Morris Frank, a 19-year-old college student and insurance salesman living in Tennessee, had lost an eye in a childhood accident and was blinded in the other eye as a teenager. One day, his father read him an article called “The Seeing Eye” in The Saturday Evening Post. It told of a school in Germany, where German shepherds were being trained to guide soldiers who had been blinded in the first World War.
Intrigued by the article, Morris wrote to the author, one Dorothy Harrison Eustis, and asked, “Is what you say really true? If so, I want one of those dogs!”
Morris also promised that if she trained a dog for him, he would start a school so others could experience the enhanced independence of working with a guide dog.
Dorothy invited Morris to train with a dog in Switzerland. Morris arrived in Vevey on April 25, 1928, and spent the next five weeks learning how to work with Kiss, whom he promptly renamed Buddy. Jack Humphrey, the first Seeing Eye instructor, trained the pair together.
Afterward, the first Seeing Eye team returned to the United States and went on to make history in more ways than one!
