Introduction

As we cruised slowly up the street of the Denver suburb, checking house numbers, a young man with a friendly full beard stopped mowing his lawn to watch us and signed, "You deaf?"

We relaxed. "Oh, yes. We're Gene and Inez Petersen and we sure are deaf. Are you Eldon Ragland?"

"Yes. I saw you signing in the car and figured it was you." Donna, his wife, came out to join in the welcome.

Once again we had found our way to the home of a new deaf couple in a strange city and our answer to the signed question, "You deaf?" had opened the door. Eldon and Donna Ragland were to be the 145th and 156th [146th?] deaf persons interviewed in a 12-month odyssey that crisscrossed the United States. The small talk on the front lawn quickly turned up mutual friends and in half an hour we felt like we had known each other for years.

Eldon and Donna Ragland are part of the contemporary deaf community in the United States, sometimes referred to as the social entity of the deaf to distinguish the people from the audiometrical deaf (Schowe, 1978). All the people in this book use some form of sign language as a principal means of social communication and most of their social and cultural activities involve other deaf people. The deaf community is something like a small American city in spirit but it stretches from Maine to California and Florida to Washington. It's a comfortable, friendly city with a strong sense of peoplehood. The people in this book are real and, with only two exceptions, real names are used with permission.

The interviews were conceived as a way to introduce hear[ing] people, parents of deaf children and young deaf adults who have had little or no contact with adult deaf role models to a variety of deaf people by visiting with them in their homes, not as researchers concerned with problems or the demographics of deafness, but as friends getting together to talk things over. This is one reason the tone of this book is upbeat. People did talk about problems, but they didn't dwell on them. Some hearing people are likely to be surprised as much by the ordinary life styles and experiences of the deaf people interviewed as by their success in compensating for a severe disability.

The sample in this book is on the high functioning side. We did interview a number of interesting people at the lower end of the socio-economic scale but most of them never returned the drafts even when we called them on TTY and sent follow-up letters. The problem was likely the old nemesis of prelingually deaf people: Their reading comprehension. They were uncertain if they fully understood their own stories and [were] too proud to ask for help. With so much room for factual errors between the interpreter, the secretaries who transcribed his oral tapes and the writer's interpretation of the rough transcripts and memory, it was decided not to use any interviews which had not been read and corrected as needed by the persons interviewed. Some of the high functioning deaf people had second thoughts and asked that their interviews not be used. Regretfully, some interesting interviews had to be shelved.

No interviews with "pure" oral deaf people are included even though we did meet some such people and enjoyed talking to them. By choice, they prefer not to be identified as part of the deaf community that uses sign language as a preferred means of communication.

The interviews are not verbatim. Sign language is a visual, motion-specific language and cannot be captured in print. What we have here is a translation in conversational English. Also, most of the interviews are condensed but interesting remarks made chatting over refreshments are worked into some of the interviews.

As the project advanced, a number of professionals asked to see our list of questions, but we didn't use one. It was felt that using a list would inhibit spontaneity and slant the interviews. However, to get the conversations going, it was usually suggested that the person being interviewed start off with some background information, then talk about his or her education, vocational career, social activities and then express opinions on any topic of interest. Thus, a pattern can be discerned.

Schowe, Ben Sr. (1979). Identity Crises in Deafness, Scholars' Press, Tempe, Ariz.

Gail Hyde
Project Coordinator, Web Design