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

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tion Stokoe had organized and labeled himself, which Baker-Shenk has described as "one of the most complete collections of sign language linguistics material in the world" 61 As Covington recalls, "I went over there . . . and introduced myself and said that I was wondering what happened to Bill's materials. They just looked at me blankly, then pointed to a corner and said, "That must be what those boxes are" They had just thrown this tremendous linguistic libraryarticles, beautifully organized and filed,
anything you wantedinto boxes and stacked them in a corner. They didn't seem to care. To them it was junk and they didn't know what to do with it."62
That's not surprising. They had never known what to do with Bill Stokoe, either.
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Page Chapter 8
If there is a place where unconscious signifying and communicating come together with the conscious use of language, it is in
the realm of signs made with human bodies and read with human vision.
WILLIAM STOKOE
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Page The Linguistics Research Laboratory closed, but Stokoe's letter-writing campaign had a lasting effect. Today, more than ten years later, the administration at Gallaudet is still criticized for its actions. I. King Jordan says the school's reputation has not recovered.
Bill should have brought great prestige to Gallaudet, but the administration, in its "wisdom" closed down the Linguistics
Research Lab. Now that I'm president I'm not sure how to go about explaining why that happened. It has caused me a lot of headaches, because the message that the world received . . . was that we were devaluing American Sign Language. The response of the administration was, "No, no, there's a Department of Linguistics and there are other units on campus that do the same research."
But I don't care how many times or how forcefully you say something like that, people say "That's nonsense" It still hurts us today. People still ask, "Why did Gallaudet ever close down the Linguistics Research Lab" People allover the world who know about the study of American Sign Language know Bill Stokoe's name. When Stokoe retired at the end of 1984, he was sixty-five and Ruth Stokoe was sixty-four. They were comfortable enough on
Bill's pension and Social Security to continue to travel occasionally. They "settled down in retirement" Stokoe says, in the same house they had bought in 1957, but much improved by Stokoe's tinkering, "with Ruth continuing to conduct her National
Gallery tours, and I editing the journal and seeing the children and grandchildren and friends, and going out to things occasionallya very quiet but satisfying life together."2
Ruth had never liked riding on her husband's motorcycle, but their granddaughter, Jennifer, was a regular passenger whenever she visited. And the mild success of Linstok Press allowed Bill to indulge his passion for computers, installing all the latest software and keeping abreast of technological developments that would make the journal more readable and easier to manage.
It never occurred to Stokoe to abandon his work after retirement. He continues to lecture and to write and review books.

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