“The Blind Man”

You never know how or when a story that you suspect to be an urban legend might be confirmed as such. And sometimes the proof is almost as weird and unexpected as the legend itself.

For example, I’ve had the story I call “The Blind Man” on file for a couple of years, assuming that it must be a fictional story with a history of retellings behind it. A recent letter from John Pilge of Soquel, California, settled the matter. His evidence went back thirteen years and comes from Down Under.

In 1973, Pilge recalled, he got a short-wave radio for his birthday and began listening to evening broadcasts from faraway places. One night, he wrote to tell me, he heard a funny story on Radio New Zealand, which he reconstructed for me in his letter.

“From the North Island, we received an amusing story,” the broadcaster began. “A woman taking a shower hears her door chime and calls out, ‘Who is it?’ The reply is ‘Blind man!’ Thinking of a local charity, she grabs some money, and, without bothering to cover herself, opens the door. The man looks at her, quite astonished, and says, ‘G’day ma’m. Now where do you want your blinds?’ If you hear of this story after 1973,” Pilge added, “I may be partly to blame. I told it to all my friends in high school, and I have heard the same yarn many times since, with different locations given. Always I ask them the source. One person I talked to said he heard it on Paul Harvey.”

My own note on file for “The Blind Man” story, however, came not from Harvey’s syndicated radio broadcast, but from an equally common disseminator of legends , a recent “Ann Landers” column. In this one, dated August 10, 1986, a reader from Paducah, Kentucky, wrote to share a story that she had heard, admitting that “it may or may not be true.”

The story is, of course, another version of “The Blind Man.” This time, a woman doing her spring cleaning on a hot day decided to finish the housework in the nude—a motif you may recognize from the legend I call “The Nude Housewife.” As she was happily working in this free and easy state, the doorbell rang. When the nude woman peeked out through the curtains and saw a man, she called out to see who it was. The reply came back, “Blind man!” You can guess the rest. The only detail that is different from the New Zealand story is that the woman, on hearing the man’s reply, called out again: “Are you sure?”

To which the man replied, “Of course, I’m sure!” The blind man can hardly believe his eyes, but he just gulps and asks, “Okay, lady, where do you want me to hang these blinds?”

The unlikelihood of this series of events, plus the familiar theme of nudity and the Paducah woman’s own uncertainty, made me immediately suspect the story to be a fictional one that had been passed around by word of mouth. The New Zealand version supported my judgment, as did letters from two readers of this column.

A woman from the West Coast and a man from the East Coast both wrote to say that they remembered hearing and telling “The Blind Man” in the middle or late 1950s, when the punchline specifically mentioned “Venetian blinds.” One correspondent commented, “I thought everyone knew this old story.”

Well, I didn’t, and Ann Landers didn’t—until our readers sent them to us. I distrusted the story from the start; as for Ann Landers, she relied on her instincts and professional experience for her reply, which was this :

“It’s a funny story, whether it’s true or not. If you sat where I’m sitting, you would never question the plausibility of any situation. Nothing is so outrageous or bizarre that somebody, somewhere, won’t do it.”

While I agree that the story is somewhat plausible, it’s all too neat and coincidental to be true. And now I have three responses—one all the way from New Zealand—to verify my guess that the story must be an urban legend.