Blind and Deaf Rigby man who teaches kids to ‘respect the cane’ was once a chart-landing musician
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RIGBY — A little boy took Paul Kenny by surprise when he grabbed the white cane he was using in Walmart.
The incident happened many years ago, but it remains a defining moment in Kenny’s life.
The 70-year-old Rigby man has Usher Syndrome, a rare genetic disease that affects hearing and vision. Kenny’s been completely deaf since he was a little kid and later, he developed Retinitis Pigmentosa, a loss of vision that happens gradually.
Though Kenny can still make out shadows and light, he tells EastIdahoNews.com at this point in his life, most of what he sees on a daily basis is “a gray fog,” which means he needs the assistance of a cane to walk around.
He remembers feeling very disoriented the day that child took his cane from him.
“He’d never seen a blind person before, so he didn’t know what (the cane was for),” Kenny says of the child in retrospect.
Since then, Kenny has devoted his life to educating children about “respecting the cane.” He’s visited kindergarten and elementary classes throughout eastern Idaho over the years, preaching that Blind and Deaf people are still smart and capable.
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Kenny is a member of the Rigby Lions Club, which hosts vision screenings for school districts at the start of the school year. Parents and kids have seen Kenny at these events, and he often dresses in a lion costume and interacts with people at other Lions club get-togethers.
“I’m passionate about getting the word out about blind people and try to knock down the misconceptions that blind people are stupid,” says Kenny. “Having lost my sight gradually, I’ve been able to see people’s reactions when they see a guy come in with a white cane. I’ve seen people pull their children out of the way. God bless them, but they don’t know that a blind person is just like anybody else. They have feelings, they have emotional ups and downs, they get frustrated and they can be passionate about things.”
Kenny was born in the UK and he recalls struggling to read in school because of the early stages of his eye condition. His parents and teachers often told him to stop squinting when looking at his comic books.
Though Kenny never had any problems communicating with people, he remembers getting his first hearing aid when he was 4. There were challenges with using it at the time.
“The hearing aid was only in one ear, and it was a nuisance,” Kenny recalls. “It was very cumbersome and tinny-sounding. Everything sounded like an old transistor radio — a lot of fuzziness, a lot of distortion.”
By the time he was eight, he and his parents had moved to the United States.
All these years later, Kenny says “there’s never been a better time” to be a Blind and Deaf person because of the abundance of assistive technologies that allow people like him to live a normal, productive life. Spreading that message has been Kenny’s personal mission for the last 30 years.
‘I learned to play by ear … and I got good at it’
But there’s much more to Kenny’s story than simply learning to cope with a disability.
Kenny spoke repeatedly of being able to hear music from an early age, despite his hearing loss. He learned to play piano, clarinet and guitar.
“I learned to play by ear … and I got good at it,” says Kenny.
At 26, he accomplished something many people without hearing problems never achieve. He joined a band that went on to have a hit on Billboard’s Top 100.
In 1980, his band Pendullum landed a record deal with Venture Records. Their song “Gypsy Spirit” peaked at No. 89 on the music chart.
“The guy who signed us to the label was the manager for Little Richard when he was hot,” says Kenny. “We had to add two Ls at the end of ‘Pendulum.’ We had no idea there was another group out there called Pendulum and they had a record deal, too.”
John Lennon was assassinated that year. His music got a lot of attention as a result, Kenny says, and there were many lesser known groups, including his, that fell off the charts to make room for Lennon’s album.
A culture war in the late 1980s brought the American Atheist Association to national prominence. At the time, it produced a number of radio and TV shows. Somehow, Kenny and his band caught its attention and they ended up recording a song that became the theme for many of its programs. The song was called “Who Am I?”
“We were not Atheist. One of the guys (in the band) was particularly religious and so he wrote the lyrics. It was like a hymn … and we presented it to them and they loved it,” says Kenny. “The song didn’t mention God, (but there was a line) that said ‘I’ll make my heaven here on earth.’ They snagged on to that.”
Kenny and his band never made a dime on the song. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the leader of the movement who took on the Supreme Court to get prayer out of schools and became “the most hated woman in America,” was murdered. (Netflix produced a film about her in 2017). Though everything fell apart, Pendullum’s song later became the topic of a cover story for American Atheist magazine.
By the mid 1990s, Kenny had become disgruntled with the music industry and left the business. He later met his wife, Sue, through Yahoo! Messenger and that’s what brought him to Rigby.
Paul played the organ in a local church for many years and he recorded albums of his own arrangements of well-known hymns.
“People were bugging me to death to put out a CD because I played it my way,” Kenny explains. “There’s a song called ‘There is Sunshine in my Soul.’ When they played it in church, to me it was like, ‘Come on, let’s pick it up.’ It was so slow. The tag at the top says it should be played joyfully and so I played it joyfully. Boy, did I get in trouble (because it wasn’t reverent).”
LISTEN TO THE SONG BELOW:
‘I’m just an ordinary bloke’
Despite all his accomplishments, Kenny insists he’s an “ordinary bloke” who just does things differently, and that “nothing stands out” about him.
He prefers to focus instead on the work he does with the Rigby Lions Club, advocating for Blind and Deaf people.
As he gets older, he says “the lights are starting to go out” but he feels blessed in spite of it.
“I was told that I would be blind by the age of 50, so I feel like I’ve gotten an extra 20 years. I can still do things around the house. I make my wife breakfast every morning and make my coffee, do the laundry,” says Kenny. “I’ve been blessed.”
