Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author

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Page ten in textbooks about sign language which on the face of them were just totally absurd.
So he wasn't a linguist. But he was the one who created a place, the Linguistics Research Laboratory, where people could come and work, be guest researchers, and conduct linguistic or cultural investigations into the sign language of the deaf community. It was such a fertile time, such fertile ground for the transmission of knowledge and for the creation of knowledge. Bill managed to press on for intellectual honesty about these particular linguistic and cultural issues in the midst of a college community and linguistic and cultural community that should have realized all of this stuff but didn't.
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While he was director of the lab, Stokoe continued to teach at least one course per semester he gave addresses at more than one hundred conferences he edited and published a monthly newsletter, along with Sign Language Studies. James Woodward remembers that Stokoe was always at the lab during the week and often on weekends "I wouldn't call him a workaholic, but he was working all the time. His work was a significant part of his life. We were a tightly knit group, particularly in the early years. We'd work all day, go out to supper together and talk, then comeback and continue working."38
However, Stokoe was anything but atypical academic, burrowed in theories and research to the exclusion of everything around him. Dennis Cokely, a linguist who worked in the lab, found him "one of the most modest, friendly, helpful persons I've ever had the pleasure of knowing Virginia Covington recalls that Stokoe, while still chair of the English Department, would be working intensely, late in the evening in his office, when suddenly the phone would ring. "Here would be this mad tinkering genius, so to speak, working on what was to become the first dictionary of American Sign Language, and suddenly you'd hear him in this kind, contrite voice saying that oops, he had forgotten that it was marketing night, but he'd be right home."40
Ruth Stokoe had never learned how to drive, and Bill made himself available to her whenever she needed a ride. As the

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