LAWRENCE — Going blind after college, Steve Lonegan couldn't land a job.

He collected disability checks from Social Security, which he now wants to cut, and was told to seek food stamps, rent vouchers and vocational training.

“Vocational training back in 1980 meant putting together toasters or making potholders and things like that,” Lonegan told a crowd of students and fans last night at Rider University. “I chose not to pursue that course.”

Lonegan, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate facing Newark Mayor Cory Booker in the Oct. 16 special election, opened up about his blindness for the first time in his campaign Tuesday night.

Despite the odds, he managed to build a successful kitchen-cabinet business and send his two daughters to private schools, he said.

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"First of all, let me just be clear about something: I’m blind,” he began, acknowledging a disability he has rarely mentioned in public. “Where I’m standing here right now, I can’t see a single one of you, so if there’s anything you disagree with, just flip me the bird. It’s fine.”

A former college football star, Lonegan, 57, said that instead of collecting welfare checks he decided to start his business in an old silk mill in Paterson. The Lonegans sold the kitchen-cabinet company a few years ago.

“Not real sexy, you know, I wasn’t the Facebook founder,” he quipped. “(But) I employed a lot of people during my career. And I was often asked, ‘What’s it like, being blind and trying to run a business?’

“And I was like, ‘Well you know what? I hired a lot of sighted people and they make good employees, too.’”

Lonegan, who was diagnosed with the degenerative disease retinitis pigmentosa at 14, has kept a busy schedule during the campaign and his staff has an informal system to manage his blindness. An aide or family member is usually by Lonegan’s side to guide him through crowds or onto stage platforms. As people approach the candidate, their names are whispered into his ear.

At 22, Lonegan, an art and opera buff, toured through the most famous museums in Europe while he still had some eyesight, according to a 2009 Star-Ledger profile.

“When I speak with people, and when I meet people, I judge them based on how I feel about who they are,” he said. “The words they use, the ideas that they express, and the things that they believe.”

His ideas got a respectful if not warm reception by the crowd of college students, who quizzed him repeatedly after his speech about his stances opposing abortions, the $50 billion federal relief package for Hurricane Sandy victims, and same-sex marriage.

Lonegan said he believes as a Catholic that life begins at conception. He said the Sandy relief should have been offset by cutting funds sent to foreign countries such as Pakistan.

Marriage, he said, should be for heterosexual couples. But he added that he would push in Congress to “get the government out of the business of marriage” so that same-sex couples could enjoy the same legal benefits as other couples.

In a wide-ranging speech, Lonegan also said he would decriminalize marijuana, serve only two terms in the Senate – “I don’t believe in sinecures,” he said – and that he would like to join the Finance Committee if elected.

RELATED COVERAGE

• Conservative group touts Lonegan's past in new online ad

• Star-Ledger profile in 2009: Lonegan forces fellow Republican gubernatorial candidates to take notice

• Complete coverage of the 2013 special U.S. Senate election

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