According to this site it was her family who urged her into cosmetic surgery.
As with any topic of human interest I couldn’t help reading about her on the web. No pun intended but what an eye opener. I can’t help but be intrigued that she donated her glass eyes and that they were destroyed(?) in the WTC attack.
It certainly adds a “Damn your eyes!” twist to the conspiracy.
You’d think someone deaf and blind would be more willing than most to stay in Alabama. Does it smell particularly bad there?
There’s something exquisitely surreal about the phrase “Helen Keller’s eyes,” let alone the notion that Al Qaeda destroyed them.
This is the type of thing that has always amazed me about her: The works of these two men are primarily experienced through the senses of sight and hearing. How on earth did she come to appreciate them to such a degree?
Which reminds me of the song Bettie Davis Eyes. Yikes, if someone was singing Helen Keller’s Eyes it wouldn’t be quite the same romantic ballad.
Helen Keller rolled her eyes at me once. I almost tripped on them.
Then she threw her voice. I never would have credited her with so much strength.
Most deaf-blind folks have significent residual sight or hearing. She could have been legally blind. I do know that she did try to learn to talk. Since she was an adult before hearing aids were even a gleam in someone’s eyes, that means that she had some residual hearing.
Also “deafness” comes in many different “flavors”, even within the same degree of loss. Someone with a profound loss may not be even able to hear enviromental loss, but for another person that may mean only being able to hear ten percent of the words on a spondee (the test where you repeat words after an audilogist) test.
Would it ruin your joke to point out that the first one is in Virginia, not DC? Yeah, it probably would. 
I have stayed on the top floor of the Francis Monkey (known to CoC students, oddly, as the “Funky Monkey”) but they must have put me on the other side of the building. (It was for the Charleston Conference on Serials and Acquisitions - ever been? Great conference.) I don’t think I could have slept with John C. Calhoun watching me. I certainly couldn’t have done anything, you know, other than sleeping. Shudder.
I was highly amused by all these “OMG OBAMA’S A SOCIALIST!” politicians at the unveiling either not knowing or not saying that she actually was a socialist.
Well Ft Benning was named after an enemy of the United States of America. A racist, slave-owning enemy of the Union. Go figure.
:smack: Well, metro DC. (And Truman was pretty gay; there’s no saying for sure the flame wouldn’t eventually spread.)
Eh, the Franklin Institute is named for a slaveowning horndog who advocated the army use bows and arrows, so go figure. Half the high schools in the south are named for Confederates: in Montgomery two of the biggest are Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee (I understand JD since he lived here/took the oath of office here et al, but Lee’s only real connection was that many Alabamians served under him, and that’s true of most any general in any war [Sherman had an Alabamian regiment on his march]). Both start the day with the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S… Go figyah.
I’ve no idea how she enjoyed Charlie Chaplin (she did meet him but I’m guessing he wasn’t that funny in person, especially if you couldn’t see him), but as for Edison I know she enjoyed phonographs and later record players (and also radio, though Edison wasn’t much involved with that). She felt the music by placing the palm of her hand against the source.
Derleth’s “rolled her eyes” joke goes in the file with the ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES exchange that was always one of my favorites. Gomez and Morticia looking at their baby, Pubert:
GOMEZ: Cara mia, he has my father’s eyes!
MORTICIA: Gomez! Take those out of his mouth.
IIRC, Annie Sullivan had quite the story too. I believe she and her brother lived in an orphanage and he suffered from tuberculosis (?) of the hip, which made him nearly crippled. I believe he died fairly young at the orphanage. Annie also had problems with her eyes…one of the biographies of Helen Keller I read as a child said that one day, at the orphanage, doctors held her down so they could scrape “grit” off her eyeballs. Didn’t she go blind too? I know she died before Helen, which must have been quite a blow to her.
To quote the great philosopher Ben Elund: “It’s my estimation that every man ever got a’statue made of him was one kind of sommbitch or another.”
She was one of many kids and all but she and Jimmy (the little brother [trivia: Patty Duke voiced him in the Broadway show in the flashback sequences] who died of TB) and a sister died in infancy or early childhood. What became of the sister is unknown; she seems to have been given up for adoption. Their mother died when they were little and their father abandoned them.
I’m not sure if she went totally blind but she was certainly legally blind. She had about two dozen operations and procedures on her eyes before she ever met Helen and she was only 20 when that happened. She retired from being Teacher before she died but not until she had personally trained her replacement (who also trained a replacement before she died).
As in the movie Annie had a fiery temper and was not always an easy person to live with. This combined with her 24/7 devotion to Helen destroyed her marriage to John Macy (whom there is some speculation that Helen was in love with and he with her).
One of my favorite stories about Annie- I believe it’s in the Hermann book- is about her pillar to post childhood. She and Jimmy were sent to the poorhouse (literally) as kids where, as she mentions in the movie, many of the residents were indigent prostitutes who were syphilitic or otherwise deranged and very ill, and where babies were delivered constantly and some years all of them died (the place was probably a hothouse for germs and disease). Poor Jimmy probably didn’t have a fighting chance since he was already sick.
One of the prostitutes could write and had a special fondness for Annie (I mean that in the better way, nothing sordid) and hated that such a bright and nearly blind girl had to grow up in such a horrible environment, so she wrote to every philanthropist and charity and state agency trying to get Annie out of there. It worked: she ended up being moved to a Catholic girl’s school that was run by a convent whose students as well as the nuns or novices from well-to-do Irish Catholic families in the Boston area. She stayed there for a couple of years before going to the school for the blind (where she roomed for a time with Laura Bridgeman, the deafblind woman whose life and instruction paralleled Helen’s (born sighted/lost her hearing/sight to Scarlet Fever shortly after she began talking) and whose education inspired Helen’s (like the water pump “Miracle”, Bridgman’s break through was when she associated a signed word felt to one that she remembered from the 2 year window when she was a normal child).
Anyway, the “one of my favorite” stories part- and what says a lot about Annie- is when a biographer asked her about her childhood and the constant separations during it (from her parents when abandoned/her brother when he died/the prostitutes and other residents of the poorhouse/the students and nuns at the Catholic school). She said that she missed Jimmy terribly of course, and then on reflection “and I missed most of the whores”. There was no love lost twixt her and the nuns/students of the Catholic school; among other things she believed (probably with some validity) that they thought of her as charity trash.
One of my favorite stories about Helen from her later years is in the memoir of Lilli Palmer, an Anglo-German actress probably best remembered for being the second Mrs. Rex Harrison. She got his Italian villa in their divorce settlement (long story there- she actually helped set him up with his third wife, the terminally ill Kay Kendall, thinking he’d return to her when Kay died) and in her memoir, Change Lobsters and Dance, she mentioned the weekend when she hosted the elderly Keller there. A drunken and p.o.d driver took them through some insane driving through the hills near the Portofino coast and almost killed them- making wild turns near steep drops into the sea and driving the convertible far too fast, before finally coming to a sharp stop at her villa. Palmer and Keller’s assistant (Annie’s replacement) were absolutely terrified until the car stopped; Helen, who couldn’t see the dropoffs or sense the terror around her, was smiling and laughing hysterically and begged to do it again- she’d had a blast.
Another favorite Helen story: she enjoyed wine and other spirits from time (I don’t think she ever had a problem but she liked her occasional nip) and she liked an occasional cigarette (though for obvious reasons she could only smoke one if somebody else lit it for her and was there to make sure it was extinguished; she was understandably terrified of fire). When she grew old and had some health problems her doctor told her she should quit smoking and drinking altogether. She responded (words to the effect of) “I am very old. I have arthritis, high blood pressure, I can barely walk. I am blind. I am deaf. I am mute. What the hell else is going to happen?” and she kept her vices.
The most intriguing thing- which I’ve mentioned before- is that she suffered from Alzheimers or some other form of geriatric dementia in her later years, especially after a series of mild strokes in her 80s. Like most elderly people who have such a condition she would occasionally forget where she was or who she was with, but unlike them she had very little to confuse her by way of images or sounds, so she might be sitting in front of a heater in her living room in Connecticut (Arcan Ridge- the farmhouse she lived in for most of her later years) but in her mind she might be on the patio of Mark Twain’s (nearby) house on a sunny summer day in 1908. Her conversation would reflect this- her assistant was always Annie Sullivan in her mind and the person she was speaking to might be Mark Twain or her mother or somebody else who’d been dead for generations, and more often than not when this happened those with her would just humor her.
For some reason I’ve always thought this was somehow… sweet. And feel-good. I’d much rather be talking to Mark Twain on a summer day when I was a young than an infirm old woman at home in a New England winter.
Heh. One of the things I find amusing on road trips are the signs announcing that this is the home town of someone who shook the dust off his feet as soon as he could and never looked back.
The funny thing is how ancient it is. Every town, village or crossroads used to have at least a saint or demigod who either was conceived or born or at least was buried there. (Martin Luther famously observed the oddity that of the Twelve Apostles 18 were buried in Germany.
Another Alabamian I’d consider commemorating would be Alexander McGillivray, the chief (mico) of the Creek Nation and one of the most skilled diplomats the Native Americans ever produced. He was brilliant at playing England, the young U.S., and Spain against each other to his and his Nation’s advantage, especially considering that he had no army to speak of (many warriors, but he well knew that they were no match for a well equipped Euro style army).
There are no authenticated likenesses of him (a couple are said to be of him but there’s no proof) so the artist could have a ball, though I’d use Charles Bird King’s paintings of Seminole and Creek chiefs as guidelines. McGillivray’s generally believed to have been about 1/4 French and 1/2 Scottish and 1/4 Creek, or as the Creek’s counted it- 100% Creek (only the mitochondrial line was important). It would be a good way to remember that the state was inhabited by others at least 10 times as long as it’s been inhabited by whites, blacks, and other. (McGillivray’s nephew William “Red Eagle” Weatherford could also work, but he did slaughter a few men women and children which may offend the sensitive.)
