Published: Sunday, June 17, 2012, 9:20 AM
By Bob Brody
Guest Blogger/For NJ.com
The baby who became my father was born almost completely deaf, able to discern only about 10 percent of all sounds. Early on, he had a hard time understanding anyone who talked to him, and equal difficulty making himself understood.
In the face of a society that often regarded the deaf largely as dumb, several physicians misdiagnosed him as mentally disabled. That was how the world generally saw deaf people. His hearing loss frustrated everyone he knew, most of all himself.
Photo: In 1994, Lee Brody, executive director of TTY-Phone, Inc., Hackensack, described a teletype machine that was designed for use by a deaf person to Jack Panarra of Elizabeth, a student from the Marie Katzenbach School for the Deaf, West Trenton. [Star-Ledger file photo]
He lived with his parents and two sisters on the second floor of a small house on Leslie Street in the Weequahic section of Newark. He was bright and, by all accounts, also absent-minded, a daydreamer, his head in the clouds.
His father had come to New Jersey from Austria at 12, alone
