Wisconsin School for the Deaf - Tattler Yearbook (Delavan, WI)

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THE LIFE OF HELEN KELLER By Ethel Cm Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, a small city of northern Alabama, on June 27, 1880. She was the oldest of the children, having one brother and one sister. Helen’s father, an officer in the Confederate army, was descended from Casper Keller, a native of Switzerland, who established himself in Maryland. Another Swiss ancestor was the first teacher of the deaf in Zurich. Her father's mother was a direct descendant of Alexander Spoils wood. Colonial Governor of Virginia. The child's mother, Kate Adams, was descended from Benjamin Adams of Newburg, Massachusetts and was a relative of Edward Everett and Dr. Edward Everett Hale. The Keller home in the South wus called “Ivy Green us English ivy covered it. In the garden there were many beautiful flower ; such us roses, honeysuckle, jessamine and clematis. Roses hung in long festoon from the porch. Helen loved their fragrance. At the age of one und a half, Helen became blind and deaf following n severe illness, congestion of the stomach und brain. Then she lived in silence and darkness for several years. Before her sickness she could talk some ana was a bright child. Afterwards she remembered only a very few words and those she spoke very imperfectly. Her playmates were dolls, one of them called Nancy, she liked very much. She had several pet dogs, her favorite was Belle who was old and lazy. She often tried to teach the aog the signs she used. Sometimes Helen knew that Belle refused to do as she wanted her to. A little colored girl named Martha Washington, a little older than Helen, was ner constant companion. She always seemed to understand what Helen wanted to do and many were their mischievous pranks. One day they went outside and were busy cutting out paper dolls. It happened that Helen cut ofT one of Martha's wooly pigtails, so Martha was angry and seized the scissors and was about to cut off one of Helen’s golden curls. Just then Mrs. Keller uppcured so Martha gave up the idea immediately. Helen often hud terrific outbursts of temper or of affection, and sometimes she acted as if she were insane. One day she found her little sister asleep in her doll’s cradle and she was so ungry that she overturned it as she wanted to put her doll in it. Her sister would have been killed but her mother caught her before she reached the floor. Mrs. Keller rend of a blind and deaf girl named Lauru Bridgeman who had been educated by Dr. Sumuel Gridley Howe of Boston. This made her wonder if he could help her blind child. So, when Helen was six years old, her purents took her to Baltimore to see the great Doctor Chrisholm who had cured several blind people. They were very much disappointed when they found that he could do nothing to help Helen but ho sent them to Washington to see Dr. Alexander Gruham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. He became very much interested in Helen. He had taught many deuf children to speak by means of symbols and he told them about the school for the blind at Boston, the Perkins Institution. He told Major Keller to write there in regard to a private teacher. He did so and Miss Anne Mansfield Sullivan who was partially blind became Helon’s first teacher. When Miss Sullivan came to the Keller home, Helen was stubborn and often unruly so her teacher had to win her confidence in order to secure co-operution from her pupil. After several weeks of hard work this seemed accomplished. The first word Helen learned to spell on her fingers was “doll and it aroused her interest for then she knew that things had names. Miss Sullivan let the water from the pump run over the little hand and spelled the

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so rough that in I860 the faculties of Yale and Harvard prohibited foot-ball. At Princeton a more orderly game was played somewhat like the English “association game. In 1861 the fit at inter-collegiate game took place between Princeton and Rutgers nnd in 1871 foot-bull was revived at Harvard with rules which permitted running with the ball us in Rugby. Not long after this, McGill College in Montreal challenged Harvard to a match. On May 15, 1874 these two teams played the first intercollegiate Rugby match in America. The McGill pluycrs were used to English Rugby rules and the Harvard ployers to their own version of them So. on the day before the game, the two teams courteously coached each other in tactics. On the 15th a game was played under Harvard rules, Harvard scoring three time . The next day under the McGill rules, neither side was able to score. This mude Rugby more populur. In 1875 Harvard and Yale played a game under a compromise set of rules which permitted both running with the ball und batting the ball with the hand, but the compromise was unsatisfactory. In 1876 Columbia, Princeton, and Yale abandoned this form of foot-bull in favor of straight Rugby. A code of rules much more complex but permitting a far higher development of team play has gradually taken the place of the original Rugby rules. Every year since li 06, coaches from different colleges nnd universities have met to make rules to emphasize good sportsmanship, to do away with unnecessary roughness, and to give the spectator better opportunity to watch the movement of the ball while in play. Today college, university, and amateur teams play football from the opening of the fall term till about Thanksgiving time, and few games have ever attracted wider attention or been played with greater interest and vigor by the youth of any land.

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word, '‘water” in Helen's other hand nt the same time. In about four monhts she had learned to spell more thnn four-hundred and fifty words. Miss Sullivan had a true teacher’s sympathy for a pupil and she always tried to make her lessons pleasant. In studying science and nature, they went to the out-of-doors and Helen learned many different things about the trees, flowers, birds, insects, and the farm-yard fowls. When Helen studied geography. Miss Sullivan made raised maps in clay, showing mountains and rivers. Then the little girl could tell the difference between damn and islands as the dams were made of pebbles. She learned to read in raised letters called braille which were made for the blind to feel with their finger tips. She also learned to write that way. At the age of eight, Helen studied History at Bunker Hill where she climbed the monument, counting the steps. Then she had her first voyage in a steamboat to Plymouth to learn about the Pilgrims. She spent that summer nt Brewster on Cape Cod where she dug in the sand and bathed in the ocean. Helen had a pony named Black Beauty which had been presented to her by n friend. She greatly enjoyed riding and driving. When Helen was ten years old. she heard the story of a blind and deaf girl named Ragnhild Kuala in Norway who hud learned to speak. This mode her wish to learn to talk very much. Then Miss Sarah Fuller, principal of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston gave her several lessons in speech. She made some sounds and let Helen feel them by touching her lips and throat. In an hour Helen hnd learned six elements of speech: m,” ”p. ”u,” “t,” “i.” She was so eager to talk that she practiced speech almost constantly and most of all she wunted to go home and talk with her mother and sister. The whole family met her ut the station und they were very anxious to hear her too. So Helen said, I am not dumb now, for she could talk with her parents and sister and to her beloved dogs whenever she wished. One day a dog. Lioness, which had been presented to her by friends, died. When sue was told that they wanted to buy her another dog, she asked them instead to help educate a small deaf and blind boy named Tommy Stringer of whom she had heard. He had no mother to love him and his father was rather poor anu could not afford to send him to school. Helen raised $1000 to send Tommy to the Perkins Institution in Boston. One of the chief events of the year 1893 was Helen’s visit to the World’s Fair in Chicago with Miss Sullivan and Dr. Graham Bell. She stayed there for three weeks, enjoying everything. She hud permission to touch many of the exhibits so she learned about many new things during her stay there. The next summer Helen attended the meeting of the American Association to promote the Teaching of peech to the Deaf at Chautauqua, New York. While theie, arrangements were made for her to attend the Wright-Humnxon School for the Deaf in New York City where she could receive more instruction in speech training and lip-reading. So that fall, Miss Sullivan and Helen went to the New York school where in addition she studied arithmetic, physical geography French and German. In the year 1896 real grief came to Helen for the first time, for her father died after n brief illness. She had finished the eighth grade studies und began to prepare for entrance to Rnd-cliffe College, all her written work being uone on the typewriter which she hnd learned to use. In 1899 she passed the college entrance examinations and the next fall saw her at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For four years she enjoyed college life. Miss Sullivan always attended classes with her and spelled all lectures and instructions into her hand. Helen enjoyed her work in composition, English Literature und Economics more thun in some other necessury subjects. Examinations were the greatest horror of College life. She lived in one of the pleasant homes near the school with several girls. Some of them learned how to talk with her. Since he graduation from RadclilTe College in 1904 her greatest pleasures have been reading, out-of-door sports, playing with her pets and talking to her friends and meeting people. She