founder humanitarian philanthropist
She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest child of Charles Custis Harrison and Ellen Nixon (Waln) Harrison. She had three brothers and two sisters. Both parents were native Philadelphians and descendants of pre-Revolutionary settlers. Her father, the head of a sugar refining company, became provost of the University of Pennsylvania.
Dorothy was educated at the Agnes Irwin School in Philadelphia and the Rathgowrie School in East-bourne, England.
Her later interest in animal genetics was probably fostered by the experimental dairy farm that they operated at Hoosick Falls. In conjunction with the state department of agriculture, the Woods farm demonstrated successfully that selective breeding could increase the milk production and commercial value of dairy cattle. The work continued until 1917.
In 1917, two years after Mr. Wood's death, she moved to Radnor, Pennsylvania, where she remained until 1922, when she moved to Vevey, Switzerland. At Hoosick Falls she had owned a German shepherd dog, Hans, of unusual intelligence and faithfulness. Now she decided to experiment with the scientific selection and breeding of these dogs at her estate, Fortunate Fields.
With her second husband, George Morris Eustis and with Elliott S. ("Jack") Humphrey, an American horse breeder and trainer, she began a program of research and experimental breeding. A strain of German shepherds of seemingly exceptional qualities evolved, but it was soon evident that the effectiveness of the program could be measured only by the dogs' performance.
A training program was added to the enterprise, and the "graduates" were soon rendering outstanding service to the Swiss army and to several European metropolitan police units. Eustis became aware of the dogs' full potential when she visited a school in Potsdam, Germany, in 1927 and observed shepherd dogs being trained as guides for blinded war veterans. Deeply impressed, she wrote an article, "The Seeing Eye, " for the Saturday Evening Post (November 5, 1927).
Many letters came to her from blind Americans, asking where such dogs could be procured.
One letter was from Morris S. Frank, a young insurance salesman in Nashville, Tennessee, who was willing to go to Switzerland to be trained.
"Thousands of blind like me abhor being dependent on others, " he wrote. "Help me and I will help them. Train me and I will bring back my dog and show people here how a blind man can be absolutely on his own. "
Eustis invited Frank to Fortunate Fields to work with the first dog guide trained there. Returning to the United States five weeks later, Frank and his dog, Buddy, received much favorable publicity. Eustis then decided to establish a dog guide school in this country.
The Seeing Eye was incorporated in 1929, and during its first year, in Nashville, seventeen blind men and women and their dogs were trained.
The school moved the following year to Morristown, New Jersey, home of Willi Ebeling, a retired importer who raised German shepherds as a hobby and who joined the enterprise as a kind of financial manager.
From 1929 to 1933 Eustis also presided over L'Oeil Qui Voit, a school she established in Switzerland to train instructors and to train dogs for other countries that might wish to organize more dog guide programs. Eustis early discovered that good instructors were not easy to find; many who imagined the work would be congenial lacked the dedication and perseverance to undergo the rigorous years (usually three to five were required) of apprenticeship.
The dogs had to be educated rather than trained to learn to follow commands and also to be intelligently disobedient to commands that might endanger a sightless master. The instructor also had to have a sympathetic understanding of blind pupils. A small, spirited woman of great intelligence and independent outlook, Eustis did not advocate placing dog guides with every blind person.
She was impatient with the apathy and resignation that prevented many blind people from seeking a freer life, as impatient as she was with restrictions on the rights of Seeing Eye dogs and their masters to go wherever they wished.
She and her coworkers, many of them blind, overcame barriers that had denied dog guides and their owners access to restaurants, hotels, and public transportation. Yet even by the 1970's only about 1 percent of blind Americans used dog guides, less than half the number meeting the physical and emotional criteria for eligibility.
The Seeing Eye limits applicants to persons between sixteen and fifty-five years of age, with some exceptions for younger people of unusual maturity and older persons of adequate physical strength as well as those seeking replacement dogs.
Like other reputable dog guide schools, it will not provide dogs for mendicants or those with no work plans.
From the beginning Eustis approved the Seeing Eye policy requiring each student to pay for his dog, enhancing his sense of self-respect and responsibility, even though the organization could have assumed the financial responsibility, as it does for transportation, board, and lodging at the school during the student's month of training. The Seeing Eye attracted immediate public support.
By 1958 its funds were ample, and no further fund raising has been undertaken. At that time The Seeing Eye grants program was instituted. In its first fifteen years it allocated $5, 885, 719 to 128 different institutions, providing support for ophthalmic research, veterinary medicine, orientation and mobility training, and vocational and educational rehabilitation.
She died of cancer at her home in New York City and was buried in the churchyard of St. David's Church, Wayne, Pennsylvania.
At her death The Seeing Eye had supplied over 1, 300 dogs to the blind. The organization's social impact, which was always potentially broader than its training programs, has been frustrated by community attitudes of pity and overprotection toward the blind. Eustis devoted much of her own fortune to The Seeing Eye, which remained her keenest interest. She served as president until 1940 and thereafter as honorary president. She herself trained many dogs.
She was a Christian Scientist.
She was impatient with the apathy and resignation that prevented many blind people from seeking a freer life, as impatient as she was with restrictions on the rights of Seeing Eye dogs and their masters to go wherever they wished.
A small, spirited woman of great intelligence and independent outlook, Eustis did not advocate placing dog guides with every blind person.
On October 6, 1906, at Radnor, Pennsylvania, she married Walter Abbott Wood, head of a mowing and reaping machine company in Hoosick Falls, New York, and a state senator.
With her second husband, George Morris Eustis, of Aiken, South Carolina, whom she married on June 23, 1923, and with Elliott S. ("Jack") Humphrey, an American horse breeder and trainer, she began a program of research and experimental breeding.
Eustis had two sons by her first marriage, Walter Abbott and Harrison; her second marriage ended in divorce in 1928.
