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Page holding it, just sort of showing it to everybody, and the audience gave him along, thunderous, standing ovation. This was only one of the many honors that Bill received, but it was a very special one because it came from people who knew his work and it was witnessed by people who had benefitted from his work. It was a very special time. Ruth Stokoe had written an essay for the book and helped choose the photographs. She had also helped Baker-Shenk and Battison with the preparations, and Bill remembers her relief that he had not learned about the surprise in advance.
Gil Eastman also remembers the occasion well, including a conversation with Stokoe the day after the presentation:
I was walking in the hallway of the hotel, and I saw Bill coming toward me, looking as if he were in a daze. I said, "Hey
Bill, how are you" I thought he was still in shock over the award. He said, "Oh, I feel great, I feel for the first time as if
I'm in the world of the deaf, and it's fascinating" He told me that he had gone to a lot of conventions in linguistics,
English, and soon, but this was the first time he had ever gone to a convention where so many deaf people had attended,
and he noticed something different. I asked him what it was. He said that he realized for the first time that when deaf people come together and see one another, they say, "Hello, haven't seen you in along time" then they give each other hugs. That hugging really impressed him, even perhaps more than the award. I'm telling you, that's Deaf culture, and although Bill was an expert on the language of the deaf, he was just beginning to realize, to see for himself, our specialness, our uniqueness.31
Eastman's recollection of Stokoe's "first" experience with deaf culture is particularly telling. Stokoe had been working with deaf students and, as his research expanded, with deaf informants and researchers for more than twenty-five yearsyet he had just discovered something very fundamental about the way deaf people interact with each other. This says more about deaf culture than it does about Bill Stokoe. He was a warm

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