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Page work and wanted to work with him. Robbin Battison recalls that although Stokoe offered him a generous salary to spend a summer at the lab, he would have traveled from California to Washington, DC, to work with Stokoe without pay.
Initially, Stokoe wondered how he managed to attract these researchers to his lab. Soon, he realized what was happening "I
would send my proposals to the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and the peers who reviewed the proposals would then tell other researchers and linguists in the field that I was being awarded a grant and perhaps they should contact me. That's how I managed to get Charlotte Baker-Shenk, Robbin Battison, James Woodward, Lynn Friedman,
and others" 25
Stokoe abandoned the traditional methods of research and turned directly to deaf informants to learn about deaf language and culture. Stokoe remembers that he and his researchers were under pressure from the establishment from the very start. The president of the college and the superintendents of schools for the deaf had it in for us because we were a threat to them. We were always a kind of suspect operation. We were rebels we were saying the emperor has no clothes on. We were saying that deaf people were real people they can think, they can talk, they have brains. We in the LRL were perceived as "the lunatic fringe" and to a large degree we enjoyed being that.
I must say no one had the courage to confront me about our work. I got the feisty ones in the lab, the ones who were not content with the old-fashioned paradigms, with paying lip service to the philosophy of the s. I got the people who saw what was going on, who wanted to go further into the examination of what was really happening, and who instinctively reacted against the kind of stuff they had been told about deaf peoplethat these people had a deficit, that there was something lacking, that they had to be cured, that deafness had to be prevented. That if you can't cure it or prevent it,
then you've got to do the best you can, but you can't hope for much. We were against all of thatthat's what directed our research.26

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