Interview Transcript
John and Martha were in their late ‘30s when they wrote to Leonard Bernstein from Rochester, New York. They were the last of their family lines, but I got in touch with a former neighbour, Jim Leunk, who agreed to speak with me in November 2024. We talked about John’s phenomenal dexterity, and about the unique musical scene in Rochester that gave John and Martha so much pleasure.
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Dear Mr. Bernstein,
Greetings, and please note: We are a sightless young couple and, have as one of our greatest pleasures, the hobby of collecting ‘Genuine’ china cups and saucers, NEW or old, the size that can be used. Our collection contains cups and saucers from some famous and outstanding persons throughout the country. It would thrill us no end if you would add to our collection, not for publicity purposes, for our own immediate and special pleasure and enjoyment. You are marvelous, should be more like you, GOOD music is wonderful. We wish there were more of it broadcast. We attend the Philharmonic concerts at the Eastman Theater each season here in Rochester, and as it is our real pleasure we purchase center orchestra seats. We love it and go to enjoy the fineness of it. Too many in the audience do too much coughing an are always trying to see and complain about that. They should just sit quietly, close their yees [eyes] and absorb and we believe they would get much more from the music. Please do not disappoint us, you cannot imagine how thrilled we would be if you would add to our collection.
We were both born with almost no vision […] We live alone and do all of our own cooking, baking, washing and ironing, shovel snow, mow lawn etc. […] We enjoy good reading, music and our hobby, and being where we can enjoy these things.
PLEASE add to our collection, oh how happy we would be and so proud to have a cup and saucer from a symphony Orchestra conductor. Thank you and God bless you always.
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When we moved into our house in 1983, my wife and I had young daughters, young children, and John and Martha were then, you know … elderly, retirement age. They were older people. I mean, you know, we would chat over the fence and that kind of thing. I don’t recall that I ever was in their house, even though he lived next door – and would talk fairly often. Martha, I knew less well than John. John, I would talk to mostly because he was so incomprehensibly competent at things that you would expect a blind person not to be able to do. And so it was just very interesting to me. And he was quite neighbourly.
I can remember in 1991 we had a very memorable ice storm in March here in Rochester, and it’s the kind of thing that just … hundreds of thousands of people lost power, and some people lost it for as much as two weeks. It was just devastating. But we did not lose power. What hap… the main effect on us was damage to trees. We had a small Japanese maple tree in our front yard that split three ways right down to the base of the trunk from the weight of the ice.
I, over the next month or two, went about digging out that stump so I could plant the tree, plant a new tree there. And John was the … he had this array of tools. He lent me a six–foot long, probably 60–pound steel bar to pry that stump out of the ground with. And, you know, it was an enormous. I would like pry it a little bit and then cut some roots and pry it a little more and cut more roots. And he finally came out and helped me, you know, and he’s digging around under there with his hands, finding the roots that we need to break or cut.
But he was also quite opinionated. When we were all done, he looked at … that’s funny … I was going to say he looked at me and said, ‘Why on Earth did you try to dig up such a big root ball instead of just pulling out as little of the stump as you could?’ And well, the answer was that I needed to have a hole big enough to plant a new tree in. But, you know, he … he was very competent. He had lots of tools and lots of know–how, and he wasn’t shy about stating when he was pretty sure he knew what was … what the right way was. And he questioned whether I did. He was just a remarkable man
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I know that John was born in this region – more toward the finger lakes of New York, to the east of Rochester. But he and Martha met at the New York State School for the Blind. And my impression is that the curriculum then was sort of trade school – emphasis on teaching people things that useful skills that would make them employable. And John certainly was that.
I don’t think he had any higher education. I know that John, in the 1940s, would have been a relatively young man, just coming out of the State School, was involved in an auto-mechanic shop here in town. He and another man ran that together. And so in later life, when I would see him with an antique Ford pickup truck in his garage and he was redoing the brakes on it or something. That’s … that’s where John picked that up. I assume he developed some skill at the State School that he was able to then use in a mechanics … auto-mechanics business. But I don’t know much about that at all.
I know that later on he worked in a factory setting. He was kind of an assembler in like a manufacturing concern for electronics products. He did that for many, many, many years. But by the time we moved in and met him and Martha, they were retired already. They had lived in this area for decades; and in this neighbourhood, this part of the eastern side of the city of Rochester for a very long time.
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The houses on my street were built mostly in the Second World War. My house was built in 1943. They were built, I assume by the same developer, one after another because they’re quite similar – small … we call them Cape Cod style. It’s like a storey–and–a–half. The upstairs is an attic or a second floor with sloping ceilings. And they’re modest houses. This would be, I would think, kind of a working-class neighbourhood.
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When this neighbourhood was built in the ‘40s, the real wealth of the town was closer in toward downtown in … there’s a big boulevard called East Avenue here. The mansion that housed George Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak Company, is on East Avenue. You know, these are massive structures, many of these houses. And the … East Avenue and the streets running off East Avenue, there was a lot of money there.
But as you got farther out, the houses got smaller and, you know, there are … there are houses in our neighbourhood that are … they were very clearly built for housing workers, factory workers. They’re … they’re built quite close to the street, which is not at all typical of Rochester. You know, a front yard, so to speak, of maybe six feet … off the sidewalk, that kind of thing. They’re very narrow and deep on the lot and it’s a small lot, that kind of thing.
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George Eastman’s money, Eastman Kodak Company money, went a very long way here in Rochester. The University of Rochester got a huge chunk of his money, and Eastman School is part of the University. The Rochester Philharmonic, and the Eastman Theatre where it performs, are more evidence of his fortune.
There’s a lot of music in Rochester, and so I think that it might be that the ordinary resident of the Rochester area has more involvement in music – both as a participant and as a member of an audience – than might be typical in some other places. But I think that John and Martha probably stood out from that just because what was visual was really closed off to them in many respects.
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I don’t believe they played an instrument. No, no. John, well, for his whole life really, he had this enormous number of tools, some of them weighing, you know, like a tonne, in his basement – machine tools and stuff.
But he also was a ham radio enthusiast. It’s the type of radio hobbyist who needs to have a certain amount of knowledge and pass a test in order to get a government licence, but then is entitled to use a certain piece of … certain frequencies on the radio dial. Citizens’ band – anybody can buy a radio and get on that. But ham radio is not that way. You actually need a licence and some skill and knowledge to do that. John did that and this was really quite remarkable too. He probably had a mast for his antenna in the backyard attached to the side of his house. I would guess it at 30 feet tall. It was substantially taller than his house. And in later years when he gave up that hobby, he climbed that mast and dismantled the antenna himself.
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I mean, I knew it was there because when I was working – I was a newspaper editor – I happened upon an article about John and Martha in the archives of my newspaper, and so read about their teacup collection. But I never saw it.
My impression was that John and Martha in later life became quite reclusive. You know, they would … it would have been surprising to me, for example, if they left the house and went downtown to attend a concert of the Rochester Symphony Orchestra. But they did that all the time as younger people. I don’t really know what happened there – why it was that they became somewhat reclusive.