SEES WITH HIS EARS

Evening Star, Issue 20372, 2 January 1930, Page 1

SEES WITH HIS EARS

BUND BOY’S FEAT SPEEDWAY ENTHUSIAST. A remarkable instance of a youth’s triumph over blindness is contained in a story featured in a Sidney paper. The youth concerned is Eric Anderson, thirteen years old, and he has been without sight since he was eighteen months old. Through all the years intervening he has been, like other blind children, shut off from the full contact with the world in which he lives, and looking into the future without any hope of improvement. But the sound of a motor cycle has brought real sunshine into his life at last. He has become Sydney’s only blind dirt-track enthusiast. . ' . , He can conjure up in his mind an almost accurate idea of the racing track, and ho can pick .up ; from a group of machines, by_ the purr of ; tlxe engines, those which he knows belong to his friends who race at the Wentworth Park speedway regularly each week. He- knows all of them personally, and it is indeed touching to see them all go up to greeVhira each time a meeting is a fact that he can sense their positions in a race from the throb of their engines, just in the same manner as a doctor senses a temperature from the throb of a pulse. < He follows an event unerringly from ’ start to finish, calk out the, positions of the riders, and from the mere throb of_ the engine he .tells those about, him the name or the winner. Each time the speedway is open Eric Anderson ■is the centre of an admiring and marvelling crowd, who pay more attention to the changing expressions on his f«xco thiiu to the speedway is light itself.