Friday, February 04, 2000

Couple embraces 'the deaf world' together

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BY JOHN JOHNSTON
The Cincinnati Enquirer

        The doorbell doesn't ring at Ann and Frank Benedict's Mount Washington home. Instead, light bulbs flicker on in rooms throughout the house.

        Ann and Frank appear at the door, all smiles. She is 69, with short gray hair and kind eyes behind oval-shaped glasses. Frank is 71, balding, with bushy gray eyebrows.

Everyone has a story worth telling. At least, that's the theory. To test it, Tempo is throwing darts at the phone book. When a dart hits a name, a reporter dials the phone number and asks if someone in the home will be interviewed. Stories appear on Fridays.

        Both have been deaf since birth.

        Ann leads the way to her cozy yellow kitchen, as Frank disappears. “I never sit down,” he says. “Busy, busy, busy.”

        So she begins to tell this story herself. It's the story of a life lived in two distinct but overlapping worlds: one that hears, and one that doesn't.

        She shows me newspaper clippings, yellowed with age. The death of her father, Joseph Garretson, made front-page news in 1959. During a 30-year news career, he worked as a newspaper reporter and columnist (including more than 20 years at the Enquirer)and radio and TV commentator.

        “I loved him,” Ann says, and she crosses her arms over her heart.

        She was an only child, raised by parents who could hear. They expected her to conform to the hearing world. They didn't want her to learn American Sign Language (although as a young adult, she did). They sent her to the Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis to learn to read lips and to speak with her own voice.

        She was to be as much like a hearing person as possible.

        (When she speaks, I understand a good bit of what she says. When I have trouble, she jots her thoughts on a legal pad.)

        In her youth, she played with hearing friends. After learning to read lips and speak, she attended school with them.

        She was not unhappy. And yet, “I missed lots of conversations whenever I was at family gatherings or (with a) group of hearing friends,” she says.

        She met Frank when both were attending the St. Louis school. They married 45 years ago and began planning a family.

        “I thought I would have hearing children,” Ann says.

        She had good reason to think so. Only 10 percent of people born deaf have deaf parents, says Bob Coltrane, director of community services for the deaf at Cincinnati Speech and Hearing Center.

        Ann remembers the moment when she knew her first child, Holly, could not hear. Just 6 months old, she was asleep next to another child when someone dropped a plate; the sound roused the other baby, but not Holly.

        Their second child, Dwight, was born two years later, also deaf.

        “At first, Frank and I were very upset they were deaf,” Ann says. She and Frank thought having hearing children would make it easier for the family to function in a hearing world.

        But in hindsight, the Benedicts say they believe they were blessed.

        Ann and Frank enrolled their children in the Indiana School for the Deaf, where they learned American Sign Language. Holly and Dwight would go on to attend a leadership camp for deaf youth and become increasingly involved in the deaf community.

        So did their parents.

        “Having deaf children changed our lives from the hearing world to the deaf world,” Ann says. Eventually, she says, her own parents came to understand “I was happier in the deaf world.”

        She and Frank immersed themselves in various clubs and organizations that provide community services for the deaf. Among the couple's projects: heading a committee that helped establish a 24-hour TDD (Telecommunications Devices for the Deaf) answering service in Cincinnati. Now called the Ohio Relay Service, it allows people with speech or hearing impairments to place calls and receive calls from hearing people, and vice versa.

        Mr. Coltrane of the Cincinnati Speech and Hearing Center says the deaf community encompasses two cultures. On one hand are people who consider themselves “hearing impaired” and try to function as a hearing person would.

        On the other hand, he says, there are those whose primary means of communication is sign language. They abide by this philosophy: “I'm deaf. There's nothing wrong with me. I love, I cry, I pay taxes, I go to school, I have fun. I'm normal. The only thing is, I communicate a different way — with my hands and with my eyes, instead of my mouth and my ears.”

        That describes the Benedicts and their children. Holly, 44, is a part-time college professor in California; her husband is deaf and they have two dogs, one deaf. Dwight, 41, is director of campus life at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the nation's best known school for the deaf. He's married, and has two daughters, both deaf.

        “We're very close to them,” Ann says of her children and grandchildren. She says it plainly enough, but it's her smile that comes across loud and clear.

       

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