NSA Clubs 42 & 651

There was a Scrabble tournament for the blind in Michigan on the same November weekend that the area's top Scrabble players gathered at Wisconsin Dells for a tourney of their own. Nadine Jacobson didn't have to think twice about which one to attend.

"Look, I could have competed in that blind tournament," she said, "But I don't think separate but equal ever works. Besides, a blind person can play as well as a sighted person."

She proved her point by finishing third in the Wisconsin tournament's intermediate division. Now she's setting her sights on the North American Scrabble Championships - the Super Bowl of Scrabble - in July.

The first qualifying round for the national tournament will be held at 11 a.m. today at the South St. Anthony Recreation Center at Cromwell Av. and Territorial Road in St. Paul. Codirector Robin Proud said that more than 150 contestants have registered, making it the largest field for a Scrabble tournament in state history. Contestants who win at least two of their four games today will advance to a two-day tournament in April at which they must win eight of ten games to advance to the Nationals [1].

Playing in a national championship sounds like an ambitious goal for Jacobson, considering her handicap. No, not the fact that she's blind. She doesn't consider that a handicap. Her biggest problem has been preparing for a tournament, a time when most serious Scrabble players are poring over word lists to sharpen their vocabularies.

Until now, Jacobson couldn't do that, since word lists weren't available in Braille. Then she heard of a book that lists all the 7- and 8-letter words in the Scrabble dictionary in alphabetical order.

"It's called a bingo book in Scrabble lingo," she said. (A "bingo" is a word that uses all the letters on one's rack, earning the player a 50-point bonus.) "I heard that the people who had put the book together in New Mexico had used a computer.

"My husband is a computer programmer - thank God! - so they made the discs available to him for just the cost of the discs and he hooked them to a printer that prints Braille."

That explains why Jacobson, sitting at the dining-room table of her home in south Minneapolis, had a stack of Braille sheets nearly a foot thick beside her.

"And that's only about a third of the eight-letter words," she said. "At this rate we'll have to build an addition to the house."

As far as she knows, Jacobson is the first person to convert those word lists to Braille. And in their den, Steven Jacobson has devised another learning helper: an IBM personal computer with speech capability, plugged into the Scrabble Dictionary.

When she types a word on the keyboard, a voice tells her if the word is acceptable while the same information appears on the screen. If the word isn't good, the voice tells her the usable words on either side of it.

The only problem with the computer, as her husband sees it, is that "we may need a second computer, because she'll be using this all the time." He is also blind but doesn't play Scrabble.

Jacobson owns two Braille Scrabble sets. She keeps one at home and one at the home of her most frequent opponent, Carol Madden [2] , another tournament player, who is sighted and often drives her to Scrabble matches and tournaments.

Until now, Madden has also been her main learning source, reading her lists of the acceptable 3-letter words while Jacobson recorded them on her Braille writer.

"It's a good-natured rivalry," said Madden, who lives in St. Paul with her husband, a retired English professor. "We usually play once a week, about four games in the afternoon. I think I rank higher than her on a national level, but we're evenly matched."

The Braille sets have a board and letter tiles with Braille markings so that Jacobson can survey the game with a touch of her fingers, but she also relies on her memory of previous plays to plan her next move.

She's amused by the reactions she draws from people playing her for the first time. "Some people assume that playing a blind person is going to be a piece of cake," she said. "You know, `No problem. I've got the game.' "

Veteran Scrabble players know better. In a New Year's Day get-together at the home of Dan and Robin Proud, Jacobson caused a stir by scoring 147 points in a single turn with the word "capsizes."

Her opponent was Robin Proud, one of the region's top players.

Not many opponents are overly solicitous.

"A funny thing about Scrabble is that it does bring out our competitive edge," she said. "Some people have an innate feeling that they shouldn't get beat by a blind person, that it means there's something wrong with them, because they assume that blind people aren't as competent.

"So if they get beat by a blind person, that's a real problem. And of course it isn't. Blindness just isn't an issue."

This attitude - that the blind shouldn't be treated differently from sighted persons - is what put Jacobson in the spotlight in 1985. She and her husband were charged with disorderly conduct in Louisville, Ky., as the result of an airline incident in which they refused to move from their seats, which were next to an emergency exit.

They contended that they could handle emergency procedures as competently as a sighted person - possibly more so if the lighting inside the plane was reduced. They were acquitted.

They were returning from a national convention of the National Federation of the Blind. Steven is secretary of the Minnesota chapter. Nadine does volunteer work, particularly in the area of ensuring proper educational facilities for the blind.

"The real problem with blindness is that 70 percent of blind people of working age are unemployed. They have job skills, but people have so many funny ideas about blindness.

"I have a master's in social work from the University of Minnesota, and I've gone out applying for jobs, and the interviewer, rather than asking me what's my theory of social development or how I'd motivate people, wants to know how I'm going to find my way to the bathroom."

Jacobson worked eight years as a social worker. "Then I took a break, which most people who've been social workers for eight years can understand."

She was born in Minneapolis 33 years ago. "I was a premature baby. I weighed two pounds, three ounces - I know that's hard to believe to look at me now - and I had a twin brother, who died at birth.

"The reason I'm blind is that they put too much oxygen in my incubator. The fact that they saved my life, though, is what's important. I consider myself very fortunate to be alive.

"And the blindness? So what? My mind is good. I get everything done in life that I want to get done."