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He won many awards including the National Headliners Club award for writing the best local interest column in the country in 1962. In 1977 his fellow Tri-State Journalists honored him with with the first Distinguished Service Award. He is the author of five book: A Pig In The Gray Panel Truck, A Dandelion in Winter, Day of a President, Just a 100 Miles From Home, and The Journey in the Red Jalopy. He worked for newspapers in Santa Fe, N.M., Monett, MO, Beckley WV, and Memphis, TN. He began working for the Evansville Courier in 1957. Aaron was born in Cone, Texas and reared on a farm in Portales, NM. He
attented the University of New Mexico where he graduated with honors with a
degree in journalism.
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by Joe Aaron The House at 721 S. Land St. is scarcely distinguishable from all the others along the block.
It appears substantially built and is neatly kept, and if you didn't know otherwise, you would suppose it had been put there by an ordinary builder.
But the builder of the house at 721 S. Land St. was no ordinary man, nor were his methods ordinary.
His name was W.E. Harper, a preacher and broom maker, and he was blind.
And though almost a half of a century has passed since then, and he has been dead for several years, people still talk with semi-disbelief at what he did.
Said Dugan O'Neal who lives in the corner house across the street:
"I've seen plenty of men with two good eyes who couldn't have done half as well."
"That picture window in my own house for example." He added with a grin, pointing. "it gave me fits and still isn't a very professional job."
"But Mr. Harper measured the boards with a notched ruler, and notched them where they should be cut, and he sawed them with a handsaw, and he nailed them all in place by himself, just by feel."
"He would tap a nail lightly to get it started , then he would hold onto it to know where to aim, and every time the hammer came down he would jerk his hand away."
"I kept expecting him to break every finger in his left hand, but I don't think he hit himself any oftener than any other carpenter does."
"I used to talk to him quite a bit, and when he told me one day he was going to build a house, doing all the work by himself, I didn't figure he'd ever be able to do it."
"But I was wrong, He built it, all right."
It is not proper , I suppose to say that Mr. Harper built the entire house himself, for he hired a contractor to lay the foundation and a roofing crew to put on the shingles.
"But after the foundation was laid." O'Neal recalled, "he got up on it and walked slowly around it, feeling its evenness with his feet."
"and then, when he had walked all the way around it, he jumped down again and said to the men who had laid it for him, "It's a perfect job, boys."
"He could tell, just by feeling."
Then he built the house, inside and out, and installed slate siding - and people around the neighborhood don't recall it took him any longer than it would have taken anybody else.
But I guess it shouldn't have, for it was not the first house he had built; it was the second.
Back when he was a young man , according to his nephew Orville Lucas, who lives back down the street from O'Neal, he had built a house in nearby Gaskin City.
Sitting in a creaking, shaded swing in his backyard, a chaw of tobacco in his jaw and some of it on his chin. Lucas said his half-uncle was blinded when he was two, by scarlet fever.
"And for the rest of his life he lived by sounds. He could even tell who you were by the sound of your footsteps"
Mr. Harper was a piano tuner and a good mechanic, and he got a Bible printed in Braille so he could preach.
He also made brooms - "just about the best brooms money could buy." Lucas claims - and sold them in Harrisburg and neighboring towns.
And he used to play the guitar on downtown streets, a tin cup set on the sidewalk in front of him.
Well, there was only one thing, after I had talked to his neighbors and inspected the house by feel, that I regretted.
I regretted that he had died before I had a chance to meet him.
My admiration for him is considerable, for I have known men in my time with nothing worse than a cold who wanted to retire from life, drawing 'disability' and enumerating their ailments.
The Rev. W.E. Harper, for whom the day was distinguished from the night only by the singing of the birds, was not such a man. No, not hardly.
