Acknowledgments

Many people contributed to this book, including a dozen professionals who supported my application for the Powrie V. Doctor Chair of Deaf Studies. I hope this finished work justifies their faith.

Many people contributed to the actual writing of the book, but two deserve special mention.

The first and most important is my wife, Inez. While I had the personal honor of occupying the "Dr. Dr." chair for the 1985-86 academic year, Inez was with me and we worked as a team from beginning to end. If the result of our collaboration makes for interesting reading, a large share of the credit should go to her. Inez is one of those people with a God-given talent for making comfortable friends out of strangers in about ten minutes.

This was vital to the success of the project because we were not collecting demographic information but attempting to bring hearing people into the living rooms of a variety of adult deaf people to get to know them as real people by listening while they talked about their educational, social and vocational experiences, opinions and philosophies in their usual and most comfortable mode of communication with a minimum of questions.

Very often, the most comfortable mode of communication was American Sign Language (ASL). Here Inez' much greater fluency was invaluable. The majority of the deaf people we interviewed were bilingual; they switched from ASL to Pidgin Signed English (PSE) without giving it a thought. But, to repeat an old saw, "it takes one to know one," and deaf people who grew up in residential schools immediately recognized Inez as a native signer and this opened doors.

This is one reason it would be difficult for a hearing person, even someone who used ASL fluently, to do what we did. Deaf people certainly respect and appreciate hearing people who sign well, but the simple physical fact of hearing/not hearing makes it difficult to accept them as peers. We were not acting as researchers, but as deaf people dropping in for casual visits with deaf friends.

Inez also acted as cameraman, making sure the people being interviewed remained in camera range as they shifted position--an indispensable function we learned the hard way after one person shifted position in her chair and her spelling hand got out of the picture. Inez also spent long hours at the typewriter, typing and retyping the drafts as they went through the editing process.

The second indispensable collaborator was Bill Adams, who interpreted the majority of the videotapes. At the beginning, we tried watching the tapes with legal pads and pens on our laps but we missed so much when we took our eyes off the TV screen to write, that we had to watch each tape at least four times. Adams, who was introduced to us by Gallaudet's Interpreter Coordinating Center, took over this formidable task with enthusiasm and great professional skill. We had no previous contact with Adams but as we got to know him and his wife, Janice, better, our respect for his skill as an interpreter and regard for him as a friend grew daily. An interview with Janice [Adams] is included in the collection.

Two other people on the front line were Cordelia Jones and Vicki Darnell, secretaries at the Gallaudet Research Institute, who transcribed Adams' audio tapes. A problem with unstructured interviews is that people, both hearing and deaf, naturally ramble. You don't notice this in face-to-face conversations but on paper it frequently gets confusing. Add to this the complexities of ASL translated into oral English. Cordelia and Vicki deserve special mention for completing a difficult assignment.

The entire Gallaudet community, through its hospitality and support, made it difficult to leave Kendall Green. As we got to know these people socially and professionally, we came to realize that Gallaudet University is wealthy measured in terms of human resources. At the risk of leaving many good people out, we want to give special recognition to President Jerry C. Lee for his warm personal support; Dr. Raymond Trybus, director of the Gallaudet Reseach Institute and Jack Gannon, director of Alumni Relations for invaluable advice and consenting to write the Foreword.

Also, we are indebted to Dr. Susan Foster of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Dr. Robert G. Sanderson, a former "Dr. Dr." Chair holder, and David W. Myers of the Rehabilitation Services Administration, Deafness and Communicative Disorders Branch, for reviewing drafts of the manuscript and offering many helpful suggestions.

Back home again in Indiana, James McClelland, president; Sandra Wilt, Vice President, and Phil Hess, director of program development at Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana deserve thanks for their encouragement and selectively poor vision as we used many hours of company time to complete the manuscript while they pretended not to notice.

And without the help of many friends around the country who put us in touch with deaf people in their area as a first step to arranging the interviews, time constraints would have made it difficult to find so many good people to interview.

Finally, all the 160 people who consented to be interviewed deserve recognition. While they were told there would be room for only 50 or so interviews in the book, all opened their homes, made us feel welcome and each contributed to our understanding of the contemporary deaf community in the U.S. We now look at these people as personal friends. They reinforce our conviction that there is much that has been right in the deaf community in years past, is right today and will be right tomorrow.

[. . .Gene Petersen]

Gail Hyde
Project Coordinator, Web Design