At Bernard's bar mitzvah at Temple Sinai, 1982-1983. From left to right: Rabbi Soltz, my dad, me, Bernard, Vicki, Stefi, my mom, and Vicki's parents, Irene and Jack Bernstein.

Realizing how much my son’s bar mitzvah had meant to me, I myself was bar mitzvahed for the first time in my late sixties. Vicki and I were visiting Russia as part of a Postsecondary Education Network-International trip with my colleague Jim DeCaro, the project director. We met with the director of a postsecondary center for deaf and hard of hearing students, and she happened to be Jewish. She had a very close relationship with a rabbi in Kazan, so she brought us to meet with the rabbi and his wife in a private room at their temple. The rabbi asked if I had been bar mitzvahed, and I explained that my grandfather had emigrated from Russia back in the late 1890s, and he had exempted my father and me because of our being deaf.

“You should be bar mitzvahed right here and now,” the rabbi surprised me by saying. I was stunned. Didn’t it take many years of work to prepare for a bar mitzvah? The rabbi persuaded me to take advantage of his offer, and he said he would make it a simple procedure. Vicki and Jim both encouraged me to go through with it. I thought of Kirk Douglas, who was bar mitzvahed in his eighties. If he could do it, then I should do it. The rabbi took me, with my designated interpreter, to the synagogue and told me what we would do. Once we were ready, the rabbi told Vicki and Jim to come in to watch. It was an intriguing and exhilarating experience for me. I had finally had my bar mitzvah. I had wondered why my father and I were exempted, but then there was no opportunity for a deaf person to achieve this goal in the small town of Sioux City. Afterward, we celebrated with a large Russian dinner.

At my bar mitzvah in Kazan, Russia, with the rabbi, Maria Shuskovitch, and Vicki.

I was bar mitzvahed a second time when Rabbi Yehoshua Soudakoff, who is deaf and the son of deaf parents whom we knew well, was on campus at Gallaudet. He came to my office for a chat and I told him about my experience being bar mitzvahed in Kazan. He offered to give me another blessing in a brief ceremony in my office.

BERNARD TOOK REGULAR classes at public schools. He first attended a small private kindergarten; it didn’t match his social, linguistic, and academic needs, so at the recommendation of a child psychologist, he began taking classes in a public school. He did not meet the entry criteria for decibel hearing loss for RSD. The New York State Department of Education had and continues to have an archaic policy that requires a child to have at least an 85-decibel hearing loss to be admitted into a school for the deaf in New York state.

Despite the frustrations we often felt when searching for the best educational and social match for Bernard, we were very proud of his academic accomplishments. Academically, the potential was there for him to do even better. Like many kids, however, he preferred to play Atari, work on his computer, listen to music, play baseball, collect baseball cards, write, and read, read, read. He was the editorial editor for his high school newspaper. Remembering how my mother used to “force” me to read books for at least one hour a day before I could go outside to play, I realized that Bernard was my opposite; we encouraged him to go out to play for at least an hour before he was allowed to come back inside the house to read a book.

A STEADY BREEZE cooled my face, and the sky above us was bright blue, but things were not going well. I looked over and saw that Harry was laughing at my repeated attempts to assemble the many aluminum poles, which I had to fit into each other, end to end. The idea was to create one long, flexible pole, which I would then feed into the canvas pockets at the corners of the tent.

Grilling chicken in front of our canvas tent.

“There’s a trick to it,” I told him laughingly.

“Aren’t you an engineer?” he teased me. When I refused to answer, he added, still smiling, “This is why we have a camper.”

Harry and Pat Scofield’s pop-up camper, parked at the adjacent campground 200 feet away, contained two beds piled with blankets and soft pillows. It was attached to their blue Ford station wagon and had two little windows decorated with frilly curtains—it was a home away from home, or at least a comfortable bedroom away from home.

The kids were still small, and we were on the first of what would be many camping trips with Harry and Pat and their family. Harry was a great outdoorsman who loved to camp, fish, and hunt, and he taught us a lot about camping. We had a ten-foot-by-sixteen-foot canvas tent, a sturdy cloth house really, but yes, I could see the advantages to a pop-up camper: no poles, no assembly, no leaks.

One time, we set up camp at the Hamlin Beach campground at Lake Ontario about forty miles from our homes for two whole weeks. Harry and I would commute daily to our workplaces at NTID, while Vicki and Pat and the children would go to the beach, to lay out in the sun, play in the water, and cook hot lunches on our Coleman stove.

Years later, on one of our best camping trips with the Scofields, we spent two weeks at one of the Thousand Islands near the Canadian border, using our large tent for both families. Harry took us in his boat to the island, which was like a paradise with all its nature with no one else around.

Not all trips were as terrific, though. One summer, we were camped at Sampson State Park between Seneca and Cayuga Lakes, two of the glacial Finger Lakes in the Southern Tier of New York state. The lakes are more than thirty miles long and over 400 feet deep at their deepest points. As soon as we erected our tent at the campsite, it began to rain so hard the roof and walls of the tent shuddered nonstop. We could feel the rumble of thunder as flashes of lightning illuminated the tent. Could lightning strike us through the canvas? Yes, of course, it could! We scrambled out of our sleeping bags and gathered them up into our arms before dashing out of the tent, through the torrential rain, and to the campsite bathrooms, where we slept, protected from the dirty concrete floors of the women’s bathroom only by our sleeping bags.

At 5:00 the next morning, before the sun was entirely above the horizon, a park ranger entered the bathroom and said, “You folks have to clear out of here by six o’clock because other campers will be coming in to use the toilets and the sinks.”

When we returned to our campsite, our sleeping bags hugged to our chests and our feet sinking in mud, we found our tent flattened and soaking wet, covered in small puddles. We decided to drive to nearby Ovid for a hearty breakfast at a diner. Afterward, we went back to the campsite to pack up everything except the tent, which we set up to dry. A few days later, I drove back about two hours to the campsite to take the tent down and bring it home.

“Let’s get a pop-up camper!” I said to Vicki when I returned home with our tent. She was in full agreement, and so that same month we bought one, which we enjoyed frequently using over the next five years. Back then, it was easy to get ready for a camping weekend at the last minute, depending on the weather on a Thursday afternoon or Friday morning, and finding a spot. Unfortunately, a few years later, competition stiffened, and we had to reserve campsites far in advance—at least six months for popular sites. The problem was we never knew what the weather would be like during the times we reserved a site for—this was before the internet was readily available—and if we had to cancel plans because of rain or cold, then all four of us would be disappointed.

The Hurwitzes in front of their pop-up camper.

As our children grew, Bernard became more involved with Little League and other activities, Stephanie with summer camps. More and more often, our camper parked dormant in our backyard. By the time they were teenagers, and my job had become more demanding, we donated the camper to the Salvation Army. We’d loved every minute of the camping experiences. I must admit that I still miss those days, when we were in close quarters at night, with the starry sky outside the little windows, after a long day of hiking, swimming, or fishing together. We’d sit around the campfire, slapping bugs away, roasting marshmallows, and cooking over the fire. Sometimes we wouldn’t see another family for hours or even days at a time—it was just the Hurwitzes out in nature, being together, soaking in the natural world.

INCREASINGLY, while technology and many other things have improved for deaf people over the years, travel has not. Even so, when I think back to some of our earlier cross-country odysseys, I marvel at how much has changed. One time we relied on the kindness of a train conductor at Grand Central Station to get a message to a fellow train conductor at Penn Station a few blocks away that we needed help making a connection to our Florida-bound train. We had missed the earlier connection since our train was late arriving in NYC from Rochester. We explained that we needed to catch up to our Florida-bound train because we had friends that were meeting us in Jacksonville and we had no way to contact them to tell them we’d missed our train. That first conductor personally put us in a cab headed to the other station and used his radio or phone to call and let the other conductor for the DC express train know to look for us. We made the express train to Washington, DC, where we got off and got on our original connecting train from New York City to Jacksonville that was on the slower track and arrived one hour later. Once we arrived in Jacksonville, we met up with Merle and Susan Reekers and their two sons Scott and David. Crisis barely averted! We then enjoyed traveling with them in their RV throughout Florida.

Merle and Susan Reekers in front of their RV with their sons Scott and David.

Or the time Vicki and I decided to travel across the country for six weeks during the summer of 1996. The trip would prove to be one of the sweet highlights of our marriage, but it was also marked by challenges caused by our reliance, as deaf people, on technology. Driving our minivan, we set off for Minnesota to visit with our friends. From there, we drove on through North Dakota. We had brought our Compact (a portable TTY) in a cushioned case, so we could maintain contact with our children, a laptop to keep up with our work emails, and a decoder to enjoy the benefits of closed-captioned TV programs in motels. After about a week on the road, we stopped in Cody, Wyoming, for the night. The next morning, we checked out of the motel, and I carried several bags to the car. We then headed for Yellowstone Park. After a harrowing all-day drive on winding roads, some snow-covered, through the mountains, we drove into Montana and stopped in Ennis to stay overnight in a hotel. Vicki and I unloaded the minivan quickly and carried all our things to the room. Vicki was anxious to use the TTY to call our children. But we couldn’t find it among our things in the room. I went back to the minivan but couldn’t find it there either.

Back in our room, I suddenly felt ill, like I’d swallowed a brick. I remembered putting the TTY on top of the minivan that morning after checking out of the motel in Wyoming! I could picture it on the van’s roof. I ran back to the vehicle to see if it was still there. Of course, it wasn’t, so I sheepishly admitted to Vicki what I had done.

I went to the motel office and asked the clerk to call the motel clerk in Cody, Wyoming, to see if someone had found the TTY. The staff went out to look for it and couldn’t find it but promised to call back if they ever located it. Naturally, we were sick about what happened.

“Maybe we can use our laptop to send an email to our kids?” Vicki wondered. There was no other TTY in the entire town of Ennis, in the middle of nowhere in Montana. We hadn’t felt so isolated in a long time. On top of it, we couldn’t use our laptop even to read and send emails, since there was no internet connection. Thank heavens we had the TV decoder. I hooked it up to the old TV in the room, and we entertained ourselves with a good movie with captions.

The next morning, we stopped at a different motel elsewhere in Montana that had internet service to send email messages to our children to reassure them that we’d keep in touch via email until we could find a payphone with a TTY.

Three days later, we arrived in Portland for the NAD convention. Vicki and I entertained the idea of buying a new portable TTY, priced somewhere between $200 and $400, from one of the exhibitors, but we held off. The next day, I got an email from Bernard telling me that he had called his answering machine back home and found a message from a woman in Cody who had discovered our Compact TTY on the road between Cody and Yellowstone Park. She looked inside the case and saw our son’s telephone number.

You can imagine how flabbergasted I was. I immediately called the woman through a relay service using a payphone TTY in the hotel lobby. She offered to send the Compact TTY, which didn’t seem damaged, to me wherever I wanted. I asked if she’d send it by Federal Express to our hotel in Portland, and that we’d send her a check. The next day, we received the package with the Compact TTY inside, in perfect condition, despite its fall from the van and time on the road.

The rest of that trip included (but was not limited to) a visit with Bernard and his future wife Stacy for three nights in the San Francisco Bay area, and an overnight stay with our friends, Paul and Anne Ogden, in Fresno. We then traveled on to Yosemite, Death Valley National Park, and Barstow, California, where it was more than 100 degrees. The hot air was thick with the aroma of cow manure, and so we went on to Arizona, New Mexico, and the Grand Canyon. We arrived in St. Louis in time to attend a CID alumni reunion, after which we drove on to Omaha, Nebraska, for the American Society for Deaf Children conference, where Vicki and I gave a presentation for parents of deaf children. From there, we drove to my hometown of Sioux City and onward to Lake Okoboji, where we stayed for a week at a lake resort. We were on our way to Chicago when we saw a sign advertising the “Field of Dreams,” the place in Dyersville, Iowa, where they filmed the movie of the same name. We drove to the ballpark, ringed by cornfields, sat on the bleachers, and reminisced about the movie. It was surreal and awesome to see.

By the time we made it back home to Rochester, our eyes full of this vast country’s majesty, Vicki and I marveled that we’d managed to spend nearly every minute of the entire six weeks together, happier and more in harmony than ever. Most of the time on our trip, we talked and talked, but other times, we were quiet and reflected on what we experienced during our long drives through the beautiful country.

WHEN BERNARD BEGAN his first year at Princeton University, and Stephanie was in high school, Vicki was ready to work full-time. She applied at Substance and Alcohol Intervention Services for the Deaf in downtown Rochester. Although she didn’t get the job, she was referred to work as a social worker at Norris Clinic. This residential alcoholism treatment center had a unit for deaf and hard of hearing clients with severe drug and alcohol addictions. Vicki was the only deaf employee and shared an office with Pat Morrison, who was both a social worker and interpreter. Although Vicki had an excellent supervisor, some hearing employees treated her as if she were an assistant, expecting her to provide a Deaf culture class for them. She told them that her job description did not include that responsibility and advised them to find someone from NTID. For sixteen months, Vicki provided her clients with individual, group, and family therapy and behavior modification.

About two years before Vicki started at the Norris Clinic, she’d applied for a position as a coordinator for student development in the student life team in the Department of Human Development at NTID and didn’t get it. More than a year later, the department encouraged Vicki to apply again. They offered her a five-year position on the condition that she obtain a master’s degree. Hence, she enrolled in the Careers and Human Resources Development (CHRD) graduate program at RIT. At the age of forty-nine, she graduated with a master’s degree in CHRD—a year after Bernard graduated from Princeton and a year before Stephanie graduated from RSD. After five years’ work with the student life team, she had to reapply for the same position, although this time it would be permanent. After a round of interviews and other candidates vying for the position, she got the job for another eight years.

Vicki graduating with her master's degree from RIT, 1993.

As a part of Vicki’s graduate studies, she developed a curriculum for a pilot course in Deaf women’s studies, which she taught at NTID for ten years while working with the Department of Student Life. The course was the first of its kind in the country at the time, in 1993. Vicki loved her job and had wonderful colleagues. She also taught courses in freshmen seminar and Deaf heritage. After seventeen years of service, Vicki retired from NTID in 2001.

Vicki with her Deaf Women's Studies course students at NTID.

Once retired, she planned to return to being a homemaker now that her children had completed their college educations, and she looked forward to doing projects at home. This aspiration was short-lived, however, because Dr. Harold Mowl, RSD superintendent and CEO, approached her about applying for the open position as director of the RSD Outreach Center. She was hesitant since she wanted to retire, but decided to give it a chance. Years earlier, she had wanted to work in a school setting where she could provide resources to deaf children and especially their families. Here was her chance. She took the job and went on to have a very successful career at RSD. She was instrumental in developing a variety of outreach services for students and their families in other schools in the area ranging from Lake Ontario to the Southern Tier and from Batavia to near Syracuse. She oversaw sign language classes for parents, the Rochester After-School Academy, and the Sign Communication Proficiency Interview.

Additionally, along with the Monroe County Intervention Services and Marty Talbot of the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, Vicki developed, published, and widely distributed a comprehensive resource manual on services for families of children with hearing loss. After work, she continued teaching Deaf women’s studies as an adjunct faculty at NTID. After four years at RSD, she retired for the final time.

Vicki continued to be involved in the Deaf community after founding several organizations for deaf women and receiving numerous awards. She was the cofounder of Deaf Women of Rochester and Advocacy Services for Abused Deaf Victims in Rochester, now known as IGNITE. She served as vice president on the national board of Deaf Women United and was the editor for the ESNews, a publication organ of the ESAD in New York. She also served as the editor of the CID alumni association newsletter.

Vicki and her cofounders of ASADV. From left to right: Sharon Haynes, Martina Moore, Vicki, Beth Metlay, and Sharon Kocher.

As a student at RSD, Stefi was in a class of eight students in their senior year. It so happened that seven of them wanted to go to Gallaudet, even though NTID was also a good choice. But having lived in Rochester most of their lives, they wanted to go to a college away from home.

Stefi with Bernard at her graduation from RSD in 1994.

“I’m worried Gallaudet might not be a good fit for her,” Vicki said to me one day.

“It would be a challenge, true,” I said. Despite Stefi’s academic, emotional, and social challenges at RSD, we nevertheless supported her decision to go to Gallaudet with the hope that she’d receive strong support from her teachers and counselors. Most of her RSD classmates were admitted as regular freshman students, while Stefi and two others were placed in the Prep Year program at the Northwest Campus eight miles from Gallaudet’s main campus.

“This will be good!” Vicki said. We were thrilled Stefi would be in the smaller group, able to focus on her academic, social, and emotional needs. Over time, our hopes proved well-founded. The prep program allowed her to get into a comprehensive evaluation program that addressed her past struggles in school. Stefi had excellent teachers and counselors who helped her with her ADHD issues. And her participation in the varsity softball team on the main campus at Gallaudet gave her an outstanding balance between the academic, physical, and social aspects of college life.

Stefi.

Interestingly, after one year at Gallaudet, all of Stefi’s six classmates from RSD withdrew—some leaving college altogether, others transferring to other colleges. Stefi remained as the sole RSD student in her class during the second year. Since Gallaudet decided to close down the Northwest Campus and move all the prep students to the main campus, Stefi spent her second year on the main campus, which she loved. She continued to play on the varsity softball team. Still, the academic side of college continued to be a struggle for her, so she decided to transfer to NTID in her junior year, which we believed was another excellent decision for her. Although she continued to have struggles in academics, she loved being back home at NTID and happily participated in campus activities, including a sorority. She had an excellent counselor by the name of Lee Twyman, who gave her excellent emotional support as her academic and social advisor. At NTID, she completed her associate degree requirements in applied computer technology. As an alumna of both NTID and Gallaudet, she is fortunate to have friends with people from both colleges and continues to associate with them in the community. To this day, she loves camping with her friends.

Bernard graduated from Princeton in 1992 with a major in politics, a minor in history, and a secondary school teaching certificate. He student-taught at a Catholic all-girls school and did an internship one summer with Congresswoman Louise Slaughter’s office in Washington, DC. After graduation from college, Bernard went to Poland to teach English and spent several months traveling in Poland and Eastern Europe, where he took the opportunity to learn more about our family history. He then worked as a legislative assistant for New York Senator Mary Ellen Jones for a couple of years before attending the University of Buffalo School of Law, where he specialized in education law. He also did a year as a visiting student at Cornell Law School, studying labor and employment law.

Bernard graduating from Princeton after signing I-LOVE-YOU to us on his way to the stage.

NOT FAR FROM the camping sites where we’d parked our pop-up camper in our family camping heyday stands the beautiful Belhurst Castle, on the shores of Seneca Lake near Geneva, NY. The morning of Bernard’s wedding day, the rain poured down steadily, and Vicki and I glanced nervously out the window of our room, praying the rain would stop. The plan was for Bernard to marry his love, Stacy Lawrence, outside on the lawn at four o’clock.

As I tied my tie in the mirror, I winced at the unsightly bandage over my forehead. The day before, I’d stepped out of my shower, rushing to get ready for the rehearsal dinner, and I slipped and fell. When I shot my arm out, trying to grab one of the towel bars, it broke off the wall. My head hit the edge of the bathroom counter. The big gash on my forehead bled profusely, and Stefi rushed me to the ER, where they gave me stitches and covered the wound.

Little did I know that on the morning of the wedding, Stacy’s father was suffering a similar mishap. He stood up quickly after picking up something he’d dropped on the bathroom floor and bashed his forehead against the sink counter, also breaking open the skin on his forehead.

Bernard and Stacy's wedding at Belhurst Castle in Geneva, New York.

Miraculously, it stopped raining around noon and was sunny all afternoon. Since Stacy is Catholic, they decided to have both a rabbi and a priest officiate the wedding as a team. Father Tom Coughlin and Rabbi Alan Abarbanell led the beautiful ceremony in ASL. Sun glinted off the wet grass, Bernard and Stacy stood beneath the chuppah, and tears flowed down many faces. It was perfect, and everyone loved it.

After the ceremony, we all went inside (Stacy’s father and I identically bandaged) to the ballroom for a reception and dinner, and the rain started up again, big sheets of water pouring down, with thunder and lightning. Rain on a wedding day, a blessing for everyone, especially the bride and the groom.

Bernard was a practicing attorney for two private firms, Harter Secrest & Emery and Nixon Peabody, for a total of four years and then worked as an editor for three years at the publisher Thomson West (now Thomson Reuters), which publishes law books. He then served for five years as a labor relations attorney for a local board of cooperative educational services that oversaw twenty-two school districts. He worked closely with superintendents, school boards, and unions and is currently associate vice president of RIT for the Office of NTID Administration, a role he has had since 2011.

Bernard and Stacy, who is deaf, now have two adorable children, both hearing. Susan Juliette is a fourth-year student at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, where she was recruited as a coxswain of the varsity women’s rowing team and later selected as team captain in her second year. She completed her study abroad in Ecuador and Ireland.

Susan Juliette with her blackboard artwork in her parents' kitchen.

Susan Juliette as coxswain on her rowing team after winning a race on the Erie Canal.

Ethan is a high school senior and a budding baseball star who plays third base, my old position, and pitches. He also plays other infield positions. Pretty soon, he will be deciding where to go to college. Of course, Vicki and I are grandparents bursting with pride about their accomplishments.

Ethan and Aunt Stefi playing pool at House One at Gallaudet.

Ethan about to scoop a ball at third base.

With our grandchildren.