Helen Keller
It is hard to imagine what life would be like if one couldn’t see or hear anything. If a person were to close his or her eyes and cork his or her ears, it is still almost impossible to imagine living a life like that. Helen Adams Keller is candidly a legacy today because she spent her entire life never truly knowing what was in front of her. She could not enjoy a favorite song or the beautiful landscapes of the world. Despite being deaf and blind, Helen’s life has attracted awe, respect, admiration, and inspiration to those deaf and blind today.
In a rural town in Northwest Tuscumbia, Alabama, a healthy baby Helen was born on June 27, 1880. She was the daughter of Captain Arthur Henley Keller and Kate Adams Keller. A healthy baby meant ten fingers, ten toes, full sight, and hearing. Helen’s mother, Kate, was a tall blonde with blue eyes and twenty years younger than Helen’s father, Captain Keller. They lived in the house that Helen’s grandparents had built many years ago and they were far from wealthy. Her father earned his living working two jobs. He was a cotton plantation owner and the editor of a weekly local newspaper, the “North Alabamian” (NNB – Tracking the Entire World). When Helen reached the young age of nineteen months, she came down with a strange illness. The doctors described the illness as “an acute congestion of the stomach and brain” (Windows Encyclopedia). Something like this could be known as scarlet fever or meningitis. She quickly overcame her illness, but obviously did not fully recover from it for it left her permanently deaf, blind, and unable to speak. She spent the next five or so years in her isolated world. She gave her parents a myriad of problems and was known by most everyone as a “monster child” (Times Reader 2.0). She became a very wild and unruly child. She would kick and scream and throw huge tantrums when she was unhappy or not getting her way. She would laugh and giggle obnoxiously when she...