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Page Richardson, the principal of his high school, about a 98% score Richardson gave him on the physics regents "I still believe the answer he thought was wrong was the right answer" Stokoe says. 15
Stokoe recalls that as a student at Cornell he once had a "discussion" with a man who was repairing his motorcycle. They disagreed about whether Stokoe's Harley Davidson was a 1920 or a 1922 model. When the man showed him the year stamped on the crankcase, Stokoe had to admit he had been mistaken. But he says he justified his mistake by pointing out that "it did have 1922 wheels on itafter 1920, Harley wheels and tires were two inches wider Very few people care enough about such things to argue about them, much less remember the details more than fifty years later.
Stokoe behaved in much the same way at Gallaudet. Many people were put off by what one former administrator describes as his "petty persistence" But getting things straight matters to Stokoe, a self-described skeptic "I have never been willing to take what somebody has said about something important without finding out for myself whether it was right or not Stokoe's colleague James Woodward describes this aspect of his personality as "intellectual intensity It maybe this, most of all, that accounts for Stokoe's refusal to back down from his findings.
Robbin Battison sees a correlation between Stokoe's stubbornness and his pioneering role "Bill was discovering new territory. .
. . Maybe there was no one supporting him, but there was no one who could prove him wrong to his satisfaction, and that's all the reason he needed to proceed."19
Nowhere is Stokoe's refusal to let people stop him from doing what he wanted to do, what he believed in, clearer than in the way he fulfilled his passion for playing the bagpipes. Many people on campus teased him about the noise (If the students weren't already deaf . . . "). Beyond the friendly jocularity, many people made cruel jokes about him, in his presence and behind his back, particularly when he dressed in his kilt, doublet, hose, and skean dhu and piped his heart outuninvited in some public place.

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