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Page A nice thing happened tome this afternoon" Stokoe recalled a few months before the move.
I was down in the basement packing copies of Sign Language Studies to send to subscribers when the phone rang. I just said as usual, "William Stokoe speaking" The caller was quite taken aback and said, "Oh my goodness, it's like finding
Moses on the line" His name was Mike Cargo, an interpreter who wanted to get a subscription to Sign Language Studies.
. . .. We chatted fora few minutes. When I thanked him for his order, he thanked me for all the good things I had done for the profession. It was a very touching tribute.
I'm always surprised by this kind of thing because for very long there didn't seem to be much of any indication that anyone was listening. I realize now a lot of the people teaching and interpreting weren't even born when I published Sign
Language Structure. It's kind of hard to realize time passes like that. Knowing that Ruth Stokoe was well cared for, Bill was able to resume traveling. In September of 1992 he and David Armstrong flew to England to present a paper entitled "Gesture and the Origin of Syntax" at a meeting of the Language Origins Society in
Cambridge. In October of 1992 Stokoe joined his best friend, George Detmold, at a testimonial dinner in honor of Gil Eastman,
who was retiring after thirty years at Gallaudet. At the same time, Stokoe was completing two book manuscripts for publication early in 1993 and was well into the winter issue of Sign Language Studies. In November of 1992 he traveled to Copenhagen to deliver a lecture and to receive an honorary doctorate from Copenhagen University on its 455th anniversaryalong with "a handshake and congratulations from Queen Margarethe, both regal and cordial in lovely purple, with a splendid plumed black hat."39
In 1993 Stokoe consented to serve on a task force on ASL and deaf studies at Gallaudet. But the task he found "most enjoyable"
that year was typesetting the travel journals that Ruth Stokoe had kept for more than thirty years on all their trips together. In he had one hundred copies of the journal published privately and distributed them to family and friends.

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