Ageless Passions by Karen Putz

Author: Karen Putz

  • Howard Rosenblum, Attorney

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    Howard Rosenblum was just twelve years old when he attended an event that changed his life and determined his career path.  At the event, he met Lowell Myers, a deaf attorney who had argued a famous case which was made into a movie, Dummy.

    Howard recalls the event:  “When he came to speak about his experiences as a lawyer at an event in 1978, a twelve-year-old deaf boy saw the same opportunity that Mr. Myers saw for himself. That boy was me, and thanks to Mr. Myers, I became a lawyer 14 years later.”

    Today, Howard is a Senior Attorney at Equip for Equality located in Chicago– a non-profit organization that advances the human and civil rights of people with disabilities.   He holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Arizona and a J.D. from Chicago-Kent College of Law.  He is the founder and director of the Midwest Center for Law and the Deaf which provides attorney referrals for deaf and hard of hearing people.  In 2002, he received the Edward J. Lewis II Pro Bono Service Award for providing many years of pro bono work during his tenure at the law firm of Monahan and Cohen.

    Howard credits his parents for encouraging him to pursue his dream and to ignore the naysayers.  Just as Myers inspired Howard, Howard is now inspiring other deaf and hard of hearing individuals with his path.  The number of deaf and hard of hearing attorneys continues to grow, and together, they’re breaking down barriers.

  • Saying Goodbye to Summer

    I hate Labor Day Weekend.  It’s the “official” end of summer at Christie Lake and it always makes me sad.  We try and grab as much as we can out of the weekend and always have to make the decision of whether or not we’ll take the boats out or stretch out a couple more weekends into the fall.

    It’s been a rather cool summer this year and the summer was one of the speediest summers I can ever remember.  It was gone in a flash.  Joe’s Mom keeps trying to tell me that the older you get, the faster time spins.  She told me this when David was a baby and I laughed.  She said the high school years were a blur.  I couldn’t fathom that, because I was holding a little kiddo in my hands and just trying to make it through the next hour with some semblance of sanity and intact thought.

    Damn.  She wasn’t kidding.  Time is indeed spiraling by and I swear, it seems like someone keeps turning the clocks on fast-forward.  You know that little baby I was talking about?  This is him:

    He’s an offensive lineman for Hinsdale South now. In two short years, we’ll be sending him off to college.  I don’t understand how he went from being a baby just yesterday to this strapping hulk of a boy/man.  I kind of envy the Duggars. If I was smart, I could have cheated Father Time by just having baby after baby.  Yeah, that would have been a good plan– you know how time crawls when you try to get through hour by hour with little ones.  And then it would take forever before the last kiddo goes off to Grown-up-hood.

    But getting back to the weekend, another reason I don’t like Labor Day weekend:  each summer that goes by is a summer that I know I can’t get back, another summer ticking by.

    So here it is, the big weekend of summer.  So rather than thinking about endings, I’m going to celebrate the weekend instead.  Join me–not in saying goodbye to summer, but just merely, “So long, see ya next year!”

  • Lions Camp for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Kids

    My kids are still talking about this year’s week at Camp Lions.  Every year, they look forward to that one, magical week with all their friends.  The conversations last all year–via sleepovers, Facebook sharing, texts that fly back and forth and videophone calls.

    My kids spend all day in the mainstream going to classes with students who can hear so they cherish their time with deaf and hard of hearing friends.  Those friendships are deeply important, because communication isn’t an issue and being different isn’t an issue.

    At a deaf picnic this summer, a young mother came up to me and signed, “Do you remember me?”  I looked at her–she looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place the moment in time where we knew each other.

    “You were my camp counselor at Camp Lions!” she said.

    Back in the mid-80s, I did one summer as a camp counselor for the Lions Camp.  I also did one summer as a waterski instructor at Camp Endeavor in Florida.  It’s easy for the kids to remember the counselors, much harder for counselors to remember the many kids!  But I did remember the young girl at camp and it was amazing to see her as a mother to her own kiddos years later.

    I have several friends who attended the Lions Camps as young kids and thirty-plus years later, they can recall the fun they had and the connections that were made.  It’s no surprise that Camp Lions continues to fill up year after year.  They are now in their 51st year of providing camps to deaf and hard of hearing kids in Illinois.

    So I’m writing this to publicly thank the Camp Lions of Illinois and the Lions of Illinois Foundation because if not for the tireless efforts of every Lion group in Illinois who fundraise each year– the deaf and hard of hearing kids in Illinois would have no magical week to remember.

    Thank you.

    Camp is Over, It’s Back to the Real World


  • My Mom’s View of my Birthday

    “Ok, Mrs. Griffard, you’re going to have this baby soon,” said the nurse as she moved around the bed and pushed back the sheets.

    “This really hurts!” Mom said.  “When is the doctor going to put me out?”

    “Oh no, we don’t do that anymore.”

    “What do you mean?  I was put out for my other four!”

    “No, you’ll have to help push this baby out.”

    “You gotta be kidding.  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! This hurts! Ow, ow, ow!  I feel like I’m going to be split apart!  This is painful!”

    And that’s how I came into the world 44 years ago.

  • Lessons from a Sea Doo

     

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    It was one of those idyllic summer weekends– good food on the grill, time with the family and fun on the water.  David and I took turns pulling each other on the jet ski, attempting to skim along the water on our bare feet.  I hadn’t gone barefooting in years, but I tried getting up on the board and planting my feet in the water.  I couldn’t do it.  David tried a couple of times, both on the board and on the ski.  He was pretty determined to try over and over.  I liked the fire that I saw in his eyes as he attempted the new skill.

    The kids wakeboarded behind the Sea Doo and then we did some tubing the next day with another deaf family.

    Yesterday, the sky was grey and a storm had passed through.  The sun lightened up the clouds and David decided to pull Steven on the wakeboard behind the Sea Doo. Steven did a dock start on the wakeboard and went halfway around the lake before he fell and the two of them headed back for another round.  As David tossed out the rope, the Sea Doo was still circling.

    Whoooosh.

    The rope went right up the intake.  With the intake piston revolving over 1,000 RPMs, it wasn’t long before the rope got stuck.

    I was in the house when I heard the news.  Let’s just say that I wouldn’t win any Mommy-of-the-Year awards with my response.  I’m sure the neighbor’s eyes popped watching my animated signing.  “What-were-you-thinking-this-was-totally-avoidable-how-could-you-not-watch-the-freaking-rope…”

    I’ll spare you the rest.

    David and Joe went under the lift to assess the damage.  “It’s wound up so tight, totally impossible to get this off,” Joe said.  “I think we need to bring it to the marine place and have them take it apart.”

    “Try to get it off,” I growled at them.

    After a half an hour of hacking at it and cutting loose some of the rope, the guys weren’t getting very far. I finally jumped in the water to take a look.

    It wasn’t pretty.

    The rope was wound so tight and it had been shoved deep into the shaft.  My first instinct was to agree with Joe– this was a job for someone else to do.  I took another look.

    Hmmm, if I could just loosen one end, we might be able to get it out.

    “Can you get me a long screwdriver and a needle-nose pliers?”

    Little by little, we each took turns under the lift and loosening the rope bit by bit.  David had a big grin on his face when he pulled out the last of the rope from the shaft.  He had relieved grin on his face when I started up the Sea Doo and took off with it.  It worked fine.

    So what did we learn from this?  For starters, David learned how powerful the intake was on a jet ski– I’m betting that he’ll never make this mistake again.  I also was reminded of the time that I ran over a ski rope myself around the same age–my Dad had to take the prop off the boat to get all of the rope out.  I do remember him hollering at me to be more careful after that.

    But the biggest lesson of all was this: Something that at first looks impossible can be accomplished by working at it little by little and not giving up.

    More lessons from a Sea Doo–What I Learned About Stress.

  • Twitter, My Virtual Watercooler

    I don’t understand this Twitter thing,” a friend of mine said to me recently.  “I can’t make sense of it all.  What’s the point of all those short sentences?”

    My sister-in-law asked me the same thing and so did my neice: I Don’t Get Twitter.

    That’s pretty much what I thought too, when Glenda Watson Hyatt introduced me to Twitter over a year ago.  I am so glad that I listened to Glenda, because Twitter has become my virtual watercooler.  In my daily life, I’m often cut off from conversations around me unless I have access to an interpreter, captioning or some super lipreading.  Twitter lets me peek in on conversations (Ah, so that’s what people talk about!) and gives me the opportunity to join in.  I enjoy Twitter so much that I ended up here: Chicago Moms on Twitter.

    Liz Strauss is hosting a writing project: 25 Words of Social Media Wisdom.  I’ve decided to join in and share my thoughts on Twitter and what it means to me:

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  • Come On, Let’s Tip the Girls Over! Wordless Wednesday

     

     

    The boys succeeded in tipping the girls off the tube.

    Wordless Wednesday!

  • Z Ya Later!

    Check out the sports section of the Chicago Tribune!  I had to laugh when I saw that, because my buddies at Zvrs.com are always saying to each other, “Z ya later!”

  • Advocating for Captions on the Web

    I recently discovered that NBC now has some old episodes of  the Emergency series posted on their website.  As a kid, I loved that show, even though I had to lipread my way through it.  This was before the days of captioning on TV.  And today, I feel like I’m right back in the 70s– because there’s no captioning on the TV episodes that are displayed on the web.

    Representative Ed Markey introduced the Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2009 on June 26, 2009.  Quite simply, the bill has this as the goal:  “To ensure that individuals with disabilities have access to emerging Internet Protocol-based communication and video programming technologies in the 21st century.”

    In other words, it means that if I want to see old episodes of The Tonight Show or waste time watching Deal or No Deal– that I would have access to those episodes just like everyone else.

    Isn’t 30 years a long time to wait for captions on the web?

    Keep in mind, this doesn’t apply to user-generated content.  So if you toss a video on YouTube, no one is going to make you caption it.  But I sure would appreciate the access if you decided to make your content accessible. And something else to think about: someday your own hearing might go south and you’d appreciate a captioned web.

    The Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology has a petition to sign. Jamie Berke has a blog with tons of info:  Caption Action 2. Over on Facebook, a group has gathered to push the grassroots effort and get this bill passed.  Won’t you come and join us?

    Of course, just clicking on a Facebook group isn’t going to get a bill passed, but there is strength in numbers.  Facebook helped to save a deaf school from closing.

    I know you’re probably rolling your eyes and thinking, “Not another bill, Karen.”  But here’s the deal–if you contact your Senators and ask them to start a similar bill and contact your Representatives to support H.R. 3101 and help me get this passed and into the law books, I promise I won’t bother you again for a while.

    I’ll be too busy catching up on those Emergency episodes.

  • Wordless Wednesday–Playing in the Rain

    It was a rainy day and the kids decided to play basketball in the rain.  The boys discovered that the snowskates worked well on the slick driveway.

    This is part of Wordless Wednesday.