news-record.com

There’s some kind of commotion along West Lee.

Harry Im, in his  sunglasses, has turned a corner beside Highland Avenue into his own personal gym. At lunch, he shadowboxes, stretching, kicking and punching the air.

Meanwhile, Heather Watson looks tiny. You barely see her beside her huge computerized cutter.

Then there’s Chris Alexander . He can assemble 1,800 pens in a day and carry on a rapid-fire conversation that will bounce from jump-rope to meatloaf to Michael Jackson in one morning.

That is, if he isn’t singing.

He’s happy. Especially a few days ago. Alexander heard his department made $833,096 in August — the biggest sales month in two years. They sold scads of pens.

Their customers? Us. Or really, the federal government.

That’s what they do in that huge building just east of Beef Burger near UNCG. They do big business with our tax money.

It’s Industries of the Blind, one of six in North Carolina, one of 86 nationwide. And it’s been busy — one of the busiest times ever in its 76-year history.

Why? Because we’re at war.

The nonprofit’s employees make hundreds of products, but look at the big-ticket items. It’s all for soldiers: physical fitness pants, moisture-pulling T-shirts and hydration carriers, a fancy term for a Camel-Bak.

And pens. At least 10 styles of pens. Lots of pens.

In November, they’ll start creating another accessory for soldiers overseas. It weighs barely three ounces and hangs from the back of a helmet. It could save a life.

It’s called a ballistic nape pad. It’s a piece of equipment, seven inches long, that’s made of nylon, cotton fabric and the synthetic armor known as Kevlar.

It’s a huge contract, one of the nonprofit’s biggest. In one year, it will bring in $15 million in sales to Greensboro’s Industries of the Blind and nearly double the nonprofit’s annual revenue of $20 million.

And it will bring in new blind and visually impaired workers.

The nonprofit, which employees 238 people in two locations in Greensboro, will hire between 40 and 45 people to make 520,000 ballistic nape pads in the first year.

So, what’s known as the “blind vine’’ is buzzing. Job opportunities for the blind and the visually impaired are hard to find, and the unemployment rate for people living in darkness, shadows and fuzzy focus is at least 70 percent.

That lack of opportunity breeds fear, depression and anger. You hear about that inside the Industries of the Blind. But over the mechanical exhalation and thrum-thrum-thrum of hundreds of machines, you also hear about pride — and conflicted emotions.

They worry about their work toward the war effort because they know a soldier —- someone’s son or daughter, father or mother — is doing a job in or near the cross-hairs of some conflict halfway around the world.

Soldiers like Tim Coble. He is Watson’s little brother.

He’s 24, a specialist in the National Guard, and he’s on his second tour of Iraq. The first time, he drove supply trucks through Iraq. This time, he’s toting a rifle as a member of a SWAT team in downtown Baghdad.

By November, on her huge computerized cutter, Watson will be cutting the fabric for the hundreds of thousands of nape pads for soldiers to use.

Soldiers like Tim.

“I try not to think about it because it’s emotional, and it’s scary,’’ says Watson, the 25-year-old mother of two. “And it’s your brother. To think that, 'OK, I’m cutting this piece (of fabric) that could save his life.’ That’s just hard.”

Employees like Watson ooze independence. They see themselves serving their country in their own small way. They’re also paying their bills, earning anywhere from $8.50 to $24.50 an hour, to support their families.

That’s a big deal. Harry Im knows that.

At 23, because of glaucoma, he started losing his sight when he lived in Korea. He didn’t work. He didn’t even go out of his house.

But in 1991, when he came to Greensboro following his sister, he became an American citizen and found another family along West Lee Street.

It’s a family of the blind and visually impaired: Vietnamese, Hispanic, Thai, African American and white. Sometimes singing, sometimes laughing, always working side by side.

Im, 50, has worked at the Industries of the Blind for 17 years. Today, he makes physical fitness pants. He uses his imagination to do everything — from seeing the thread to seeing the face of his 10-year-old son.

And for Im, that works just fine.

“What is the definition of work?’’ asked Im. “It’s not just about making money. It’s about how you develop a country. It’s about education and how you treat the handicapped. It’s not just GNP.’’

Watson has retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that runs in her family. She can’t see anything beside her, below her chest or anything at night.

Chris Alexander can’t see at all. At age 10, he began losing his eyesight because of cataracts and a detached retina. He’s now 61 and he has worked at the Industries of the Blind for 37 years alongside his twin, Cliff, younger by 13 minutes.

Cliff has been there for 40 years. He’s now a supervisor. He’s blind, too.

But not Edith Clark. She’s one of the nonprofit’s employees who can see. She’s an inspector in the pen department, an employee with the Industries of the Blind for six years. She’s also a bus driver.

Both morning and after work, she ferries 14 co-workers to and from High Point. They sing, talk and call her nicknames — Cleatus, Roberta or Speedy. And they ask her about her grandchildren.

She’s got three. One of them, 13-year-old Sydney, visited her at work. Like her grandmother, Sydney learned something.

“Grandma,’’ Sydney told her. “I like these people. They’re just smart.’’

It seems appropriate, Sydney’s observation, on this Labor Day weekend, a holiday created 127 years ago to contemplate the moxie of the American worker.

It’s a chance to consider the assembly-line singing of Chris Alexander, the work-day philosophy of Harry Im, the sisterly support of Heather Watson and the professional advice from Cliff Alexander.

“You’re blind, but we live in a sighted world,’’ he tells his employees. “Don’t play the blind card. We have to adapt.’’

They have.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com