PART 2: Community rallied behind blind couple

When Jack Thornton carried his wife Joyce over the threshold of their new home on Jan. 23, 1955, the newlyweds weren’t alone. A thousand people stood outside and cheered as they entered the two-bedroom, pre-fab house at 109 7th St. in Cloquet.

It had been this way for a while, ever since the previous August when a story about the blind couple flashed on newswires and landed in every newspaper across the country.

“We were well-known,” Joyce coyly said of all the attention.

The new home was a gift. The lot, the house, the construction, the furnishings, all of it donated as the weekly newspapers in Cloquet and Carlton led a campaign to help the couple. Business and personal donations meant the Thorntons would have a centrally located, specialized home easily navigated by two blind people. Taxi companies even promised a lifetime of transportation for the couple. They were also offered food, fuel and even dry cleaning for a year after they moved in.

“The place is just darling,” Joyce told reporters on that cold day. “We both just love it.”

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Joyce Thornton is alive and relatively well today at age 86. She lives in Florida, where she has made an indelible mark as a staunch advocate for the blind and the services and accomodations made for them.

“It was crazy,” she says in looking back at her wedding in September of 1954 and all the fuss made. She said it was because Jack was an injured Korean War hero and was well-known in the county. “They honored him,” she said. Along with a Purple Heart medal, Jack received a Silver Star and the Distinguished Service Cross after his efforts to protect three other men in his foxhole by throwing out an enemy grenade. Some reports said that even after his grievous injuries, a blinded Jack held his ground under more enemy fire.

At the time, there was a lot of pressure on the U.S. government to make sure even badly injured veterans were reintegrated into work and life when they returned home from war, especially since Korea came on the heels of World War II. Officials stepped in to help Jack return to work at the Wood Conversion Company plant in Cloquet. They had to find a job that he could do as a blind person. He ended up operating a shredding machine operated by sound.

U.S. Rep. John Blatnik praised the efforts of the Carlton County community, and government agencies, from the floor of the House in May of 1955. The story of Joyce and Jack is part of the Congressional Record.

Jack had been worried about finding work for much of the summer of 1954. He and Joyce were engaged in May and the September wedding was looming. The crush of press coverage was overwhelming but welcome, Joyce said, as it helped get their marriage off to a comfortable start.

More than 300 people packed the tiny St. Francis of Assisi church in Carlton that fall. Hundreds more stood outside. News reporters and cameras were there. Sheriff’s deputies had to direct traffic before and after the 15-minute ceremony followed by a reception at Cloquet’s union hall.

“My wedding day was so crowded,” Joyce said. “It was a mess. But I walked down the aisle very proud.”

Their wedding pictures were shared across the country, often accompanied by excruciating headline puns considering the couple’s sightlessness. “Blind love” and “blind leads blind” were some examples.

Things calmed down, slightly, until the house dedication in January, which included the revealing of a framed blessing of the marriage from the Pope in Rome. Coverage ebbed again until July 1, 1955. The couple’s first son, Randy, was born, and the couple’s news was once again in papers from coast to coast.

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For all the kindness extended to the couple, Joyce said there were moments when small-town life squeezed in on them. Before their house was built, neighbors were asked to grant permission for a blind couple to move in. When Randy was born, she heard and felt the swirl of doubt about a blind couple raising a child. “There was prejudice,” Joyce said. “I had trouble in Cloquet. They wanted to take my kids away … I proved them wrong. I had to fight all the time.”

Randy and now younger brother Kurt were under a spotlight, Joyce said. Kurt, who lives with Joyce in Florida and takes care of her, said he had a fairly normal upbringing despite everyone knowing his parents’ special circumstances. “If you grow up with it, they aren’t handicapped,” Kurt Thornton said. “They were our parents. What they said went.”

“It was a normal life,” Kurt said. It was also an active life. Jack loved fishing, and trips to area lakes and resorts are a favorite memory for Kurt. He especially liked it when his parents would take the helm of a boat and the sons would guide them along the lake. They learned to ski on water and snow.

Joyce was part of their Boy Scouts experience as well, teaching some unique hands-on skills only a blind person could convey.

“Everyone knew us in town,” Kurt said, which made it hard to get away with anything. Whatever the boys were up to would quickly get back to Jack and Joyce.

Joyce had a sister, Christine, who was 19 years younger. The then 2-year-old was a crowd pleaser at the wedding, cheering her big sister and marveling at her dress. Christine became a sister of sorts to Joyce’s children. She visited her sister’s home “all the time,” Christine said.

“There wasn’t anything she couldn’t do,” Christine Williams said from her home in Texas. “She cooked, she cleaned, she took care of the kids. They walked all over town.”

She never saw her sister as a blind person, she said, because she was so capable. “She’s just a remarkable person,” she said. “And you never use the word ‘handicapped’ around her.”

Now 60, Kurt also reflects on his parents’ accomplishments. “I admire them,” he said. “The courage that they had. I wish I had half the courage they have had.”

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It was a typical mother-son argument in the kitchen one morning in 1972. The family had moved from the now-crowded home on Seventh into a larger brick home on Ninth. Randy wanted a motorcycle and Joyce fretted. The 17-year-old was adamant. “I want this motorcycle,” he pleaded. She asked him: What if you get in an accident and are hurt or killed. Joyce recalls him shrugging his shoulders and saying “if it happens, it happens.”

On an October Saturday months later, Randy took a girl on his motorcycle for a ride on the road through Jay Cooke State Park. At the hairpin curve, the pair ran head-on into a car. Randy was killed, the girl was badly injured.

“It’s the worst tragedy you can imagine,” Joyce said, her voice still quavering whenever she thinks of her first son. “I remember Kurt saying, ‘He can’t be dead. I love him.’”

“It was such a horrible time,” Christine said. “I remember that call.”

The grief sent Jack and Joyce in different directions. Joyce decided she would continue her education in social work at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

“It drove Jack to the bottle,” Joyce said.

“It’s tough for parents to stay together after a child dies,” Christine said. “She took her grief and went back to school.”

One of Joyce’s proudest moments is the standing ovation she received at her UMD graduation in social work in 1976. “Then I needed a job,” she said.

She knew her rights, as the Minnesota Legislature had just passed a law banning discrimination against people with disabilities. She made an offer to Cloquet Memorial Hospital. She would work there for free, for six months. After that, they could decide if they would keep her on or not. The hospital kept her on.

She was also obtaining a master’s degree in social work at UMD. After the hospital, she worked in Duluth as an addiction counselor and at a halfway house for women.

In 1982, she got a call from Florida. Joyce was known for keeping up with the latest technology that helped blind people navigate in the world. She could read using a scanning device and had other skills to teach those adjusting to sightlessness. Her skills were sought after.

“I couldn’t stand the weather,” she said of winters in Minnesota. She asked Jack to come to Florida with her. He didn’t want to go. And that was that. Kurt had graduated from high school and was gone.

She has no regrets about leaving her life in Cloquet. “We had a good marriage,” she said. “It was a good 30 years.”

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Ed Thornton is one of the few World War II veterans from Carlton County still alive. At 93, he says he doesn’t remember much of the details around his younger brother’s wedding and the hoopla it created. But he remembers Jack’s spirit after he was injured in Korea.

“To be truthful,” he said, pausing a beat, “he was a smart aleck. He always had his own mind. And he wouldn’t give up for nothing.”

And that’s what helped him survive after being blinded. “I’m extremely proud of him,” Ed said from his home in Carlton. He fished, he hunted, he golfed — he was a top golfer on the national blind golf circuit.

“He was very active,” said younger brother Bob, who lives in Barnum. “He got screwed up in Korea,” he said, “but he didn’t give up.”

In 1992, Jack was crossing Cloquet Avenue in downtown Cloquet and was struck by a car. It was crushing for Joyce, as she had spent the past decade in Florida advocating for safer streetscapes for the blind and educating drivers. She herself has been hit by cars while walking.

Bob said he and the family had to make the ultimate decision after Jack’s accident. They had to take him off life support. It was Sept. 19, and Jack died 40 autumns after his life was changed forever in Korea.

Ed said his brother never complained, and often said he would take blindness over losing a limb. “I’ll take my legs over my eyes,” he recalled Jack saying.

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Joyce worked at a Veterans Administration hospital in Florida for 15 years, helping those who had lost their sight and were trying to adjust. She remained a determined woman whose mantra was simply that no one can wallow, you make do.

Doreen King is a friend, one of many who flatly say that “Joyce saved my life.” When she lost her sight, she moved to Florida and found Joyce. “She’s just been everything,” she said. “She really has had an amazing life.”

When sister Christine visits, she hears from those touched by Joyce’s advocacy.

“I was so blown away,” she said. “There were so many people who said, ‘Your sister saved my life.’ It was story after story.”

Joyce has been featured in a host of newspaper articles in the Fort Myers area as word of her expertise and determination spread. It seems she never left the news spotlight.

But she remains modest. She’s on dialysis and has suffered from some recent falls. She even admits she might have a “touch of dementia.”

She surely didn’t sound like it on the phone, where she took over the conversation from the start. “There’s not much to tell,” she said, trying to stave off a prying reporter.

“But you’ve had a remarkable life,” the reporter said.

“I guess I have,” she then admitted.

Then she went into the impressive list of accomplishments — the groups she helped start, the initiatives she drove home. All of it while touching the lives of so many people, sighted and blind.

Her life’s scope came into focus as she talked about the first weeks of her blindness, when at age 13 she faced the prospect of sitting at home and trying to figure out the rest of her life. She demanded that she be sent to a school for the blind. Immediately. She wasn’t going to wallow. She was moving forcibly ahead.

“I wasn’t going to let anyone stop me,” she said.