Bridging Deaf, hearing worlds

Jeff Suess

Cincinnati Enquirer|USA TODAY NETWORK

The memoir centers on two sets of brothers a generation apart grappling between the Deaf world and hearing world. Judge tries to process the cultural and communication differences that defined his family’s relationships and were handed down to his generation.

He also explains changing attitudes toward deafness, when schools taught Deaf students lipreading and how to speak while sign language was forbidden, up to the 1990s when his mother used TTY to type a message over the phone that his father had died.

More than a family memoir, the book lets us step inside the local Deaf community, and along the way learn a bit of Enquirer history as well.

Judge’s father, James Murray Judge, was born in 1906. His mother, Iva, in 1908. Both were shaped by their experiences and the attitudes of the time, when Deaf people were treated as defective.

James was 7 when his father died, and his brother Don, just 13, took over as man of the house. But Don didn’t understand him. He managed him. Don learned some sign language to communicate with James but never used it in public.

Like most Deaf children at the time, James and Iva were sent to residential Deaf schools. For him, the Ohio School for the Deaf in Columbus, Iva the Kentucky School for the Deaf in Danville.

They lived at the schools alongside other Deaf children nine months of the year for 12 years, then went home in the summer to families who hardly saw them.

'Schools for the Deaf were called ‘institutions,’ because society didn’t see Deaf children as students with a language and culture of their own, but as a population needing care, control, and correction,' Judge wrote.

Where the Ohio school was formal, requiring order and discipline, the Kentucky school was more like a village. But being in the Jim Crow South, it was also segregated by state law, with separate White and Black schools, until 1963 – nearly a decade after Brown v. Board of Education.

James spent 45 years working in the Cincinnati Enquirer’s composing room. Newspapers often hired Deaf workers to run the machines that were extremely loud.

'The Composing Room was a place of heat, metal, ink, and precision,' Judge writes, describing where his father worked for decades. 'The air carried the smell of hot lead and machine oil. The linotype machines stood in long rows, towering and mechanical, each one a beast of gears, levers, and molten metal. When they ran, they produced a constant clatter, a metallic symphony of tapping, stamping, and casting. Hearing men described it as deafening. My father never heard a single sound. …

'The Composing Room employed many Deaf operators, men who shared the same challenges and the same quiet determination. They communicated with each other in sign language, their hands flashing in the space between the machines. In a room filled with noise, they could not hear; they created their own silent community, a pocket of understanding in a world that rarely made space for them.'

James Judge was one of the last operators to set type at The Enquirer before the printing process was computerized in the early 1970s.

Deaf youngsters from St. Rita School for the Deaf tour The Enquirer on April 19, 1971. James Judge, a printer from the newspaper composing room, uses sign language in the Enquirer library to guide the tour. Judge, who was Deaf, was a linotype operator for The Enquirer for 45 years.

Fred Straub/Enquirer file