Meet Alice Wheat

Alice Louise Wheat, born in 1932 in St. Louis, Missouri, was a child of the Great Depression and World War II. Raised in a strict Catholic family, she married in 1950 when she was eighteen.

     The book Jill's First Day of School recalls one day in her and her first child Jill’s life. Jill was born with a severe hearing impairment and diagnosed as profoundly deaf. Alice would go on to have eight more children. Four of her nine children, two daughters and two sons, would be diagnosed as profoundly deaf. A recessive gene, unknown at the time and not evident in either parents’ family, was eventually identified as the cause for the deafness. Despite the challenges of raising nine children, much less with four who were deaf, Alice persevered with their education, first with the assistance of the nationally recognized Central Institute for the Deaf, and then with several parochial schools, and finally, through public education.

     It was Alice’s belief her hearing-impaired children would have a much greater opportunity in life if they were speech-trained at school and at home. The popular belief at the time opposed the deaf having interactions with the hearing world. It was normal for deaf people to live in an isolated, cloistered fraternity, which resulted in limited communication abilities. The hearing siblings would not have been able to help their deaf brothers and sisters if only sign was used. A testament to Alice’s determination and insistence that her hearing-impaired children be treated no differently from her other children, all of Alice's children went on to complete not only high school, but then college. Most would earn advanced-studies degrees.