Seeds of Disquiet: One Deaf Woman’s Experience

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----tSTootie Campbell, my signing friend, encouraged me to join Quota Club. The members of Quota were women who either owned a business or held executive positions in a company. I was attracted by the club's commitment to provide funding to support services for persons with hearing loss. Quota Club had helped to get those first teletypewriters placed in Winchester. Tootie and I found that we celebrated our birthdays a week apart in October, though I was a year older. We started a tradition of throwing ourselves a party. We also enjoyed planning a prank each year for Quota Club's district conference. Among our favorites was a "discovery" of the true history of Quota, in which we revealed that the original motto was "so many men, so little time." Quota Club was very special to me. It gave me the first opportunity I'd ever had to be a valued part of a group of professionals. The members of Quota made an outstanding effort to include me and use my skills. They set aside hundreds of dollars each year to provide sign language interpreters so that I could participate in their meetings. Fred joined the local Jaycees. We had long been volunteering each other for favorite projects, and he recruited me to help with the Jaycees' annual Halloween Haunted House fundraiser. 114 Seeds of Disquiet We had a great time dressing in macabre costumes. With Fred's height and his convincing attempt to look menacing, he made a magnificent henchman. I was drafted to be the hapless woman cut up by the mad doctor with the chain saw. It was the perfect excuse to scream my lungs out. My only concern was that the Scream Queen role might become what people most remembered about me, just as Mr. Barry never tired of the story about my tooth retainer. Although Gramp McIntosh had been a politician, I was suspicious and distrustful of most elected officials. As I became more active in the disability rights movement, I realized it might be much easier to change misguided government policies from the inside. Fred and I had always voted for the person whose goals and commitment we liked, not for a party. We had friends on both ends of the political spectrum and everywhere in between. We were uncertain about which poliltical party to work with. Ira Lechner solved our problem. After we heard him speak at a Handicaps Unlimited conference, we felt we had found a person who could prove that "honest politician" did not have to be an oxymoron. We became Democrats to help him get elected. Ira's bid was unsuccessful, but one thing led to another . Within a few years, Fred became chairman of the local party. I may not have been the first deaf person to be a delegate to the state Democratic Party convention, but I apparently introduced most of the other delegates to the use of a sign language interpreter. I took a day trip to Gallaudet College to study Cued Speech with associates of Dr. Owen Cornett, the founder of the method. Although cued speech had been in use for almost two decades, few people knew what it was. Most of the deaf people I talked to had derogatory things to say about it. They called it "crude speech" or "cute speech." I tried to memorize the simple cueing hand shapes and positions, which were based on phonetics, but quickly decided 115 Seeds of Disquiet to focus on sign language instead. My brain absorbed language based not on the way words sounded but the way they were spelled. I found cueing to be an uncomfortable disruption of my thought process. I could have changed my mindset with a little tenacity. Cued speech could have helped me speechread with the same accuracy as sign language. My pronunciation of unfamiliar words might have improved. But sign language beckoned me with an unbeatable benefit. It offered access to a language used by many thousands more people-people with a history and a culture. There were some people who signed in Winchester, but practically no one knew how to cue. Life came full circle for me. Within three years after the fateful conference in Williamsburg, I had contracted with Barrier Free Environments, in Raleigh, N.C., to serve as a trainer for their workshops on Section 504 in various cities along the Eastern Seaboard. It was the...