Deaf Lives

Stories through the Years

Jack R. Gannon

• Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781944838669
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

Get Your Elbow Off the Horn is a collection of interactions and observations written by Jack R. Gannon, a lifelong advocate for the Deaf community. Warm and amusing, Gannon's stories begin with his rural childhood in the Ozarks and continue through his experiences as a student, educator, coach, husband, parent, and community leader. These vignettes reveal a down-to-earth family man who believed in making a difference one person at a time.Many of his recollections are brief sketches that reveal much about being Deaf—and about being human. From reflecting on the difficult choices parents must make for their children, to recounting awkward communication exchanges, Gannon marries good humor with a poignant advocacy for sign language rights. His stories preserve and share Deaf American life and culture as he experienced it.

PART ONE

BECOMING DEAF AND GOING AWAY TO SCHOOL

They Say I’m Deaf

They say I’m deaf,

These folks who call me friend.

They do not comprehend.

They say I’m deaf,

And look on me as queer,

Because I cannot hear.

They say I’m deaf,

I, who hear all day

My throbbing heart at play,

The song the sunset sings,

The joy of pretty things,

The smiles that greet my eye,

Two lovers passing by,

A brook, a tree, a bird;

Who says I have not heard?

Aye, tho’ it must seem odd,

At night I oft hear God.

So many kinds, I get,

Of happy songs, and yet

They say I’m deaf!

—Saul N. Kessler

Little is known about Saul N. Kessler (1896-1967), who was believed to be hard of hearing. He was a cartoonist and a poet, and some of his writings appeared in the Volta Review, an oral publication, and the Deaf-Mutes Journal. This poem appeared in The Silent Muse, An Anthology of Prose and Poetry by the Deaf published by the Gallaudet College Alumni Association in 1960.

INTRODUCTION

Born at home on November 23, 1936, not far from West Plains, Missouri, Jack Randle Gannon grew up in a rural setting with his parents and three siblings. His father worked as an automobile mechanic, his mother as a homemaker who also worked in a shoe store on the town square in West Plains. The family’s home used water from a well that was almost a football field away from the house, and it was one ofJack’s chores to draw the water and carry the buckets. He credits this assignment with giving him the strength to beat his first-year Gallaudet classmates at arm wrestling, thus gaining some athletic credibility with older students.

Jack was seven years old in 1943 when his parents moved the family to Richmond, California, to gain wartime factory jobs. A year later, in 1944, Jack became deaf from spinal meningitis. His parents moved him from one oral program to another, never satisfied with the results. It was not until Jack’s father met a custodian from the California School for the Deaf (CSD) in Berkeley that the family considered sending him to a school for deaf students. Jack went, but only for a few months. By 1945 World

War II had ended, and along with it, so did job opportunities. The family returned to their Ozark home.

A CSD teacher recommended the Missouri School for the Deaf (MSD) for Jack. From 1946 until 1954, he attended the school in Fulton, Missouri, staying there for weeks at a time, returning home only for winter and summer breaks. At MSD, Jack came to know and appreciate the community of Deaf people surrounding the school, particularly the Deaf teachers.

My father and me.

MY BRIEF JOURNEY THROUGH THE HEARING WORLD

Rain tinkled gently on our tin roof, one of my favorite sounds. On a rainy day, I often would get a sheet and, with my mother’s help, put it over the dining room table. I would crawl under the makeshift tent and lay there on the floor, listening to what I considered music, the most beautiful sound in my fleeting hearing world.

The woods surrounding our home abounded with sounds. The trees attracted a wide variety of birds with their calls, quarrels, and songs. At night frogs croaked in the nearby pond. Crickets chirped, katydids rubbed their wings together, and insects buzzed against the metal screens trying to get to the light inside the house. In the evenings, the family often gathered around the radio to keep up with the news from the rest of the world. Dad’s favorite gadget played 1940s tunes and radio shows such as Terry and the Pirates, and other programs.

Listening to the tinkle of the rain, these were all the most beautiful but fleeting sounds in my brief journey through the hearing world. I wondered what I would be like when I grew up. What was I meant to be?

I was soon to find out.

My mother, father, sister Betty Jo, brother Frank Lester, and me (age one).

HOW DO YOU MAKE HANDS TALK?

I must have been about six years old the day Frank Lester, my older brother, came home with the news that he had seen some deaf people downtown on “The Square,” talking with their hands.

Our mouths dropped open. “What?!” we exclaimed in unison. The Square was the business district of West Plains, our small southern Missouri hometown. In the center of The Square stood a huge, four-story white stone courthouse with black screened windows on the top floor. Everyone knew that these windows were where the county jail was because mothers would point upward in that direction and tell their small children, “If you don’t behave, they will put you up there!”

The main thoroughfare through town circled The Square from which roads jutted out in four directions—north, east, south, and west. Around the circle was where the town’s main business district was located—hence The Square’s name.

Saturdays and Mondays were the busiest days of the week on The Square. On Mondays, the local farmers brought their livestock to the market. On Saturdays, it seemed, everyone flocked to town to do their shopping, pay their bills, attend the “picture show,” or just sit around The Square and visit.

It was on a Saturday that my brother Frank Lester encountered those deaf people talking with their hands on The Square. Curious, we listened attentively as he described what he saw. He had been part of a small crowd that had stopped to gawk at the deaf persons. He said he could not understand one word they had said, but it was obvious that they understood each other because of the way they nodded their heads in response and laughed. And, he said, they seemed to talk so fast.

As a boxer.

That was my introduction to deaf people. Until that day, I hadn’t known there were deaf people in the world. I was fascinated. Imagine talking with your hands! I sat there at the table and looked down at my hands and studied them intently.

“How do you make hands talk?” I asked the family. “Where’s the mouth?”

“There’s no mouth, stupid!” my brother said, throwing up his hands before he tried to describe how the deaf people had talked: by gesturing wildly. They stood in a circle watching each other, he explained. One would use his hands and arms to “talk” while the others watched. My brother said that they moved their fingers very rapidly, too, and it looked as if they were writing a message in the air, and then they would move their hands and arms about their body with very expressive faces. Frank Lester waved his arms about his body in different directions, imitating what he had seen. And, he said again, that as he watched, he could see that they understood each other by their facial expressions and the way they nodded their heads. He said they signed so fast he had no idea how a person could see and understand everything that was being signed.

“Gosh,” I said, amazed. “I sure wish I could do that!” I hadn’t the slightest idea how soon that wish would come true.

INTO A NEW SOUNDLESS WORLD

During World War II, my parents accepted good-paying jobs at the shipyards in California to contribute to America’s war effort. We put our house and property, Ten Rocky Acres, up for rent, and our family of five made the trek across the country in our 1936 Chevrolet with what possessions we could take. We secured housing in a large housing development constructed for shipyard employees in Richmond, California. It was there that I became gravely ill.

Those were the years before the polio vaccination had been discovered, and my mother feared I had contracted polio. I developed a raging fever, but, for some reason, was not allowed any liquids. My Aunt Babe would bring me a wet washcloth to put on my forehead, and when no one was looking, I would suck what moisture I could from the washcloth in an attempt to quench my terrible thirst. When I did not get any better, Mom and Dad took me to a hospital far from home. My illness was diagnosed eventually as spinal meningitis. During an operation at the hospital, the doctors and nurses bent me over into a ball and inserted long medical needles into my back. I never pinpointed exactly when my hearing disappeared. I was eight years old.

One day, about a week after I returned home from the hospital, the local ice cream vendor drove by, and along with the other neighborhood kids, I ran to get an ice cream bar. As I handed over money for the ice cream, the vendor spoke to me, and I thought it strange that I could not understand what he said. When I went back home, I told Mom what had happened. “Mom,” I said, “The ice cream man talked to me, and I didn’t understand what the man said to me.”

“I told you, Jack,” Mom said resignedly, a hurt look on her face. “I told you, you are deaf!”

I nodded my head and said, “Oh,” and wandered off. I did not fully understand what she was talking about, or what she meant, but I have always remembered that incident because that was the beginning of my conscious journey into the world of silence.

Gradually I came to realize that my illness had thrust me into a strange, new world, a world I did not understand nor want to be part of. That journey helped me understand what being deaf really is, what it meant to an individual, and how it impacted our lives. I would learn the answers gradually over a lifetime. And, I would learn, like so many others before me, not only how to “survive” in a world of sound, but how to appreciate and reap the benefits of both worlds.

Being deaf means many things for me. First of all, being profoundly deaf means almost total exclusion from the world of sound . . . that world of music; free-flowing, spoken conversation; background noises and distant sounds. It means living in two worlds: the world of sound and the world of silence. Being deaf means teaching your eyes to “listen” and your hands to talk. It means learning to speak words and sounds you cannot hear. As a newly deaf person, I was always relying on my vision to “hear,” to receive, to understand, and to be aware of what was being said or happening. No longer could I do one thing and be consciously aware of something else going on unless it was within my scope of vision. At times, being deaf can mean loneliness, isolation even in a crowd. It meant, for me, turning inward and thriving on my own thoughts, fantasies, and dreams. It meant falling in love with books and learning to keep myself entertained. When we returned to Ten Rocky Acres, our home, no more would I hear the slamming of our neighbor’s screen door, the moaning and screeching sound of a rusty sign in the wind near the highway over the hill, the gentle tinkle of the rain on the tin roof, the chirps of the cicadas and crickets, the croaks of the frogs down by the pond, the insects’ buzzing as they popped against the window screens, the sighing of trees as the wind ruffled their leaves and they bowed in the breeze. The radio that had been our link to the world and the center of the family attention had, for me, become just a wooden box.

Becoming deaf for me meant a loss of fluent, easy, comfortable verbal communication. It meant struggling with the spoken word, trying to understand words on unmoving lips and studying, searching facial expressions, body movements, and gestures for clues that might help put the verbal puzzle together. It meant struggling to produce sounds I could no longer hear and write a language that had rules and rules and rules that made little sense. And, for me, it meant being left out, most of the time unintentionally of course, of the family and my friends and group conversations. It meant learning to accept and ignore the rude, quick brush-off when a person learned you were deaf. It meant being labeled and sometimes feeling “abnormal,” “different,” “broken,” “freakish,” “idiotic,” “dumb,” and “deaf-mute”—even though I could still speak.

Most disturbingly, it meant enduring attempts to become “normal.” Over and over, I was told that a deaf person must not sign and must learn to talk and lipread “because it is a hearing world out there!” I had to fit into their world with no regard, respect, nor acceptance of my world. I was the one who had to be “fixed.”

When I was sent to a school for deaf students, my life began to take on meaning, and I began to understand. I learned that there were others like me and that by becoming deaf at eight years of age, I was more fortunate than many because I had heard spoken language before becoming deaf. I learned to talk with my hands and discovered a beautiful, new comfortable world of silent, expressive communication. I found a place where I could belong, be involved, and have the opportunity to thrive and learn and grow into the individual that I am. I had started down the road to understanding and accepting who I was. By the time I graduated from school, I had come to realize that I was as normal as anyone else, even if I could no longer hear.

My second-grade class at Stark Hall, MSD, in 1947 (I’m in the front row farthest right).

I was in a class where the other students were just like me. I was exposed to teachers trained to work with deaf and hard of hearing children; in fact, many were deaf themselves. I found it easy to relate to these deaf teachers and looked up to many of them. Some became my role models and inspiration. Challenging me, they became the people I would learn to love and admire and who, in many different wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword, Christine L. Gannon and Jeff D. Gannon
• Preface
• PART ONE. BECOMING DEAF AND GOING AWAY TO SCHOOL
• PART TWO. BECOMING TEACHERS AND COACHES
• PART THREE. BECOMING PARENTS
• PART FOUR. INTERACTION WITH THE HEARING WORLD AS A DEAF PROFESSIONAL
• About the Author