RIP: Anita Blair (1916-2010) and Betty G. Miller (1934-2012)

Two obituaries came to my attention this morning. Both women died more than a year ago, but I'm just seeing these now. If I write about them here, I won't forget to follow up with getting Wikipedia entries going about them, when the time allows.

I first mentioned Anita Lee Blair (pictured at left, a white woman dressed in a dark suit, in a portrait with her guide dog Fawn) at this blog a few years ago, when David Paterson had become Governor of New York, and the topic of blind elected officials was in the news.  Anita Blair was born in 1916, and became blind after head injuries sustained in a car accident, not long after graduating from high school (no seatbelts or safety glass in the 1930s).  She graduated from the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy; later she earned a master's degree as well.  She was the first person in El Paso to receive a guide dog, a German shepherd named Fawn; she even made a short film about Fawn, to use on her lecture tour.  Fawn and Anita made headlines in 1946, when they escaped a deadly hotel fire in Chicago.  As far as anyone can tell, she was the first blind woman ever elected to any state legislature--she served one term in the Texas House of Representatives, 1953-55.  (Here's a Time Magazine article mentioning that she won the Democratic nomination for that race.)  She was also the only woman appointed to Harry Truman's Presidential Safety Committee, the first person to bring a service dog onto the floor of the US Senate, and later was a familiar presence in El Paso, vocal on talk radio and at city council meetings.  Anita Lee Blair died in 2010, just a couple weeks before her 94th birthday, survived by her slightly younger sister Jean.  Upon her passing, the Texas House of Representatives passed a resolution in tribute to their former member.  There's a video of Blair talking about her life on youtube (not captioned), and her El Paso Times obituary included a photo gallery from news files.

Betty G. Miller's obituary turned up in this month's Penn State alumni magazine.  (Miller is pictured at right, a white woman wearing a hat and glasses, with a big smile.) She was a deaf child of deaf parents, and learned ASL as a child at home, but was sent to oral education programs also, an experience that became a theme in her works.  Betty Miller was an artist, an art educator (she had an EdD from Penn State, and taught at Gallaudet), an author, and by her own account the first deaf person to receive certification as an addiction counselor.  In 1972 she had her first one-woman show, "The Silent World," at Gallaudet.  Further shows followed over the next several decades, and a large-scale neon installation by Miller is in the lobby of the Student Activities Center at the Eastern North Carolina School for the Deaf.  She was survived by her partner, artist Nancy Creighton.  Some of Miller's works can be seen in this Wordgathering article by Creighton and at this Pinterest board.

Apparently, this is post #1000 at DSTU, according to Blogger (I suspect that count includes some drafts that didn't ever get posted, for various reasons).  Happy 1000 to our readers, then!

Disability in the Presidential Campaign of 2012: Abram Powell

Saw this ad/video today from the Obama campaign, featuring Abram Powell, a deaf African-American auto worker from Michigan.  I like how specific it is to his life--it's not a generic disability message--and it's full of photos, and we see him speaking to an audience in ASL, etc. 
Seen other ads, from any campaign, that focus on disability themes? Drop a link in comments.

November 30: Linda Bove (b. 1945)

[Visual description: Linda Bove in the 1970s, wearing a rust-colored turtleneck and signing "I"]

When I joined the cast I found the writers would write about 'How would a deaf person do this?' 'How does a deaf person do that?' And it was just related to my deafness and it didn't feel like they were treating me as a person. I found my character one-dimensional and kind of boring. It showed how brave a deaf person was to do this and that in everday life. I said it was no big deal. I have a sense of humor; why don't you show that? I can be angry over something. Show that I can have a relationship with another person.

Today is the birthday of Linda Bove, born on this date in Garfield, New Jersey. If you were a hearing American kid in the 1970s, chances are the first place you saw American Sign Language was on Sesame Street--and chances are, it was being used by Linda Bove, one of the show's longest-running cast members (1972-2003). Bove attended Gallaudet University and became involved in theater as a student; she toured with the National Theater of the Deaf, and co-founded the Little Theater of the Deaf and Deaf West Theatre Company.

Now, for old times' sake, video from Sesame Street, first aired in 1980, in which Olivia (Alaina Reed) and Linda sing and sign the song "Sing" (lyrics here):

Around the Deaf World in Two Days

Our East Coast readers (or those willing to travel) will want to make plans to attend an exciting upcoming conference at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, on Deaf Studies from a global perspective.

The conference kicks off Friday evening, February 29 [its leap year]. At the welcoming reception linguistics scholar Carol Padden will be speaking on “Sign Language Geography: Creation and Spread of Sign Languages Around the World.” The following morning, Gaurav Mathur will be looking at the underlying structure of signs, like grammer in spoken languages, drawing upon examples from around the world, including Australian, German and Japanese Sign Languages. An exceptionally broad range of topics and regions will be represented over the course of that Saturday, March 1, 2008. Teachers can receive Act 48 hours (CEU's) for attending and participating in the conference. ASL teachers may acquire Clock Hours for ASLTA.

This conference is organized by the Linguistics Department at Swarthmore College and sponsored by the William J. Cooper Foundation. The entire program and directions to the campus can be found on the conference website.

ASL, the Lost Experience, and YouTube

"The Lost Experience" is a summer ARG (alternative reality game) meant to keep fans of the ABC television series "Lost" engaged until the new episodes air in the fall. One component has been the search for clues, in the form of "glyphs," strings of characters that can be used to access seventy video fragments, which will in turn eventually be assembled into a bigger picture. Players from all over work together to solve anagrams, codes, and literary and scientific references. Clues have appeared in television commercials, on websites, on phone messages, on t-shirts and wristbands, on the display in Times Square, and yesterday, a clue appeared.... in American Sign Language, in a YouTube video. (The "glyph" is part of the symbol on the signer's shirt; the signer's message does not match the video's voice-over, but instead communicates details for the game's story.)

You can follow how the players responded to this in the comments at The Lost Experience Clues blog. It didn't take long for a few regular players with ASL fluency to be found, and online (partly in chat) they worked on a translation together--discussions have touched on problems such as the video's quality (too grainy for the fingerspelling to be easily read, even in slowed down versions), the signer's distracting attire, the close-cropping of the video (for game purposes, the signer's face cannot be shown, and the gamers have discussed how that hinders ASL communication somewhat). Some players posted slower or false-colored versions of the video, to be helpful. So, hundreds, maybe thousands (the video has been viewed over 1500 times in its first day), of Lost gamers are learning something about ASL, or using what they already know, this week.

Elsewhere on YouTube... Caughtya.org recently linked to a wicked New Zealand public service announcement about accessible parking, definitely worth a peek. There's a lot of junk on YouTube, but there's also a lot of potential, like most formats.