Barbara Babbini Brasel shares a town house with a very small Shih Tzu dog and a very large tom cat who thinks he owns the place. Her living room has a bit of country store atmosphere about it with rows of home-canned food and pickles lining one wall along with a profusion of books. A large dining table divides the kitchen from the dining room and herbs grow in planter boxes on her patio and in pots on her kitchen window sill. Barbara is a gourmet cook.

Barbara is also a high pressure administrator and a politician. As an administrator, she is capable, tough and fair. As a politician, she knows how to make people laugh and enjoy being on her side. But behind the humor is a keen and knowledgeable mind. Legislators and other influential people soon find she knows what she's talking about, and that is why she has enjoyed considerable success in her job as executive director of the Connecticut State Commission on the Deaf and Hearing Impaired.

At the end of a long day, her apartment becomes her refuge. Since she has to go out so much in the course of her work, she cherishes her evenings at home with her pets, her books and her stock pot.

I was born in Manhattan Beach, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, but that was more or less by happenstance. My family actually lived in Las Vegas, Nevada, and both my brothers and my sister were born there. However, I was due in August and if you know Las Vegas, you'll know it gets very hot there in August. So, my mother decided to spend the summer in Manhattan Beach, where my grandmother had a summer home a few blocks from the ocean. I was born there, but shortly thereafter, we went back home to Vegas.

We were still living in Vegas when I was six years old and my brother, Sandie, was 12. A spinal meningitis epidemic hit the town and Sandie contracted it at school, brought it home and gave it to me and our mother. She excaped without any permanent damage, but Sandie and I both became deaf. At that time, there was no program for educating deaf children anywhere in Nevada, so they sent us to the Utah School for the Deaf (USD) in Ogden, that being the closest program for deaf children.

I turned out to be a pretty smart kid so I got promoted fast, skipping several grades. By the time I was 14, Sandie had graduated and gone on to Gallaudet College and I had absorbed everything that the Utah School had to offer. At the urging of Sandie, I applied for, took and passed the Gallaudet entrance exams. However, although I passed seventh in a field of 150 deaf students who took the exam that year, the Gallaudet administration decided I was simply too young--14 going on 15--for admission. I was extremely disappointed, to say the least, as it would be Sandie's senior year, his last year at Gallaudet, the last chance we'd have of attending Gallaudet together.

There being nothing else to do, I returned to the Utah School for a "postgraduate" year, but the problem quickly became one of what they had left to offer me. So, they were running around, trying to devise special tutoring for me in subjects I would normally take in my prep year at Gallaudet, in hopes that I could enter the freshman class the following year instead of the prep class. They also tried "mainstreaming" me at a hearing high school, but that didn't work out very well as they didn't have any interpreters to help me out.

Then I had a stroke of luck. A week after I returned to the Utah School, one of the boyfriend of one of the Gallaudet students' was killed in an auto accident. The heartbroken girl decided not to return to Gallaudet, which left a vacancy at the college. Well, you know my brother Sandie, and how persuasive he can be. He approached every member of the Gallaudet faculty and swore up and down that he would personally guarantee my good behavior if they would just let me in. His efforts paid off--they finally voted to admit me.

I didn't know anything about all this until one morning, about two weeks into the USD school year, when Dr. Frank Driggs, the superintendent, called me into his office and, with a perfectly straight race, handed me a telegram, asking me what we should do about it. I read the telegram and promptly went into orbit! It stated that I had been accepted at Gallaudet after all.

Dr. Driggs, still looking very solemn, repeated his question, "What are we to do about this?" My instant response was, "I'm going to Gallaudet, of course...!?" He held up his hands and said, "Wait a minute. It's not that easy. In the first place, your father can't afford to send you to college. He doesn't even have the bus fare to send you to Washington (my family was very poor). In the second place, you are too young for Vocational Rehabilitation assistance; you have to be 16 to become a VR client and you're only 15. Furthermore, your clothes are not appropriate for a college woman, they're too childish." By that time, I was sinking down into the pits, seeing my dreams of going to Gallaudet fading away.

Then he grinned and said, "However, I think we've solved some of those problems. At a faculty meeting last night, it was decided that the Utah school will lend your father the $32 it will cost for your bus fare to Washington and he can pay us back a few dollars a month. The teachers here at the school have volunteered to provide you with more appropriate clothing. And VR has agreed to pay for your books and some other things you will need, although they can't pay your bus fare. Now, what do you think of that?" That's when I knew I was going and Dr. Driggs had been teasing me. Talk about happy--I was one delirious kid!

Those teachers were beautiful. They all got together and asked their friends to donate clothing that would be right for a college girl. In addition, one teacher took me to buy shoes, another teacher bought me a skirt, blouse and sweater. Still another bought me towels and washcloths. They even bought me name tags and got all the high school girls together to sew the tags on my clothes and towels. You have to remember that was back in 1940 before World War II, and the economy was still depressed. Those wonderful teachers earned very little--but they still chipped in enough dimes, quarters and dollars to send me off to Washington with $50 in my pocket for eating and walking-around money and a full wardrobe of college girl clothes packed in a donated trunk. They were fantastic people--but sometimes I wonder if maybe they were simply awfully anxious to get rid of me (chuckles).

My first year at Gallaudet was O.K., I guess. I behaved myself, naturally, with my big brother there to ride herd on me. But I had to learn new study habits because everything had come to me so easily at the Utah School that I never really developed the discipline I needed in college. About the only thing I really loved to do was read. I always had my nose in a book, and that's partly Sandie's fault. When I was little, he would read the stories to me, then, at the most exciting part, he would suddenly remember that he was supposed to chop some wood for the family stove or something, and go off, leaving the book near me. In frustration, I would pick up the book and try to riddle out what was happening. Pretty soon I was reading on my own. Then he introduced me to the school library, picking out exciting books for me to read. By the time I left to go to Gallaudet, I'd probably read everything that was worth reading in that whole library--often at the expense of my homework. I've been a voracious reader ever since.

I attended Gallaudet for three years. After Sandie graduated and left, I cut loose and became a bit of a hellion without his restraining presence. Actually, I was too immature for college; too young, emotionally, to be associating with girls four to five years older than I. I was always getting caught and accumulated quite a few demerits. Finally, in my sophomore year, I resigned--one jump ahead of the faculty, which was bent on expelling me for general mischief if I hadn't beat them to it by resigning. It's ironic, but everything I got demerits for at Gallaudet is now permitted.

By that time, World War II was raging. Jobs were easy to get. My first job was with the U.S. Department of Labor as a clerk-typist. I was bored spitless, for all I did was type the same old form letter over and over again. Summer came and my boyfriend invited me to go home with him to Massachusetts for the summer. Quitting my dull job with the DOL, I enjoyed the summer in the coolness of Massachusetts--and fell in love with New England.

At the end of the summer, when my boyfriend returned to Gallaudet, I returned to Washington and started looking for a job. Finally, I found work with IBM, printing government checks. That soon became almost as boring as the job with the Labor Department and, after my boyfriend and I broke up, I decided to try and find more glamorous work in a "real" war plant. Pulling up stakes, I moved to Michigan, where I got a job in a bomber plant in Ypsilanti. Then the war ended and so did the job.

I tried my hand at modeling in Detroit, but nearly starved to death because the work was very sporadic. Decided to go home, "home" being Oakland, California, where my family had moved from Nevada during the early war years. Signed up with another modeling agency, but it was the same thing--boom or bust. At that time, I started to get restless and decided my best bet would be to go back to college, with the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) being my choice for that time.

Not having enough money for college (nor did my parents), I decided to approach VR for help. At that time, the famous T.L. Anderson was the VR counselor for the deaf in the San Francisco Bay area and he arranged for a series of tests to find out what areas I had aptitude in. Well, I was very clothes-happy in those days, so I thought I would like to become a dress designer. Accordingly, among the tests I was given was one for artistic aptitude and, of course, an I.Q. test. The I.Q. test scores I made were high enough to have them talking to themselves, but it was the test of artistic aptitude that really blew their minds. They couldn't believe it, for they had never had anyone get a perfect score on that test before I did. Actually, the test was easy--and probably not valid. It was just a thick volume of paired pictures that were almost identical. All you had to do was pick the better of the two pictures.

Anyway, they started working on getting me accepted into UCB and they also looked into the possibility of enrolling me in the Juilliard School of Art in Los Angeles because of my "artistic ability." However, it all came to naught, for I met my first husband, a hearing man and a WW II veteran, and eloped to Reno instead of going back to college. Nine months later, we had the first of our two childrein--both girls. (I now have five grandchildren.)

Shortly after we married, he got a job as an airplane mechanic. The marriage, which lasted 20 years, became stormy, especially toward the end, partly because I was a bit of a pain in the ass, always losing my temper and keeping after him to move up the socio-economic ladder.

Some years after we married, he enrolled in an engineering school to become a flight engineer with Western Airlines. But studying, for him, was a tough task, indeed. He just happened to be an auditory learner and when he tried to read or study, he fell asleep. The courses he was taking required a lot of technical reading of huge manuals, so he was having pretty heavy weather of it until I realized just what the problem was. That's when I started studying the manuals myself--and teaching him orally. I learned a heck of a lot in the process and probably could have taken the exams with him when he took them--and passed.

Anyway, he passed the exams and was promoted from mechanic to flight engineer and we moved to Los Angeles. To back up a minute, all during our marriage, most of our friends were hearing. Of course, I had a few deaf friends, too, but generally speaking, I more or less avoided deaf people, primarily because of some bad experiences I had had in Michigan. I was young and pretty then, and, for some damn reason or another, every time I walked into a deaf club in Michigan, the women would get their fur up--especially when their husbands would flock around me to chat. I couldn't very well ask each of the fellows, "Hey, are you married? No? Okay, you can stay. You? Yes? Get lost," etc. It got so bad that I finally stopped going to the clubs altogether. Nobody likes being snubbed and cut dead by a group of biddies when one is trying to make friends. After that, I decided I wanted nothing more to do with deaf people--and wound up marrying a hearing man.

For the first several years of our marriage, I continued to avoid the deaf community. I had a few close friends, to be sure, but that was it. However, one of those friends, Loel Schreiber, was very active in the deaf community and kept nagging me to get involved. I kept telling her, "No way!" but she kept on trying to recruit me. I kept saying I was happy being just a housewife and mother and had no interest in getting involved in the backbiting world of the deaf.

At the same time, now that I look back on it, I can see that the drive was there. I was a perfectionist. Anything I did, I had to excel in. My poor husband, I beat him in nearly everything: ping pong, swimming races, you name it. I even ventured into areas that are normally male dominated--I drew the blueprints for massive remodeling of our home, and took hammer and paint brush in hand as well. I realize now that, for me at that point in time, being just a housewife was not really fulfilling, so when the kids were old enough so that they didn't need my constant attention, I began looking around outside the home for an outlet for my energies--something interesting and challenging to do. I did know I didn't want a routine eight to five job, but I was awfully bored and restless.

One day, my friend, Loel, came to me and asked for my help. She pointed out that I was comfortable with hearing people, I was intelligent and articulate, my speech was excellent for a deaf person, and I was "untouchable" in that neither I nor my husband had jobs that were subject to outside pressure. In other words, I could speak out without fear of retaliation. She then made a pitch for me to help the California Association for the Deaf (CAD) get a law passed which would establish a multi-handicapped facility for deaf children. To support her pitch, she told me a heart-rending story about a young, emotionally disturbed deaf boy who couldn't be placed anywhere because of violent acting-out behavior.

Touched by her story, I finally agreed to help--with the stipulation that I would work on hearing VIPs to get their support while she worked with deaf people. Thus was taken my first step back into the world of the deaf.

By that time, my husband was a co-pilot with Western, having worked his way up from flight engineer. It so happened that one of the captains he flew with quite often was also the president of the Los Angeles Board of Education in his spare time. The first task Loel assigned me was to get a letter of support from him for the multi-handicapped facility bill.

Getting the letter was duck soup. With my husband to arrange the meeting with the president of the L.A. Board of Education and my own "charm" to sell him on our bill, I soon had his letter of support in my hot little hands.

Then came the incident that yanked me head over heels into community work with and for the deaf. My friend, Loel, the night before she was to fly to Berkeley for a very important meeting with the legislators who would be sponsoring our bill, suffered a complete nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. No one else being available, the CAD president asked me to go in her stead. I did--and subsequently inherited all of the work Loel had left unfinished when she collapsed, including that of Legislative Liaison for the CAD. Loel never did completely recover and died a few years later, so I found myself suddenly becoming her replacement in many more situations than I had bargained for. I was invited to workshops, conferences and seminars, and to be on committees that Loel normally would have been invited to. Among those committees was an advisory committee convened by Dr. Ray L. Jones, director of the National Leadership Training Program in the Area of the Deaf (NLTP) at California State University Northridge (CSUN)--another turning point in my life.

Meanwhile, my brother, Sandie, had always been very much involved in deaf community work and had become president of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD). While he was proud of his little sister's becoming involved in similar work at long last, he was still very much the big brother and kept after me to tone down my approach, telling me I was too abrasive in my manner of contributing to discussions, etc. And I was--very. Spoke my mind without thinking of how the other party might feel. In time, partly as a result of my later training to become a psychologist and partly as a result of maturing, I had many of the sharp corners knocked off my personality, but that's another story.

My association with Ray Jones led to a lot of new and interesting experiences. For example, in the days before Robert Weitbrecht developed the modem that led to TTYs and TDDs for the deaf, Ray had spotted the telephone as one of the major hindrances to the advancement of deaf people in a hearing world. Therefore, he was always looking for some device that would help the deaf use the telephone--and I became his primary guinea pig for testing out all sorts of devices, some of which were neat, but others of which were off the wall. I did a lot of experimenting with the Speech Indicator, a gizmo which enabled deaf people with good speech to talk on the phone and receive "yes, yes," "no" or "please repeat" response from the hearing person on the other end of the line--and I even devised a dial/code to enable the other party to send short messages by indicating the number and letter in the holes on the telephone dial. The Speech Indicator was very limited--usable only by those deaf persons who had good speech. The advent of the TTY made the Speech Indicator and all those other devices obsolete.

Meanwhile, Ray Jones had begun his long campaign to persuade me to go back to college and get my degree. I kept stalling and putting him off, saying I would if he could find me an interpreter and the money to pay for the service. However, it was becoming clear to me that I did need a college degree. While I didn't mind donating my time to community work, which I was finding increasingly interesting and challenging, I also wouldn't have minded being paid for my work. But every time an interesting job would open up which I felt I could handle, and I applied, I got the same answer: "Oh, Mrs. Babbini, you would be perfect for this job. By the way, what major is your college degree in?" and when I told them I didn't have a degree, they would look at me in shock and disappointment and say, "Oh, I'm really sorry, but the job requires a degree."

As a matter of fact, in one of those typical bureaucratic foul-ups, I almost wasn't allowed to teach sign language classes in the Los Angeles Adult Education Program because I didn't have a college degree. The irony here is that a course of study outline for teaching sign language that I had gradually developed over my years of teaching the courses at CSUN and that Ray Jones had arranged for CSUN to "publish," had been adopted as the official course of study outline for the whole Los Angeles Adult Education System! It took special dispensation from my friend, the president of the L.A. Board of Education, to get me permission to teach the same damn courses for which I had written the course of study outline that was being used all over the city!

At any rate, Ray Jones finally prevailed and I enrolled as CSUN's first deaf undergraduate--after he persuaded the Soroptimist Women's Club to donate $300 toward interpreting services for my first semester at CSUN. VR took over after that--probably because I made the Dean's List that first semester and impressed them (and made the Dean's List every semester thereafter).

I found college, the second time around, an exhilarating experience. My mind was like a sponge, with all that new information laid out in front of me like an educational smorgasbord. I was admitted as a junior, CSUN having accepted all of my Gallaudet credits, so one of the first decisions I had to make was deciding on a major. When Ray asked me what I wanted to major in, I impulsively said "Psychology." It really was a shot in the dark, but I found I loved it. I loved the courses. I loved the teachers--and I really loved having the interpreters there.

My association with interpreters and interpreting didn't start there, though. I first became aware of interpreting as a profession back in 1964, when I subbed for Loel Schreiber at the Ball State (Muncie, Indiana) workshop on interpreting--the workshop at which the National Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) was founded. That workshop stimulated my interest, for I began to see that interpreters could open up the world to those who cannot hear--and it's an interest that has remained steadfast to this day. However, when I enrolled in CSUN in 1966, I was still very green insofar as knowing how to use interpreters was concerned. In addition, my two interpreters at CSUN, Virginia Hughes and Maree Jo Keller, were not, at that time, skilled interpreters. They were skilled signers, having had deaf parents, but not interpreters, so we all learned the trade together. I learned to recognize what was really good interpreting, what to expect from the interpreters and what not to--and what I liked and did not like. They learned to interpret very, very well. Virginia later claimed that I taught her how to interpret--with my eyebrow. When she goofed, or did something I didn't approve of, my eyebrow would shoot up and my attention would focus on her, not on what the professor was saying. At the same time, I was generous enough to share my excellent grades with them. When I got my grades, I would phone them (using a Speech Indicator) and chortle, "We got an 'A'!"

In a sense, Maree Jo, Virginia and I spoiled one another. They became the standard by which I judged all other interpreters for many years, sometimes too harshly; and I became the model deaf student against which they inevitably compared all their future "clients." Consequently, I became something of a terror to interpreters in general--they were scared to death of Babs Babbini--who reputedly ate interpreters for breakfast--and it wasn't until much later that I began to realize that, with the proper encouragement, training, experience and constructive criticism, even apparently mediocre interpreters could blossom into first rate professionals. And that's the philosophy that now guides me and my interpreter coordinators in our dealings with the commission's interpreting staff, many of whom came to us as raw beginners, but are now crackerjack "pros."

While all this was going on, my marriage was falling apart. At one point, I became so depressed that I swallowed the contents of a bottle of tranquilizers. Luckily for me, there weren't enough in the bottle to do any real damage but, looking into the scared and shocked eyes of my two daughters afterward, I realized that at that point in time, I needed professional help--and got it. Went to a psychiatrist regularly for three months and, by the time we finished, I had developed enough courage to end my marriage and go it alone. I'll say this for my former husband, although he didn't want to divorce, once it had taken place, he was very good about abiding by the terms of the settlement and supported me faithfully until I finished college and for the first few years thereafter--until I was sure I could support myself. We have remained good friends ever since, which I'm sure my daughters appreciated as we never subjected them to the emotional tug of war many divorced parents inflict on their children.

After I graduated with my B.A. in Psychology, I enrolled in the M.A. program at CSUN, also in Psychology, doing a bit of counseling under the supervision of my faculty advisor. However, as often happened in my life, I changed directions in mid-stream--Dr. Ray L. Jones being the deflector again. Instead of going on to get my M.A. in Psychology, I was invited by Ray to enter the NLTP, which I did, and got my M.A. in Administration and Supervision instead of Psychology.

Believe you me, at that time the NLTP was a high quality program. I don't know if it still is, but I do know that in my present job as executive director of the Connecticut Commission on the Deaf and Hearing Impaired, I use every skill and every bit of knowledge that I gained in the NLTP daily. It has helped me tremendously in other respects, too, for my first job after I received my master's in Administration and Supervision, was with the Institute for Research on Exceptional Children at the University of Illinois under Dr. Stephen P. Quigley, who was sufficiently impressed by the M.A. from the NLTP to hire me, and it helped me get my present job.

Now, Steve Quigley is a tough man to work for, to put it mildly, but he taught me so much. He polished my professional writing skills, taught me how to plan a budget, and how to ride shotgun on it to keep expenditures under control; taught me about using computers--not to actually use them, but to tell the people who ran the computers what I wanted in the way of data and how I wanted it arranged. He taught me a lot about research (he was and is one of the foremost researchers in the field of deafness) and increased my ability to interpret the data I was working with. In exchange, I did a lot of the research and writing that went out under his name--with him being the toughest editor I ever had. He also arranged for the University of Illinois Press to publish two books I had written on teaching and learning sign language. I worked for him for four years--I think I still hold the record for the longest tenure of any of his assistants. While at the University of Illinois, I also taught sign language and the psychological implications of deafness--a very popular class that was always overbooked.

Initially, I had planned to work with Quigley for one year, then enter the Ph.D. program in Psychology at the U. of I.--and was accepted into the program. However, at this point there came another derailment of my plans. I'd fallen in love again, with another hearing man, Ken Brasel, who also wanted to pursue a doctoral degree at the U. of I. After a lot of discussion, we decided that since we couldn't afford for both of us to be on the paltry stipends doctoral students received in those days, he would get his doctorate first, with me continuing to work for Quigley until Ken finished his studies and got a job. Then I would go for my doctorate while he supported me.

Oddly enough, I wound up tutoring Ken just like I had tutored Ted, my first husband. Much of the subject matter he had to study for his Ph.D. research option was subject matter I had been required to study extensively at CSUN as part of my psychology major. I was, therefore, able to help him design his research, select the statistics to be used and the tests to be administered to his subjects and tutor him in many of his courses. I even helped to write his eventual dissertation--hell, I wrote most of it myself (but received no credit for it other than the usual note of thanks buried among the acknowledgments). Steve Quigley later remarked, laughingly, that between Ken and me, he had the best single doctoral student he'd ever had. Me, I never did get my doctorate, although I'm sure I could have "proficienced" my way to one after helping Ken get his.

To back up a moment, while all this was going on, I had written a grant application for some research into the characteristics of interpreters which had received approval and funding from the then Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA). I had long wondered why, given similar backgrounds, experience and length of time interpreting, two interpreters could be vastly different in their interpreting competence. One would be top-notch and the other never rose above mediocre. My research project was designed to find out if the good interpreters shared a commonality among their traits which distinguished them from the mediocre. Anyhow, the project was funded and we spent the first of an anticipated five years designing or adapting tests, running subjects and collecting a beautiful batch of data on some 33 interpreters from all over the U.S. at all levels of skill. Then, dammit, there was a major change in the administration in Washington and the project funding was cut off. Lopped off cold turkey. Nixon had had his hatchet men go into the RSA and slash away at hundreds of research projects without an iota of consideration for the value of the reseach in question. It was reported that they simply took a list of all the projects, drew an arbitrary line through it and told RSA to cut off everything below that line. My project was below the line, so it went. So did my job with the U. of I. (The University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) is now in the process of attempting to finish my long-tabled project.)

By that time, Ken had finished his course work and although he had completed the collection and statistical analysis of his data, he still hadn't written his dissertation. However, with my job ending and his, too, he decided to hold off on writing his dissertation until he had found a job. He found one here in Connecticut, as assistant superintendent in charge of the academic program at the American School for the Deaf (ASD). We had married shortly before we got the grim news from RSA about the termination of the interpreting project so, when Ken got the job at the ASD, I moved to Connecticut with him.

For me, there was no job here other than occasional substitute teaching at ASD, so I whiled away my time working on his dissertation as he didn't have the time, what with his new responsibilities. Then another of those twists of fate took place. The supervising teacher of the Upper School at ASD was accepted by the NLTP--which meant he would have to take a seven-month leave of absence in order to attend. Rather than appoint a temporary supervisor to replace him, then have to "demote" the replacement when he came back, it was decided that the existing six chairpersons of each of ASD's six academic departments would become temporary supervising teachers for their respective departments. Dandy solution, right?

Right, but it made for some problems. In order to supervise the teachers under them, the new "supervising teachers" had to have additional free periods from their full teaching schedules--and the free periods had to be at different times of each day so that they could periodically monitor each of the teachers under their supervision, all of whom had different schedules. And that meant that the supervising teachers had to have substitutes for the missed classes--or a Super Sub would have to be located who could teach everything from math to sex education to social studies to reading to English to all the way to ballroom dancing. Guess who Super Sub turned out to be. I would up teaching 32 different classes in 12 different subjects at 18 different levels (sixth to 12th grades, three different academic tracks--fast, medium and slow), and got to know 143 kids by name. In my free time, what little there was, I did counseling with some of the kids. My schedule was so crazy that I had to carry a clipboard with me at all times, with a chart on it that told me where I was supposed to be and when. And, I might add, up until that time, I had never taught deaf kids before. It was fun while it lasted, but I wouldn't want to do that as a career.

Even though I was busier than the proverbial cat on a tin roof, I wasn't really satisfied. My wages as Super Sub were less than half of what I had earned at the U. of I., and, let's face it, I wasn't exactly the typical school administrator's wife. I didn't conform. I was a bit too out- spoken for Ken's comfort. And I didn't really like living in Ken's shadow, nor having to entertain his colleagues damn near every night. I began to feel increasingly "smothered." And I guess it showed, for my second marriage began to fall apart a lot faster than my first--and ended just one and a half years after it began.

I don't mind admitting that I felt like the world had been kicked out from under my feet when the break came, but, at that critical point in my life, another of those lucky breaks occurred. The Connecticut State Commission on the Deaf and Hearing Impaired (CDHI) had recently been established and I learned that they were looking for an executive director. Pulling my socks on, and dusting myself off, I applied for the job and, to my surprise, I got it. On a temporary, three-month basis at first, but that three months was sufficient time for me to convince the Commission's board of advisors that I could handle the job better than any of the dozens of others who applied for the permanent job. In April, 1975, I was appointed to the permanent position of executive director at CDHI and I've been here ever since.

We started small, just me and my secretary, and an initial budget of $75,000 (of which I managed to spend $56,000 in the five months left in the state fiscal year). But we grew fast and now have 19 full-time staff and about 40 part-time employees and an annual budget in excess of $1.5 million dollars. We provided comprehensive services to over 2,000 deaf persons each month, a large part of which is interpreting service. And it is my modest opinion that we do a damn good job of what we do. I have an excellent staff. They make me look good!

I had a lot of help and a lot of luck. It was a case of being in the right place at the right time with the right skills to work with the right people. And I found I hadn't lost my touch with legislators. I could still charm them, make them laugh, yet still make them respect and trust my viewpoints. To be a success in a job like mine, you have to know your subject thoroughly; know exactly what you are talking about and have statistics to back it up. But legislators--and other VIPs--are human. They like a bit of humor and charm mixed in with the grim facts and figures. And that, I think, is in large part the reason for my success in my present job.

To illustrate, I'd like to tell you a little story. A couple of years ago, right after I'd made a detailed presentation to the Appropriations Committee on our budget, explaining how I'd managed to stretch our previous year's appropriation, etc., etc., and telling the committee what I planned to do with what we were asking in the way of funding, the President Pro Tem of the Senate, Phil Robertson, who happened to be sitting in on the committee hearing, stopped me before I left the witness' chair. He said, "Barbara, I am most impressed, as usual. I wonder if we could talk you into taking over as Commissioner of the Department of Transportation."

Well, at that time, the DOT, one of our largest state agencies, was in a hell of a mess. They had fired the commissioner for all sorts of blunders and mismanagement, and were shaking the DOT tree and having deadwood fall out all over the place. Anybody who stepped into the commissioner's job, therefore, would be inheriting one gawdawful mess. My response to Robertson was, "Phil! I thought you were my friend!"

While it was flattering to have him think of me in those terms even in jest, I'd like to make a point. I do know my limits. Where I am now, I use all of the skills and knowledge I possess. Moving into something bigger would probably bring the Peter Principle into play, and I'd probably foul up. Maybe. But I really don't have any aspirations for bigger things--there ain't no better thing than what I have now. It's fun where I am. It has been fun, although there were some rough patches, too, but overall it's been worth it.

After all this "looking back" over my life, I'd like to do some looking forward. I see a crop of young deaf people coming up. Some are linguistically sophisticated, and some are not. Some of them are militant--"Deaf Power" and all that, and it worries me. That kind of an attitude turns off hearing people, especially the ones who control the delegation of the important jobs --and the money. The militant young ones are hindering their own changes of getting good jobs in administrative positions where they can affect the welfare of deaf people. At the same time, I see some rising stars.

A few years back, there were only two deaf female executives--Edna Adler and me. Now, a few more are beginning to emerge. Few of them are young, though. Most are of my generation--which is heading for the rocking chair. I see Marcella Myers of the Greater Los Angeles Association of the Deaf, who has been shaking and moving things in the L.A. area. My generation. I see Gertie Galloway, the first woman president of the NAD and a mover/shaker in her own right. Again, my generation--or close to it, anyway. And I also see a few women in my generation who have blown their chance after being given that chance--and who can't find decent jobs now. What interests me now is the younger generation--those who will have to take up the torch when us older leaders have been retired to pasture. Tracy Harris, for example. Boy, I'd really like to have her working for me so I could train her. She already has the humor, the intelligence, the wit, the charm and a lot of the smarts that one needs in finding one's way through the maze of the political arena. That's the kind of youngster I'd like to see more of, both male and female.

Another concern I have is the fate of the NLTP. I certainly hope they keep it going for it is a wonderful forum for interaction between the younger generation of deaf people and the hearing people they will encounter in their future work. I do know that, as an administrator who hires (and fires) people, I perk up my ears every time I receive an application for employment from someone who has a degree from the NLTP on his resume.

You ask what I do for recreation? Well, I can't work 24 hours a day for the deaf, that's for sure. You see this chair here. I sit here a lot, nose to a book, and simply unwind. I also cook. I love to cook and am a bit of a gourmet cook. I like to try out new recipes on myself and, if they turn out well, I'll try them out on my friends. I have a thing about knives. I like them razor sharp and take my knife sharpener when I travel, for I know I'll be doing a lot of cooking wherever I visit (unless I'm staying at a hotel). I have a tendency to take over kitchens--my daughters both simply abdicate their kitchens the moment Mama arrives. I also do that to my friends--shove them out of their own kitchens. Most of them don't mind because they know they'll get a good meal out of it. And some don't like to cook, anyway, and appreciate the unexpected vacation.

Usually, after work, I come home, feed my animals, then cook myself a mini-gourmet dinner. Funny thing, though: One thing I am absolutely incapable of doing is cooking a small pot of soup. Nope, it has to be home made. But I can't make a small batch; I have to have a huge batch in order to get the balance of flavors just right. See that stock pot? It holds 12 quarts--and 12 quarts of soup is what I invariably make. I give most of it away and people love it.

My dream? To win the state lottery so I can retire at 65--and continue shopping in gourmet food stores.

Gail Hyde
Project Coordinator, Web Design