By Alex Robinson
A Flushing man who relatives said was the first blind person to run the Boston marathon died last week at the age of 90.
Joe Pardo lost his eyesight at 29 after he suffered an inherited degenerative eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa that deteriorated his sight, but he refused to let his affliction slow him down.
“My dad was one of those people who never believed he was handicapped,” said Pardo’s daughter, Kathy Pardo-Carlson. “He would always say ‘I’m not blind, I just can’t see.’”
Pardo grew up in Detroit, where he got married and had four children. Before his eyesight failed, Pardo worked as a commercial airline pilot, and as his condition worsened, Pardo-Carlson said her father sold insurance and later was employed as as a door-to-door salesman.
He separated from his wife in the late 1950s and moved to California. He then moved to Connecticut and later Flushing, where he lived in an apartment on Northern Boulevard for 47 years. He became a masseur at Flushing’s YMCA and started long-distance running in his 40s with the help of friends who would lead him with an elastic rope.
When he was inside the YMCA, he would set up radios at the corners of the running track so he would know where to turn.
In 1968, he tried to enter the Boston Marathon, but was turned away because he was blind, Pardo-Carlson said. He returned the following year and did not bring a cane so that the marathon’s organizers could not tell he was unable to see.
“He ran by listening to everybody’s footsteps and following them and he did very, very well,” Pardo-Carlson said. “It just absolutely fascinated me. He ran without people knowing he was blind.”
A spokesman for the Boston Marathon could not confirm whether Pardo was the first blind man to ever run in the race’s 118-year history, as it did not start holding a division for the visually impaired until 1986.
Pardo finished the race and went on to run in dozens of marathons and hundreds of races all over the world. Pardo-Carlson said her father competed in marathons in New York City, Long Island, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.
He even had the honor of carrying the Olympic torch through Manhattan in 1984 for a leg of the torch relay as part of the Los Angeles Summer Olympics.
“That was his crowning glory,” Pardo-Carlson said. “That was one of his greatest honors.”
In addition to his job as a masseur, Pardo became a running trainer.
He moved to Florida five years ago, but only stayed for three years before relocating to Roscommon, Mich., where he lived his last two years before his death.
Reach reporter Alex Robinson by e-mail at arobinson@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4566.
