I read books for the blind a few years ago, before I came on board — for a second tour of duty — at the Arizona Capitol Times.
I had heard about the volunteer opportunity from the Times’ former managing editor, Dave Hurlbert, He teamed up with his wife at a studio in Mesa. She read the books, and he ran the tape recorder. He had started his volunteer work shortly after his retirement.
His job was to catch mistakes his wife, Linda, made. As an editor, he must have been good at it. Hurlbert’s time as a volunteer was all too short. He died in 2004, just three years after his retirement.
But his e-mails to me about his volunteer work piqued my interest. I began to think: I could be doing something useful. And I could get out of house, where I pretended to make a living writing books. My real job was collecting rejection letters from literary agents and publishers.
So I made the call to the Arizona Braille and Talking Book Library studio at 32nd Street just north of Roosevelt in Phoenix.
The volunteers, I soon learned, are broken into three camps. There’s the reader. Then there’s the person who records the reader and listens for mistakes. That’s the monitor. And there’s a person who sits off in a corner somewhere and listens for more mistakes — the reviewer.
I wanted be a reader, the talent. But not just anybody can read. The job required an audition, and I remembered what my wife often told me: “Stop mumbling.”
But I went ahead and gave it a shot. Jeannie Pawlowski, the volunteer coordinator, ran the recorder during the audition. The words seem to jump off the page, because I kept tripping on them. Pawlowski said she had to send the tape out for a professional review. Her own evaluation: The voice wasn’t bad, but I was mistake prone.
Pawlowski’s a nice person, so I figured I must have really bombed.
Until the review came back, though, I could start right away as a tape monitor, the studio’s heavy-equipment operator. My job was to sit at a desk outside the recording booth and run the reel-to-reel recorder. I faced the big window, behind which sat the reader.
I worked with Joan Lincoln, a long-time volunteer. She had a smooth and elegant speaking style, blended with a hint of folksiness. And she showed a lot of patience as I learned all the intricacies of the machine: Red button means record. Back arrow means rewind. It took me a while, but I caught on.
The hard part came in correcting mistakes picked up by the reviewer, who noted each error in what looked like a spreadsheet of mispronunciations and left-out words. Lincoln and I would track down each offending sentence on the reel and record the correction over it.
Timing had to be just right. Going too short was bad. The original sentence would sound like an echo of the overdub … the overdub … the overdub. Going too long was worse. That meant rerecording the whole next sentence, and if that went long, the one after that.
Sometimes you felt like a dog chasing its tail.
In the digital age, corrections like that are a lot easier. They can be dropped right in at the click of a mouse.
Later, I learned I had passed the audition. I was headed for the big time — two hours a week in a booth just big enough for a book, a microphone, a lamp and a metal box with a small red bulb. When the bulb lit up, that was my cue to read.
My monitor was Ty Hofflander, a retired traffic engineer. We worked well together. I got the chance to read books I didn’t know were out there.
One was a biography of the first man to canoe solo down Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. He was a gas station attendant from Oregon. After his 15 minutes of fame, he went back to pumping gas. Another book was a Western. The hero was an Anglo lawman who had been raised by Apaches. He later shot a lot of Apaches and assorted other bad guys. He also got the girl.
I have since ended my stint at Talking Books. The studio, however, could always use more volunteers, Pawlowski says. There are plenty of books to read. And plenty of people waiting to hear them.