James Baquet

    June 27 goes unnoticed by many, but it has great significance for Americans with disablilities.

    It’s the birthday of American author and political activist Helen Keller. Born with all of her faculties, at the age of 19 months she contracted an illness — modern experts speculate it was scarlet fever or meningitis — which left her deaf and blind.

    At that time, the great Alexander Graham Bell — whose mother and wife were both deaf — was working with deaf children. Prior to the invention of the telephone, Bell had been working on a “phonautograph,” a device that could convert the vibrations of the human voice into a visible written pattern. Keller’s family was referred to Dr. Bell by a physician, and he in turn assigned 20-year-old Anne Sullivan as her instructor.

    Visually impaired herself, Miss Sullivan was the first to enable Helen to communicate beyond a few idiosyncratic signs she used with the daughter of her family’s cook. Sullivan would form a sign with her hand inside Helen’s own, allowing her to feel it, and then associate those signs with an object. The first word Helen learned was “d-o-l-l,” to describe a doll Sullivan had given her.

    The story of Sullivan’s amazing tutelage is told in the play and film “The Miracle Worker,” the title of which indicates just how amazing Miss Sullivan was. That work in turn is based on “The Story of My Life,” Keller’s autobiography.

    Ultimately, despite setbacks, Sullivan’s work paid off, and Keller graduated from Radcliffe College, making her the first deaf and blind person to receive a bachelor’s degree.

    From there she went on to become a public lecturer, with Sullivan as her interpreter, and an author. Her talks were uplifting; the title of the very first was “Happiness,” and to hear a woman so afflicted speak on the joy that life had brought her could not help but inspire.

    In addition to her advocacies for the deaf and the blind, she also campaigned for women’s right to vote, pacifism, socialism, and birth control.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. get, as a disease, begin to suffer from

    2. teaching, guidance

    3. opposition to war

    4. weakened, damaged

    5. guess, conjecture

    6. handicaps, incapacities

    7. specific to an individual

    8. inflammation of the covering of the brain and/or spinal cord due to infection

    9. troubled, distressed

    10. causes actively supported