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

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Page Bill Stokoe was not "a man on a white horse, but he didn't back down either" Jerome Schein says. Schein's most striking memory of Stokoe captures this aspect of his personality:
I still carry the image of Bill practicing his bagpiping on the hilltop in back of the Hall Memorial Building. Distance from those who could hear was essential. Once a year, Bill would appear in kilts at Cannon's Steak House to pipe in the celebration of Robbie Burns's birthday or St. Patrick's Day. I recall his striding in, preceded by the skirling (skreechling?)
of the bagpipes. He got a great deal of teasing and outright hostility for these musical onslaughts, but he bore it all with good humorand did not curb his piping, which he clearly loved.
Somehow I believe his persistence in his sign language research and his bagpiping betray a great inner-directedness, a core of equanimity that keeps Bill on track, pursuing the goals he knows are right, despite all sorts of adverse criticism and negative reactions. In this behavior, Bill is heroic. It would be many years before Stokoe was, as Carol Padden put it, "promoted to 'just possibly serious' from 'wacko."'21
During those years Stokoe never stopped believing in what he was doing, and as always, he had the support of his best friend,
George Detmold. Within months of the publication of Sign Language Structure, Stokoe, with Detmold's endorsement, was awarded a grant of $22,000 by the National Science Foundation, an enormous grant at that time. He would use the money, as reported in the college newspaper, "to continue his analysis of the sign language of the deaf in the United States. Professor
Stokoe, Mr. Carl Croneberg, and Miss Dorothy Sueoka later Casterline] of the college will investigate the sentence patterns and the dialect differences of the language during the two-year period of the grant It was this research that ultimately led to the creation of the dictionary, which Robbin Battison and others believe was "the most important thing that Stokoe created, the first true dictionary of sign language."23
Stokoe soon realized that to succeed in his work he would have to find deaf people willing and able to help him. His first choice was Carl Croneberg. Born in Sweden in 1930, Crone-

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