A few minutes before 10 last evening, Sammie Shipman rose from her third-row aisle seat in Council Chambers. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it,” she exclaimed with a smile as gleaming as the noonday sun.
Captained by Andy Weissman, the City Council had just voted unanimously to retain its historic posture of allowing blind persons to ride free on Culver City busses.
Accompanied by her trusty and darkly handsome guide dog Mozart, Ms. Shipman came over to City Hall from her high rise home nearby “because I care very much about this issue.”
Yes, she said quickly, she understood why City Hall felt obligated to propose a 35-cent fee for the blind who ride busses, the same as for all other disabled persons.
Ms. Shipman said she agreed with her blind friend Michael Conrad that no fees should be charged to any disabled rider of busses. “But there is a ‘but’ in there,” she said with a smile.
“I told Mike I thought there should be a solution. We talked about it again this morning, and we may have come up with one.
“We have two issues,” Ms. Shipman said, anticipating the debate tumbling into a nasty nest of hornets.
. “If all disabled persons travel free, great. But how will the disabled come onto the bus and prove they are disabled? Then we get into faking disabilities. Just as we start faking guide dogs. People come on with these dogs claiming to be service animals, and they attack my dog.
“Second issue,” Ms. Shipman said, “is saying the blind travel for free but the disabled cannot, and that led to tonight’s issue. It calls for a solution, and I was telling Mike we have to come up with one.
“Here is our solution: Thirty-five cents is what the city wants to charge the blind. I believe if they charged 25 cents, it would be better. It is a single coin, and MTA charges 25 cents.”
The joint compromise reached by Ms. Shipman and Mr. Conrad, happily for both of them, turned out to be unnecessary.
Blind since birth, as friendly as your favorite relative, and as open-faced as your mother groomed you to be, Ms. Shipman was the most relieved person in Council Chambers.
An inveterate bus rider, for errands and classes, the ambitious, focused young woman is en route to her high school graduation, an A.A. degree, a bachelor’s, and later a career in child development.
As last evening suggested, Ms. Shipman is well along the route to her goals, a model for others.
