Proclamation 3769—Save Your Vision Week, 1967

More than one million Americans cannot read a newspaper, not because they are illiterate, but because they cannot see well enough—even with glasses.

One of every fifty Americans is blind or has only partial vision.

Every fourth schoolchild requires eye care. Every third serviceman needs glasses.

Americans fear blindness more than any affliction except cancer. And every year 32,000 Americans go blind. Aid to the blind costs $1 billion a year, aside from the economic loss suffered by those who must try to find their way through lives of perpetual darkness.

Yet there is hope. Blindness can be prevented. Research and better means of applying the knowledge of the laboratories to the lives of our people can materially lessen the scourge of blindness.

Every American should cherish his God-given gift of sight, protect and care for his eyes, and support the research, diagnosis, and treatment that can save vision.

I call upon all media of communications to carry a new message of hope to the blind. I call upon doctors, and private and public agencies, to press on with their work of saving, for us and for our children, the incomparable blessing of sight.

To encourage greater awareness and action, the Congress by a joint resolution approved December 30, 1963 (77 Stat. 629), requested the President to issue annually a proclamation designating the first week in March of each year as Save Your Vision Week.

Now, Therefore, I, Lyndon B. Johnson, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim the week beginning March 5, 1967, as Save Your Vision Week; and I invite the Governors of the States, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and officials of other areas subject to the jurisdiction of the United States to issue similar proclamations.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States of America to be affixed.

DONE at the City of Washington this fourth day of March in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty-seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and ninety-first.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON

By the President:

DEAN RUSK

Secretary of State