RADIO SERVICE ALLOWS VISUALLY IMPAIRED TO ENJOY DEAR ABBY, `GARFIELD'; HELLO TO ALL THOSE LISTENING IN AT HOME.

Byline: DENNIS McCARTHY 

``Heard any good newspapers lately?''

- slogan of the Los Angeles Radio Reading Service

Most of us take this newspaper we hold in our hands today for granted. Just as we take for granted the idea that we will always be able to read it.

But what if the day comes when we can't? What if the eyes reading these words right now fail us? Leave us in darkness, and make this newspaper in our hands worthless.

Just a piece of paper with no words, no meanings, no information to allow us to continue keeping a daily eye on what's going on in our world, our neighborhoods.

The Braille Institute and Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic produce some wonderful reading texts and library books, but neither can respond fast enough to keep the visually impaired in touch with the world on a daily basis.

Listening to radio and TV news fills in some gaps, but neither of these news mediums can touch a good newspaper for depth and breath.

Neither tells us who was born or who died in our communities yesterday - who's getting married or what Garfield is up to today.

No, there is no alternative to the daily newspaper. Not if you want to find out what's going on outside your front door when you can't see anymore.

And in Los Angeles, that's more than 140,000 people, according to the Braille Institute.

Teri Grossman arrives at the storefront on Balboa Boulevard in Encino at 7:30 a.m. Friday, and begins taking a pair of scissors and a marking pen to copies of the Daily News and Los Angeles Times.

She has an hour to lay out two hours of news before the morning's readers, Ford Lile and Robin Rea, arrive at 8:30 a.m. to deliver the morning newspapers at 9 a.m. to hundreds of visually impaired residents of Los Angeles.

Teri, a volunteer - like all the editors and readers who give their time to the Los Angeles Radio Reading Service - measures the columns and times them out for broadcast.

The Daily News front page will take 12 minutes to read, and parts of L.A. Life and local Valley news get an additional eight minutes. The rest of the hour is devoted to sports, Dear Abby, this column, comics, weather forecasts, horoscopes and obituaries.

In other words, Jolie Mason says, ``all the things that a person picks up a newspaper for in the first place.''

The Los Angeles Radio Reading Service exists because Mason, its project director, made it exist.

From 1988 to 1990, it was a service just like this for the visually impaired living in Washington, D.C., that got this Los Angeles woman familiar with the area while on a two-year job assignment.

It's tough enough getting around and learning about a new city when you can see. Imagine when you can't, like Jolie.

``Besides getting the local newspapers read everyday, I learned how to get around the city, what was happening on weekends, how to get groceries delivered, and all sorts of things that helped me meet and become friends with other people who were blind,'' Jolie says.

``When I got back home to Los Angeles, and found there was no reading service like this available here, I was stunned. How could that be in such a large, metropolitan city?''

It took her four years, and a lot of people telling her to forget it, it couldn't be done, but Jolie finally got air time - hooking up as a sub carrier on KCSN-FM (88.5).

``Basically, we piggyback their radio signal, but you need a special radio to get us because regular radios filter out the sub-carrier frequencies,'' Jolie says.

The radios cost $25 for a transistor model, and $85 for a table model. ``We provide the radios to low-income people through donations we receive from people in the community,'' she said.

For the visually impaired who can afford them, they are available through catalogs designed for people living with disabilities, Jolie adds.

Aside from the Daily News and the Times, the service offers news from ethnic newspapers twice a week, and monthly magazines. On Halloween, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., celebrity readers will broadcast ghostly tales, followed by old-time radio shows with Halloween themes up to midnight.

With a possible audience of 140,000 visually impaired people in Los Angeles, her service should be broadcasting the news ``to thousands,'' Jolie admits.

``But, so far, it's only hundreds because it's hard to get the word out to people who are blind in the Valley that we are here,'' she says.

``We're doing all right, though. We're small, but we're growing.''

For anyone interested in more information on the Los Angeles Radio Reading Service, or helping it donate special radios to low-income, visually impaired seniors in the community, you can reach Jolie at [phone].

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Photo

PHOTO Jolie Mason, with her guide dog, Yuma, founded the Los Angeles Radio Reading Service to read newspapers to the visually impaired.

Gus Ruelas/Daily News