Teaching from the Heart and Soul: The Robert F. Panara Story

Finding a Deaf Identity

25 Finding a Deaf Identity After graduating with a New York Regents diploma from Clinton in June 1938, Bob joined his parents and sister in Somerset, Massachusetts, where Eleanor was attending a school run by French Canadian nuns. The Great Depression was still taxing family finances. Bob knew that going off to college might be too expensive. At the time, there were no government loans or state tuition plans, and the only other way to finance his education was through employment. Fortunately, there was the clothing business run by his father and Uncle Ed. Bob began working as a stock boy, packaging bathrobes, smoking jackets, and women’s housecoats. He also handled the yard-wide rolls of wool, terry cloth, and silk, checked the colors , and helped to load them in carriages and wheel them to elevators. For lunch, he went to his dad’s office and ate sandwiches prepared by his mother. While his father took care of invoices and bills during the lunch breaks, Bob read the sports pages. His interest sparked in the sport of golf, he began borrowing his uncle’s golf clubs to practice in the cow fields near his home. Those fields, bordered by quaint stone-wall fences, also became the baseball sandlots for Bob and the friends he had made over the past few summers. 26 Teaching from the Heart and Soul Bob’s father had no concern about his safety while swimming and often let him leave work on afternoons to go enjoy himself with his friends. It was at this time that Bob began to take up long-distance swimming seriously. He would row a boat while one of his friends swam alongside for half a mile or more, then they would switch. They did this at the oceanside beaches of New Bedford and Horseheads. Despite numerous times when people in the distance would wave their arms frantically to warn them to come closer to shore, Bob and his friends never feared sharks. A few times, the lifeguard swam out to wave them in—and lecture them afterwards. With Bob’s love for the ocean, it was no surprise that he was especially enamored with the poetry of Lord Byron. Byron, who had a clubfoot, was also passionate about swimming. “And I have loved thee Ocean! and my joy / Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be / Borne Like thy bubbles onward, from a boy,” Bob would quote from Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.” And like Byron, Bob “wantoned with thy breakers, they to me / Were a delight.” The poets Shelley and Keats and Bob’s favorite novelists Robert Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville, and Ernest Hemingway, were also drawn to the sea. In an essay Bob wrote a few years later, he expressed his pleasure eloquently: “I love to stand at the bow of a sailboat when it is ploughing through furrows of dark green water, to sense the thrill and mystery of the boundless deep, and to tremble at every little thunderclap that comes when the wind whips suddenly into a slacked sail and stretches it taut.”1 After a year in Somerset, Bob tired of his work as a stock boy. He began looking around for a place where he could study again. With his father he visited the University of Massachu- Finding a Deaf Identity 27 setts in Amherst. There he met the dean, an open-minded gentleman who was willing to sit down with him at a typewriter and interview him in that manner. Bob responded well to each question, but the dean was concerned. He felt Bob could succeed at the University of Massachusetts but that his social life would suffer, and the dean believed that to be an important part of a postsecondary education. He asked Bob if he had heard about Gallaudet College. Most likely, the dean was familiar with the college, since the University of Massachusetts is not far from the Clarke School for the Deaf at Northampton. Neither Bob nor his parents knew about the college for deaf students in Washington, D.C. Bob then applied to Gallaudet, writing directly to President Percival Hall, who responded by saying that he did not think Bob was ready for total immersion in classes made up of all deaf students. In any case, it was also too late for admission to Gallaudet that year. Bob had never met another deaf person...