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pressive, but one must remember, after all, that Stokoe was still at Gallaudet) consisted of one room in one of the older buildings on campus. That didn't stop Stokoe; he was his usual indefatigable self. He and his secretary (he had been delighted when the lock-changing secretary from the English Department agreed to move to the lab with him) found some old desks and got to work.
Within months Stokoe had hired several researchers, to be paid with grant money. He again indulged his passion for redecoratingbreaking down walls, building bookshelves and equipment standsand complaining. "I kept telling Schuchman we needed more space because I had two grants coming in, lots of work to do, and research associates to hire from the grant and no place to put them. We were practically sitting in each other's laps" The lab was moved several times in order to give Stokoe and his growing research staff more space, but he had to fight for each move. He kept up a constant barrage of phone calls, memos, and visits to gain whatever facilities he could, leaving administrators frustrated and weary, particularly as many other departments on campus were also demanding more space.
However, Stokoe's anger was often justifiable. During a particularly cold winter, radiator pipes burst, destroying books,
equipment, and records. On another occasion, the maintenance department insisted that a leak in the roof had been repaired and would accept no responsibility for two floods that occurred in one week. In utter frustration, Stokoe "climbed out a window and took a photograph of the open hole in the slate roof."23
With the exception of Ursula Bellugi's Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Studies, which had been established the previous year at the Salk Institute in San Diego, Stokoe had no model fora laboratory where the primary focus was the study of sign language. And he had not been trained in linguistic research. That didn't stop him, however he says he "just did what I had started out to do sometime ago and enjoyed it so much it didn't seem like work."24
It was an extraordinary time, not just for Bill Stokoe and his researchers but for sign language studies. Any linguist in the country who was at all interested in the field knew of Stokoe's

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