Jack Sheehan recalls the spirit of a student who overcame exceptional hardship to attend UNLV

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Sunday, Jan. 6, 2008 | midnight

I can never drive past UNLV on Maryland Parkway without visualizing the ethereal image of a pretty blonde girl and her stately golden retriever waiting patiently to cross the street. It's been 30 years, and the memory of them poised on the curbstone is as vivid as yesterday.

In most regards Debbie Anderson was a typical freshman in the fall of 1976, a young woman excited about starting college and living away from home for the first time, in a campus dormitory.

She had graduated from Western High School with honors four months earlier and looked forward to the academic and social aspects of higher education, to the new friends she would make, the boys she would meet, the parties and football games she would attend. UNLV would be a huge challenge for her, but one she was confident she could overcome. She was more than battle-tested.

Debbie had lost her father, a test pilot at Nellis Air Force Base, in a jet crash when she was 4 years old. Two years later her mother died of liver disease. Orphaned at 6, she was taken in by her grandparents.

When she was 14, Debbie started suffering severe headaches. Doctors discovered a brain tumor. It was operable, but there were risks involved. She elected to have the surgery, but was rendered totally blind.

Despite having undergone the trials of Job by her early teens, Debbie allowed little room for self-pity. She engaged in as normal a course of activities as possible in a world suddenly enveloped in darkness. She was just one year behind her class when she graduated from Western, and despite taking nearly a full load her freshman year at UNLV, she earned a B-minus average.

I met her in the spring semester of her sophomore year when she enrolled in an English 102 class I was teaching. It's a basic introduction to literature -- short stories, poetry, drama -- and the required course had given Debbie fits in her first attempt. She had dropped the class midsemester, finding the reading load too daunting.

I had been asked by the English Department chairman whether I would be willing to accommodate Debbie's special needs in my class. She would require reading assignments weeks ahead of other students to obtain the necessary materials in Braille, and all her exams had to be administered orally. I eagerly consented, certain I would learn more from her than vice versa.

I didn't meet her until the first day of class. She was 10 minutes early and by her side stood a handsome golden retriever named Midas, a guide dog with whom she had recently completed training. Flaxen-haired, vibrant, and purposeful in manner and speech, Debbie showed me how to operate her tape recorder and asked permission to place it on the podium.

“You can turn it off when you're just telling jokes and stuff,” she said.

I patted Midas and told him I hoped he would have a good semester. He responded with a hollow stare followed by a big yawn and bowed his head. Just another disgruntled underclassman.

Debbie then found her way to her desk, the first chair in the third row from the door, and situated Midas in the cramped quarters beneath it.

The other students in the class enthusiastically embraced Debbie and her dog. Several of them volunteered to read the assigned short stories and plays to her in the dorm. While the dog consistently resisted my lectures and scratched and growled from his confined position at Debbie's feet, she was more responsive, never allowing me to get by with any loose interpretations, questioning me on minor points of symbol, characterization and theme.

Only once during the semester did she complain when, during a study session one night, she discovered her cassette voiceless, the result of my failure to push the “Record” button at the beginning of my lecture. She couldn't resist a jab.

“It's all right,” she said. “You didn't say anything important anyway.”

Debbie took my exams in the anteroom of the English department. She was always anxious as I quizzed her, and her apprehension seemed to circuit down the leash to Midas, whose curved brow urged me to ease up a bit on the tough questions.

When the tests were finished, I'd tell Debbie her score and we would discuss the answers she missed. We engaged in small talk as a way of winding down from the pressure of the exam, and I came to learn much about her battles with adversity.

She said she felt blessed to be alive, that when the brain tumor had been discovered she was told she had less than a year to live. So the loss of her vision in exchange for her life was a fair enough trade.

“The meadows and sunsets I see in my mind's eye are every bit as beautiful as the ones you see,” she said. “And I'm vaguely aware when a light is on in a room, so I do have hope of seeing again someday.”

We often talked about her ever-present companion. Midas provided ongoing comic relief for our class. Invariably, during the heart of a lecture, when I'd be dissecting the meaning of a poem or explaining a character's motivation in a play, the dog would slowly raise his head off the tile floor and emit a noise that was a combination groan-burp. The students relished those interruptions -- what better way to temper the self-importance of an English instructor -- but Debbie never found the intrusions funny. They embarrassed her. “Stupid dog,” she would mutter.

As with any two beings that are by necessity inseparable, forces of resistance were at work between Debbie and her dog. Midas, I sensed, wasn't a guide dog at heart; he was more of a sentinel. And he was jumpy in crowds. As ill at ease as he was in my classroom, he always looked slightly relieved when he settled in under Debbie's desk. The enclosure provided refuge from the madding rush of students angling through hallways between classes, many of whom insisted on fussing over the animal as they passed by.

I have an indelible memory of one day watching Debbie and Midas standing on the median separating the lanes of traffic at Harmon Avenue and Maryland Parkway, waiting to cross as cars whizzed by going 45 to 55 miles per hour (although the speed limit was a posted 35). It was a foreboding sight.

Less than one year after Debbie Anderson completed my literature class with a well-earned B-plus, she and Midas were struck by a speeding motorist at that very intersection. The dog was killed instantly. She died the next day.

The heavy blanket of grief that covered the UNLV community found its vent in a campus protest. More than 800 marchers, angered by the reluctance of public officials to lower the speed limit in front of the university, paraded through the intersection, imploring motorists to slow down. The march remained controlled and peaceful, a tribute to Debbie's courage and spirit.

Eventually the speed limit through the university zone was reduced to 25. But some years later, as memories faded, it was pushed back up to 30, where it remains today.

I drove by there just the other day and could swear I saw the ghostly outline of a girl and her dog poised to cross.

It broke my heart all over again.

Jack Sheehan's column appears every other week.