The ASL Path

My path into American Sign language and the world of deafness was neither direct nor typical of the time. Although my father experienced hearing loss as he aged, deafness was off my radar throughout my childhood. Signing was not an overnight passion. In fact, it took several discreet experiences before I started the journey.

My very first “real” summer job was as a driver’s education aide. During the 1960’s and 70’s, Maryland public high schools provided driver’s education training for all students old enough to apply for a driver’s license. The semester course involved classroom lectures, getting behind the wheel learning maneuvering skills on a practice driving range, and then going out on the road. Certified driving instructors, usually high school teachers, took a portion of the class off school property into traffic. The remaining students would practice on the driving range with drivers “ed” aides, young adults many of whom had limited driving experience. My best friend Maria and I, were two of those aides. We would instruct students on an assortment of driving skills and maneuvers, e.g. backing up, weaving around cones, parallel parking, etc. Our primary role was to sit in the front passenger seat with only a brake to ensure that no student crashed into another. Looking back, it seems crazy that we were hired when we, ourselves, had been driving less than 2 years. However, the driving range was a small contained area. Students were forced to drive so slowly that a fender-bender would have been a challenging accomplishment.

Hard to believe, but at that time automobile air-conditioning was not common.  Certainly none of the school’s cars had air conditioning. Driving on a blacktop surface during hazy-hot-humid Maryland summers required windows to be down. What my best friend and I thought would be a fun job, turned out to be hot, sweaty and increasingly boring as students’ skills behind the wheel slowly improved. To entertain ourselves, Maria and I started to communicate with each other through finger-spelling. We would stick our right arm out the window with our hand peeking over the roof of the car. As we passed by each other from opposite directions, drivers eyes glued to the front, we would spell out simple short words. The first was “SOS” because it was easy. “S” was a fist shape, “O” was thumb and index finger touching looking like an “O” and the remaining fingers in line with the index. We then moved to “GOOD”, “HELP”, “BAD”. These single words were critiques of the students’ driving skills. Despite being limited in our manual alphabet ability, it amused us and helped the day go by faster. Admittedly it was adolescent, but in fact that was what we were.  Maria and I stopped our fingerspelling communication when one of the students told us he could read sign language and “thought we were entertaining.” Oops… busted!

Fast forward 2 years - Maria and I were undergraduates at the University of Maryland. Our drivers-ed aide career ended after two summers. Both of us were hired to work in a brand new hardware store. The Hechinger store was to the Washington Metropolitan area as Lowe’s and Home Depot are to the entire country today. We started off as cashiers and quickly moved to also work at the “service” desk helping customers with questions and concerns. 

On one occasion, a thin, dark haired man in old work clothes quickly entered the store carrying a boxed item under his arm. He stormed up to the desk, angrily slammed a recently purchased toilet seat on the counter, and without a word immediately started writing on a piece of paper pulled out from his pocket. I asked if I could help him, but he ignored me. Clearly, he was furious about the item he had bought. Once he finished writing, the paper was shoved toward me in

silence. It was then that I realized he was deaf. I looked at the paper. His heavy jagged writing was indecipherable. I couldn’t read it. He and I were trapped in a communication vacuum. He couldn’t write, I couldn’t read. He couldn’t talk or hear and I couldn’t express myself in a way he could understand. 

It was an awful situation. I had no idea what to do. Speechless, I looked at him trying to communicate my sense of helplessness. The customer, in his rage, suddenly grabbed his toilet seat and stormed out of the store. I was left standing immobile, feeling guilty for not being able to help. I kept thinking that I should at least know how to sign: “Hi, how are you? Can I help you?” 

Fast forward 1 year - I was still working at Hechinger’s, but had transferred to a different store. I had been married the summer before and this store was much closer to our apartment. While working at the service desk one day, a family of 5, A mom, dad and three adolescent children all of whom were strikingly attractive, entered the building. They moved through the entrance engaged in an entertaining and animated discussion. There were no vocalizations, just a flurry of hand gestures flying. It was as if they were enclosed in a bubble, floating into the store

gliding down the aisle ahead of them. I was transfixed. Their signs and body language were so compelling and appealing. As I stared, the bubble suddenly burst as they all broke into laughter! I was more than startled. I was shocked. My first thought was “I didn’t know that deaf people could laugh out loud.” My second thought was “How embarrassing that I am that ignorant.” It was at this moment I began to seriously consider learning sign-language. However, I was clueless as to how to go about it.

Fast forward another year - Rich and I had graduated and both were beginning our teaching careers. I was teaching junior high school choral music part-time. Rich worked in an elementary school teaching 5th and 6th graders. It turned out that his school’s music teacher had a deaf son. She told Rich about a woman who taught sign language classes out of her home. We decided to take her class together. Two unexpected realizations emerged from this class.

First, we were ignorant of the many forms of deaf communication. Our teacher taught “Signed Exact English (SEE),” which is very different from “American Sign Language” (ASL). The former is a manual system that focuses on English comprehension. The latter, (ASL), is an actual language complete with syntax, grammar, and cultural nuance. Because the original signed language was brought to the US from France in the early 1800’s, ASL is very different from spoken English. The two signing systems, SEE and ASL reveal a cultural divide and conflict between hearing and deaf people, which we were unaware of until later. 

Second, In the nine years of knowing each other, this was the very first time I was able to do something better than my best bud. In my eyes Rich could do everything and do it well. He was the captain of our school’s football team, the student director of our school’s musical review, an Eagle Scout, a quartermaster in the Navy. He built our furniture and was a skilled sailor. It never occurred to me that there would be anything that I could learn easier and faster than him. Surprisingly, this was a significant revelation to us both. We ended the course in the spring of 1976. By this time, Rich was ready to move on to other interests and I had become enamored with signing, eager to learn more. Again, my problem was that I did not know how to proceed.

Fast forward 2 months - We were watching the tv news show, “60 Minutes”. Dan

Rather was interviewing a young co-ed on the campus of Gallaudet College. The

young undergraduate was attractive, engaging and articulate. Her signs were clear

and flowed with grace. An off camera interpreter gave voice to the interviewee’s

signs. Both Rich and I were fascinated with the student and the school. Who

knew there was a college for deaf people? We were well into the program before it

registered that Gallaudet was not only in Washington DC, but only a 15 minute drive

from our apartment! 

It was at this moment all of my experiences of learning fingerspelling, not being able to help the man with the toilet seat, being entranced with the deaf family laughing and signing, and taking a simple signing class all came together pointing me toward Gallaudet to study American Sign Language.

The very next day - I looked up a phone number for Gallaudet, wondering if anyone could or would answer. Was the campus exclusively for non-hearing people? Yes, there was a phone number, but…? After a few rings someone did answer and she cheerfully helped me register for an evening ASL class starting in the fall. A week later, Rich and I left for Europe. It was the American Bicentennial in which Washington DC was invaded by more tourists than you could shake a stick at. We decided that traveling by Eurail Pass on the $20 a day plan would be more

enjoyable than staying home with the celebratory chaos. Six weeks of traveling on the cheap was a unique experience filled with a variety of memories. But it was when we returned home that I became excited about the upcoming semester learning sign language. Rich did not join me in this endeavor as he did not have the same level of interest I had. I was on my own.

When I arrived on Gallaudet’s compact, beautiful northeast Washington D.C. campus that first day, I felt like I was entering an alien world. I sat in class with 8 other hearing people, none of whom spoke and all of whom looked as nervous and awkward as me. What was going to happen? How would we learn this manual language? Was our teacher deaf or hearing? Could they talk? How would we communicate? Our teacher, a man entering midlife, not much taller than me, walked in smiling. He immediately started teaching by writing “Boy” on the blackboard and then miming a person pulling on the rim of a baseball cap. “Oh, I get it!” I said to myself. “The sign for ‘Boy’ is squeezing an imaginary cap.” “That makes sense”, I thought. And it did.

From that moment on I was hooked. It took five years to find my way to this path, but once there the 35 years of signing and being involved in the Deaf community was extraordinary.