Ryan Cameron's big audience, the multitude of V-103 radio listeners in Atlanta, know him for his voice. He's one of the city's power players, connecting them to the latest, local hip-hop sounds.

His small audience, eight Atlanta high school students, know him for his vision. He sees for them what they cannot see for themselves.

Courtesy of Marolyn Cameron (ENLARGE)

Ryan Cameron began wearing glasses in middle school after seriously injuring his left eye.

Frank Niemeir/AJC (ENLARGE)

A surgery four years ago implanted a new lens, so Cameron follows light patterns better. His busy schedule puts a toll on his vision.

• More photos of Ryan Cameron, mentoring program • Living coverage

He has chosen them, and given them everything from health checkups to college tours, because in them he sees himself growing up in the tough northwest Atlanta area of Bankhead.

They are invisible to many, getting by on average smarts, with a choice left up to them: Focus or wander.

These kids are like his own eyes.

The right one looks straight.

The left one drifts.

His eyes, unseen by his radio audience, tell why he sees so much for these teenagers.

He knows that a child left unnoticed, afraid, without a vision of the future — that's when life can change forever.

Cameron was 9, an only child at home with the chickenpox. His mom was at work, and he was scared.

He closed the door to his room, to keep away from his mom's longtime, live-in boyfriend.

The guy pushed him around and taunted him by hiding the only Afro comb in the house. Cameron watched during a rainstorm as the man beat his dog on their apartment balcony.

"He had a substance abuse problem and was always in between jobs," Cameron said. "He was the kind of guy who would get shot in a bar fight. You get people like that and it's like, how come no one's killed you yet?"

Cameron was afraid if he told his mom of the abuse, she would believe her boyfriend instead.

Alone, Cameron entertained himself. He wound a rubber band around a ruler and fired at toy soldiers.

This day, the ruler snapped.

One piece stabbed his left eye.

Bleeding, he held out as long as he could in his room. Finally, he opened the door.

The boyfriend called Cameron's mom, who rushed home and took him to the hospital.

Cameron wore an eye patch for a year, then thick glasses.

Nearsighted in his right eye, he can only see shadows with his left.

"It's like there's a veil over everything," he said. "If I had to drive you with just that eye, we'd all be dead."

Looking back, he says the accident could have easily been prevented had he not been isolated by fear.

"If I could have been somewhere but that room, even watching TV," he said, "I definitely would have been."

He would still have two good eyes.

Even with one, he doesn't have to look far for today's kids who are afraid and left alone.

Keep eyes on goal

In his old neighborhood three years ago, a mob that included teenagers ambushed a trucker, pelting him with rocks, bottles and chunks of concrete.

The rig jumped the curb and skidded down an embankment. A bottle rocket penetrated one of the trucker's eyes. He can still drive, but his eye movement is limited.

Some kids from the Bankhead Courts public housing project, who weren't involved in the crime, didn't like the way it gave them a black eye.

Ten created the "B Team," and Cameron brought them into his monthly mentoring program, called the Leadership Academy.

They went on college tours and got medical and dental benefits, a personal library and special backpacks full of resources for high school, others for college.

During recent monthly meetings, Cameron stressed etiquette (make eye contact) and goal setting (keep your eye on the prize).

Today two B Teamers remain in the Leadership Academy: best friends Antonio Brady and Antonio Avery.

Cameron says the two Antonios are his mirrors.

Brady, about to turn 18, has a scar on his forehead from throwing bricks in the air for fun. Cameron shakes his head. "Who plays a game like that?" he asked.

Last year Brady met his father for the first time, right before the man died of cancer.

Avery, 17, sports a new large tattoo on his neck, "Juicy 1971-2007." His mom. Pneumonia.

Cameron disapproves. That tat will still peek over a collared shirt and tie.

A junior, Avery was scheduled to transfer schools and graduate in 2009, but the paperwork wasn't finished and he blew off repeated offers of help and visits by Cameron's nonprofit foundation volunteers.

Avery's left wrist has 22 fresh stitches from a Grady doctor. He smashed it through a window while roughhousing.

Cameron sees it is time to intervene, one on one. Right after the boy gets his free dental exam from Dr. Dina Giesler (who donates her skills because she was once a domestic violence victim), Cameron sits the boy down in her small office in northwest Atlanta.

"Everything you get away with, being a kid, is about to end," Cameron warned Avery.

"You can't keep blaming everyone else. ... Look at my Prada glasses. Where are you going to get the money to get that? You are going to get a job and work. You're going to get through high school and take advantage of your chance to get an education. [Your stitches] are for no reason. ... You need a baby sitter."

"I don't need no baby sitter," Avery said quietly.

"Then start acting like it. There's no sense caring about you. You've got to give some kind of effort. Give me something to work with. I give you fresh gear, haircuts, is this how you're going to do me? ... You have to be committed, that you are not going to be the one out of every nine black men who are in jail, the one out of every 100 Americans. The chance of you going to jail is a lot more likely than you being successful. ...

"You're making that choice. Grow up a little. You're not being a man. You're a long way from that. And you're making me look bad. You're wearing my [Ryan Cameron Foundation] logo. I'm going to have to get you a Tickle Me Elmo hoodie.

"I've got faith in you, right? You already know that."

They shake hands and embrace.

Later, Avery talks about Cameron's lecture:

"He's sincere. He tells me what he expects of me. He wants me to get on the right track. ... I see a lot in myself, but he sees stuff in me, too. Stuff I can't see."

Giving to someone else

Behind each of these kids can be a single parent trying to see more for them.

Everything Cameron sees today is because of what his mom envisioned as a high school kid.

Marolyn Cameron is the face of many young moms in Atlanta, even some of the kids that her son now mentors.

She was not married at 16, but pregnant. She preferred the blue prenatal vitamins, visualizing a boy growing inside her.

She stared at a crossroads. Her twin and another sister lived on welfare. She would not.

She got her GED at night school. She became an operator at Southern Bell. Through all the changes in that business, she showed up — for going on 41 years.

Ryan's father never grew into the man of her dreams. Instead, she would raise one.

"I had him," she said, "to give to someone else."

On days her little boy got sick, she had to make do. She trusted the man she was living with at the time.

"I didn't know he was pushing Ryan up against the wall, and Ryan was afraid of him," she said. "His [Ryan's] father was sort of like that to me. As soon as I found out about Ryan's eye, [her boyfriend] was out of there immediately. Gone."

She does not blame herself. She sees it as a freak accident and thanks God it wasn't worse.

The injury sharpened her son's natural gifts of gab and humor. When other kids teased him for his lazy eye, he joked and moved on.

Out of 14 black students at Campbell High School in Smyrna, Cameron became senior class president and earned a scholarship to West Georgia. College laid the groundwork for the work ethic demanded in radio.

His bad eye "didn't hold him back," said Marolyn Cameron, now 59 and living in Roswell. "Nothing has really changed him. He's still Ryan. He keeps getting better and better."

Creating a vision

Today, the oldest of Cameron's three children is 9, the same age he was when he injured an eye.

A surgery four years ago implanted a new lens, so Cameron follows light patterns better. Still, when he took his family to the 4-D movie at the World of Coca-Cola, he could only see flat images.

He also failed the retina scan required to cruise through airport security as a frequent flier.

Without proper rest, his vision suffers. Cameron must pace himself through a nonstop schedule of radio, announcing every Atlanta Hawks home game, a new cable TV show and community appearances.

"It's hard on him visually; if he could fix it, he would," said his wife, Kysha. "It's a scar. You tiptoe around it. ... You realize it most when he strives so hard not to be that person who lets something like this hold him back."

Cameron, 42, points out that many African-American entertainers past and present have eye problems: Sammy Davis Jr., Forest Whitaker, Notorious B.I.G., Stuart Scott.

Glasses help his image, he says. He's always wearing pairs from Buckhead's Planet Eyewear in his new Starz InBlack cable network show, "Ryan Cameron Uncensored," because, he says, focus group research has shown that African-American men are less threatening with glasses on.

The kids he mentors don't know why his eye wanders. Some shrugged when asked to guess. "He was born that way?" Brady asked.

Cameron is waiting to tell them why right before they move on with their lives. He wants the story of his eye to reinforce that beyond all else, a person's vision is what he makes of it.