Word: deaf
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Last week at Buffalo 2,000 members of the National Association of the Deaf met to unveil a bronze and marble statue of Charles-Michel, Abbé de 1'Epée (1712-89), the man who codified the existing hand signs of his day, invented new ones and created the first intelligible means of communication for the deaf. He was a Roman Catholic priest, canon of the Cathedral of Troyes, son of Louis XIV's architect...
...church deprived him of his ecclesiastical functions because he was a Pansenist.* The Abbé developed his sign system in order to teach his two deaf sisters to communicate. His finger alphabet is still in use. Eugene E. Hannan, deaf sculptor of the Buffalo statue, reproduced the Epée alphabet on to the statue's base. Modeling the expressive fists was the hardest part of his work, said he last week. The statue itself represents the Abbe studying his clenched right hand for its possibilities in signs...
Many members of the National Association of the Deaf know how to read lips and to voice intelligible sounds. But they find communication by signs is more accurate. They talk with a single hand, as do the deaf of the rest of the Americas, of Ireland and Europe. English and Australian deaf use both hands. When W. W. McDougall of England addressed the Buffalo convention he required John Shilton of Toronto to interpret...
Foreign delegates to the convention envied U. S. facilities for teaching the deaf. The U. S. is the only country providing a high grade college for the deaf (Gallaudet College at Washington). Graduates have successfully followed advanced courses at Johns Hopkins, George Washington, McGill, Pennsylvania and California universities, have become teachers, home managers, printers, publishers, farmers, businessmen, chemists, ministers, athletic directors...
...Chaney's mother was Emma Kennedy, the daughter of a distinguished Coloradoan. She married a good-natured Irish barber who, like herself, was deaf & dumb. Lon, the second of four normal children, left school at the age of nine to take care of her. He could make his mother understand him by contorting his face into significant expressions. At 13 he went to work as a guide to tourists on Pike's Peak. Later he was carpet-layer, stage hand, vaudevillist. He married his singing and dancing partner; their son is a lawyer in Hollywood...