When Kerry Pangere was 14 — a freshman in high school in the early 1980s — her dad John Pangere started law school at Valparaiso University. There was one problem — he was blind. So, she and her mother helped him by recording his law school texts.
“At that time, we weren’t aware of any services that would record books,” she said in a phone interview. “My mom and I would read into an old-fashioned tape recorder.” Provided by Eugene Feingold / Post-Tribune Eugene Feingold It was mostly her mother Eileen, something that took “multiple hours per day,” she recalled.
It was an experience that inspired Kerry to go to law school herself; she and her sister both specialize in family law. Her father died on July 19. He was one of a dozen attorneys who died in 2024 and were honored Thursday in the Lake County Bar Association’s Annual Memorial Service.
Her father, a Greek-American, took over Roberto’s Pizza in Lake Station with his wife in the late 1970s, before he made the jump to law school in 1982. According to his obituary, he was the first fully blind VU law grad. That could not be independently verified by VU by press time.
The law school closed in 2020. During his career, John worked as a city attorney for Lake Station and in-house counsel for their family’s Gary-based industrial construction firm, The Pangere Corporation. At first, he could see light and darkness, but that was lost over time, his daughter said.
His blindness was genetic, but he overcame .