Walter R. Dry spent his entire life educating blind students in two states. Rising from an able instructor at the Washington State School for the Blind to the superintendent of the Oregon State School for the Blind, he championed the Oregon Plan to move the students into public schools. The versatile Dry taught gym, typing, woodshop and piano tuning — and, in the process, learned there were few limits to what a blind child could achieve.
One of his partially sighted students, Emil Fries, graduated from the University of Washington and founded the Piano Hospital and Training Center on Evergreen Boulevard in 1945. (It closed in 2016.) Fries and his former teacher became good friends, and Dry mentored and advised him. When Fries was turned down for the blind school’s supervisory position, he turned to Dry, who merely told him, “You know why.”
Another student, Don Donaldson, recalled in his autobiography, “What’s in a Name,” that Dry taught him to type using just seven fingers. Donaldson had lost the others playing with dynamite caps. Donaldson also graduated from Washington and wrote a thesis about the history of the school for the blind up to 1938. While his thesis doesn’t mention Day, it provides insights into student life at the school and its leadership. He tells how the superintendent, Thomas Clarke, believed in the “religion of work” and how the school emphasized the independence of students by providing them with skills they’d need in life.
Dry worked under Clarke for several years, but by the time Donaldson’s thesis was published, he’d left. In 1931, Oregon Gov. Julius Meier was busy cleaning his administrative houses. With board approval, he dismissed J.W. Howard, superintendent of the school, and the school’s entire staff, including Howard’s wife, a school matron. The board voted unanimously to replace Howard with Dry, who was free to restaff the school as he saw fit.
