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

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Page fought with the Gallaudet administration, with the faculty, even with the students, to give Stokoe the time, space, and funding necessary for his work.
Thirty-five years later, the work of William Stokoe came to fruition in one of the most dramatic demands for justice and equality that deaf people in this country have ever asserted. When Gallaudet's first deaf president, I. King Jordan, declared that "deaf people can do anything but hear" he expressed a truth that was new to many people in the United States and the world.
Bill Stokoe and George Detmold had recognized that truth for most of their lives.
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Page Chapter 3
There was no linguistic attention, no scientific attention, given to Sign until the late s when William Stokoe . . . found
his way to Gallaudet College. Stokoe thought he had come to teach Chaucer to the deaf but he very soon perceived that he
had been thrown, by good fortune or chance, into one of the world's most extraordinary linguistic environments.
OLIVER SACKS Seeing Voices
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Page Bill Stokoe was not traveling light when he moved from Wells College in Aurora, New York, to Gallaudet University in
Washington, DC. He was thirty-six years old, and his academic credentials were excellent. But neither he nor Ruth Stokoe had come from wealthy families, and they now had two children to support Helen Marie Stokoe, born in 1947, and James Stafford
Stokoe (named after Bill's brother, born in George Detmold still remembers the move. Bill and Ruth Stokoe drove with the two children in their station wagon Detmold followed in a rented truck containing all of the Stokoes' possessions.
The Stokoes' first rented house was infested with water beetles so was the second one. But they were soon able to buy a small,
comfortable house in Silver Spring, Marylandabout a twenty-minute commute from Gallaudet. Their living arrangement was typical in 1955: a house in the suburbs, a mother who stayed home with the children and did volunteer work, a father who left for work each morning and returned each evening with a briefcase filled with paperwork to find dinner on the table. But Stokoe was anything but typical. Although he wore the requisite suit, tie, and vest to classes, he arrived on a motorcycle. People at
Gallaudet still tell jokes about his passion for playing the bagpipes. Barbara Kannapell, a student at Gallaudet at the time, was amused by Bill Stokoe's logic in practicing the pipes on campus rather than at home the students wouldn't have to hear him. At Gallaudet, Stokoe pursued the literary themes that had interested him at Cornell and Wells. He continued to publish articles:
"The Double Problem of Sir Degaré" in 1955 and "On Oh there's Steorbord"in 1957. As a young professor, Stokoe was well aware of the "publish or perish" mentality that existed in academia, so he was particularly pleased at being published in prestigious literary journals. But his writing was inspired more by a passion for researchan obsession, some would say than by the need to be published. At Wells he had spent a large part of his yearlong sabbatical in Scotland solving the problem of 'the reading of a single word in King Alfred's translation of Orosius's Geography into the Anglo Saxon of Wessex (He still found time, however, to practice his bagpipes on the Scottish shore.)

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