“Never say you can't; always say you'll try.”
When Peter Torpey '74 heard his son's kindergarten teacher say those words, it struck a chord with him.
Torpey, born with congenital glaucoma, is blind, but that doesn't stop him from trying anything (except driving a car, he says with a laugh).
“If there is something I want to do, I figure out some way to do it,” he says. “There's more than one way to skin a
cat. There is always some tool to help you do what you want to do.”
Torpey majored in physics because he loved its mathematical components. At the time, he still had some limited sight, which allowed him to pursue his studies without visual aids. “Most of the time I read my textbooks by holding them about four inches from my head,” he says. He welcomed the fact that the campus had a fence surrounding it, and he says that he had little trouble navigating from building to building.
A week after he graduated (as a Phi Beta Kappa), he underwent an operation that left him nearly completely blind. Intent on taking advantage of a fellowship offer at the University of Virginia, he entered the Industrial Home for the Blind on Long Island. “I learned how to do things as a blind person that summer,” he says.
He learned Braille mathematics and how to get around with a cane before his parents dropped him off at the University of Virginia, showing him the physics lab, cafeteria, and his dorm room. At first, Torpey relied on friends to read textbooks for him on tape, but then he began using a closed circuit reading machine.
He received his Ph.D. in engineering physics and today is a Principal Scientist at Xerox, working on the design and study of ink-jet printers.
Being visually impaired actually works to his advantage in his job, he says. “Because I'm blind, I'm forced to engage other people, and you find that some people like one attribute of the print and not others,” he explains. In his own research, he uses a speech output device and Braille displays attached to his computers as well as a Xerox Personal Reader, a machine that scans a document and reads it back to him using synthesized speech.
Torpey had intended to get a little experience in industry and then become a professor, but loves his job and has decided to stay where he is. Occasionally, he gives lectures to college students, included students at Union a few years back.
Torpey runs four to five miles each day with a number of running partners and rides a tandem bike with his wife, Nancy, to work whenever the weather is good. A recent purchase is a recumbent
tandem bike, which he loves. Now his two children, ages nine and eleven, ride the old tandem and the family goes “tandem tandem.”
A frequent hiker in the Adirondacks, Torpey says that a good walking stick and a shoulder to lean on makes hiking feasible for him. “I guess when you don't have your eyes you subconsciously compensate with your other senses,” he says.
Compensating with his other senses for many years, Torpey says that he has great fun in his work and life and still loves trying new things, trying never to say the word “can't.”