Telephones

Because of my involvement with Deaf people I've been interested in Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone. He did that partly as a result of trying to create a device to help his deaf wife communicate.

By the early 1900s there were telephones all over the United States, at least in urban areas. Usually they would be on a wall in a hallway or other central part of a house.

We had a dial phone in the city where I lived as a little kid, but in the 1940s we moved to a family summer cabin in a small town. There we had to speak to the operator and tell her the number we wished to call.

Later, in another town, we again had a dial phone, but it was on a party line. We shared it with the family of my best friend and sometimes we'd agree to pick up our phones at the same time and speak to each other loudly over the dial tone. We felt so smart!

When I was in high school people could have more than one telephone in a house and some girls actually got their own princess phones so they could talk privately from their bedrooms.

Then came telephones with buttons to push instead of dials and, eventually, mobile phones that could be removed from the base and carried around in the house. I still have that kind.

Of course I also have a cell phone. Doesn't everyone? And today phones can do things Alexander Graham Bell couldn't have imagined. And they're a great help to Deaf people who can text, send messages, and even see each other using Sign Language by video.

Maybe in the future we'll be using our phones to brush our teeth and comb out hair. Anything is possible.

Dovey Coe

When I checked out this book at the library I didn't realize one of the characters was deaf. In Dovey Coe the protagonist, whose name is the title, has a deaf brother.

While I found it difficult to believe that Dovey had taught him to read and read lips he was not born deaf and lost his hearing when he was about ten months old, so I suppose it was possible. Otherwise everything in the story was believable.

It's a mystery that involves Dovey being accused of murdering the town bully because she was found in the room with his dead body. The plot development of the exciting story is excellent. The small, rural community in North Carolina is realistic and Dovey, a feisty girl, tells the story in first person with the appropriate dialect.

Frances O'Roark Dowell did a great job writing this book and it's no wonder it won the Edgar Allan Poe Award. It was published in 2000 but the story is timeless and kids will enjoy it whenever they read it.

Silent Words

Long ago I started to learn American Sign Language from an interpreter who is now my husband. Besides working at the California School for the Deaf for many years, I served as a church Sign Language interpreter, raised three Deaf foster sons, and have taught American Sign Language to lots of people. Our daughter started learning it when she was born.

My husband and I even taught sign language to our first dogs, who were deaf dalmatians. One of them, Brenda, became able to understand about 350 signs (mostly names of individuals and foods) and taught us to understand about 30 animal signs. Brenda was a brilliant dog and able to understand human language about as well as some two year old people do.