PORT TOWNSEND — Douglas Daniels is going back to work.
After five years on bare-bones disability payments, the 60-year-old Port Townsend man hopes soon to be earning enough money with a recording studio to take a trip once in awhile, maybe occasionally buy a good folk album. And pay income taxes.
Daniels, who as a premature newborn suffered irreparable eye damage from the oxygen treatment prevalent at the time, still managed to become a highly skilled sound engineer specializing in recording folk music and presenting radio programs in Eugene, Ore.
He attended the Oregon School for the Blind as a child, where touch and sound emphasis prepared him well for a successful technical career at the controls of highly specialized equipment.
It was his only passion.
“I wasn’t even interested in girls,” Daniels cracked.
But then the digital age dawned in the early 1990s.
The partial sight he’d been left with began to deteriorate further at the same time that control panels became harder to see.
“I always had to put my nose to it, but it got to the point where I couldn’t see the colors and things,” Daniels said.
“I hung on as long as I could, but I just kept getting slower and slower and less competitive.”
He gave it up and became a massage therapist, even teaching at the local school.
But the field is overpopulated, and he couldn’t earn a living, he said.
“Five years ago, I ended that, and I’ve been sitting here vegetating and living on my disability,” he said.
A few years ago, Daniels began working and learning through programs offered by the state Division of Services for the Blind, a subagency of vocational rehabilitation.
He was considering becoming a counselor, maybe a substance-abuse treatment specialist.
When the division provided him with a talking computer and training a year ago, the experience freed his mind and his spirit.
Daniels, who is also a musician, played some music for the blind man who delivered his computer, and the trainer encouraged him to pursue his interests.
“It was a great moment for me,” Daniels recalled with a satisfied smile.
He set to work mastering his new tool and researching the potential to return to his old craft.
A resulting four-page proposal to the state division led to a 28-page grant proposal with a business plan.
The state liked it. Federal stimulus money would foot the bill.
About 10 days ago, Bryan Smart, 33, from Dancing Dots in North Carolina arrived, following about $17,000 worth of new equipment that will allow stationary as well as remote recording.
Smart will be paid $6,000 for initial instruction and a year of follow-up.
The two were inseparable for days, one blind man teaching another the intricacies of a program originally designed by a sighted music teacher for his blind students.
Smart rattled off a list of functions and programs that tells an operator like Daniels what he’s doing as he does it, the same messages sighted people read on their screens as they type.
JAWS — Job Access With Speech — is a fast reader, rattling along like a mad HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
A program once called Caketalk, now Sonar, tells it what to read and when at Daniels’ direction.
For the sighted, it’s impossible to follow, but Daniels is accustomed and said he skims audio just as the sighted skim written copy, his fingers flowing on a Braille keyboard through the nuances of adjustment as he and Smart practice mixing a piece of music.
“I’ve lived with him for a year,” he said of the familiarly stilted computer voice.
“He’s my best friend. . . . I always tell people I see with my ears and my fingers,” Daniels said.
Daniels, who has many musician friends in Port Townsend, said several are ready to have him record them, and he’s making arrangements to live-record performances at The Upstage, a popular live-performance venue that jumps on weekends.
“This town is loaded with musicians who want me to do projects with them,” said Daniels, who plans to specialize in acoustic music.
“I was always in the folk music business, and I love it,” he said.
Once established, Daniels’ operation will be the only one of its kind on the Olympic Peninsula.
Smart said there’s another blind man using similar equipment on Bainbridge Island and only a handful in the Seattle area.
There are three other recording studios in and around Port Townsend, but with one exception, “nobody has as much experience as I do,” Daniels said.
Smart, who started out as a programmer for Microsoft, likes playing Santa Claus for other blind people and hopes the little company he works for now eventually will grow enough to provide him with full-time employment so he can quit his other job.
Daniels is eager to go full-time tomorrow.
“Twenty-three thousand dollars to put me back to work is not very much,” he said.
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Julie McCormick is a freelance writer and photographer living in Port Townsend. Phone her at 360-385-4645 or e-mail julie mccormick10@gmail.com.
