BETTY ROLAND

She lives in a world few of us can imagine.

Everything is hazy -- nothing is clear.

"I can't read or write anymore, I can't drive anymore, I can't sew anymore," the Drumright woman explains.

Today, three years after her eyesight began deteriorating due to a degenerative skin disease, Betty Roland - at 56 - is legally blind.

"At first it really threw me . . . it took me a long time to accept it," she admits.

"I used to get up in the morning and say 'today I'll be able to read the newspaper'," she recalls.

But that didn't happen.

Instead Betty Roland says today, "everything is much darker for me."

Still she seems to lack self-pity.

"You learn to live with what you've got and be grateful - I could be in total darkness."

"Nobody goes throughout life without problems," Roland says matter-of-factly.

"I do believe people should face problems as they come."

In her case, problems started early in childhood -- when she was discovered to be blind in one eye and afflicted with a disease that caused her skin to change texture.

One of 22 children raised on a farm in Wisconsin, Roland quit school at the end of seventh grade -- she recalls clearly the cruel taunts of other children that made life unbearable.

Without much education, there weren't many jobs open to her.

She started selling encyclopedias door-to-door.

"It was difficult," recalls Roland.

"I learned it the hard way," she says -- describing the man she married as a "natural born salesman," adding "I had to make my way."

Her husband -- who had no life insurance -- died when she was 46, leaving her with four children ages seven - 14 to support.

For two years after his death, there were no social security benefits.

"He was in sales work most of the time -- he didn't pay enough social security to help us out.

"They finally called and said they found enough for us to draw the minimum," Roland recalls.

To try to make ends meet, this Drumright woman -- who had never been to high school -- took whatever jobs she could find: washing dishes, working in a laundry, cleaning offices.

She was working for a local firm doing cleaning and running errands when "one day all of a sudden I had a tremendous pain in this right eye" - the one in which she still had vision.

"I said, 'I can't see,'" she recalls vividly.

She later learned from physicians at the McGee Eye Institute in Oklahoma City that the rare non-contagious skin disease, which she had since childhood, was causing her blindness.

The disease, which is incurable, left her legally blind -- five months ago.

Since then, she has qualified for a government check -- which she hopes she won't be receiving long.

"I don't want all my life to depend on social security disability," Roland says, adding, "I feel social security disability is fine if you can't do something."

However, this 56-year-old blind woman is doing something -- she's started her own business to distribute an electronic safety device for vehicles.

The device, called Super Eyes, alerts drivers visually and audibly of unseen objects while backing a vehicle.

Roland, an amazing, spunky woman who weighs 97 pounds and stands under five feet tall, says, "People should never feel they're too old to start a business of their own -- or to get an education."

When she was nearly 50 -- and she says at a low point after losing her husband -- Roland decided to try to get back to school.

"I knew I was uneducated -- I didn't have any self-confidence," she recalls when she walked into Central Vo-Tech in Drumright.

She took a business course -- an experience she says that changed her life.

At Central Vo-Tech a counselor in the learning lab worked with her.

"Dr. Joyce Smith helped me tremendously -- she made me feel like I was someone."

"Today I know I am someone," this new businesswoman says with assurance.

She is such a believer in the vo-tech system of education -- where she says "there is no criticism, no humiliation" -- that she wants all three of her children living at home to attend Central Vo-Tech.

She wants to involve all three in the family business she has started.

"It's these kind of people this economy needs," remarks Central Vo-Tech superintendent John Hopper.

"I see Betty as a part of a new generation of entrepreneurs we must foster and train at the area vo-tech.

"Here's a lady who is legally blind showing an interest in supporting herself. It took a lot of initiative on her part to have the nerve to get in this business."

Adds Hopper -- who says Central Vo-Tech is purchasing devices from Roland's company for school buses -- "It's that kind of ingenuity, effort, desire and drive we need now in starting new businesses that will employ people in the future."

"I have a theory," explains Hopper, "that rather than going after GM, I'd rather provide training for people in our area -- developing and expanding existing businesses."

"The theory is," Hopper adds with a smile, "we want to raise our own."

Like Betty Roland, who says she now thinks, "You can do almost anything -- if you set your mind to it -- and want to do it."