Out of Their Silence

Caldera Press is proud to announce its first book publication:


Out of Their Silence:
A Memoir of Philip and Julia


by
Luella Dorothy Heupel Cordier
&
Kristine Cordier Karnezis

"When I got a chance to go to college at Washington, D.C., so far from home (Helena, Montana) I grabbed it. I had a wild time in college with so many boys rivaling for my attention -- especially your dad."

So writes Julia many years later in a letter to her oldest daughter, Luella.
Julia was a saucy young girl who became deaf at the age of three but continued speaking and enjoying her Montana childhood until her mother died and an oppressive stepmother entered her life. When a teacher discovers Julia's deafness, she is sent to the Montana School for the Deaf and Blind - a welcome respite from "Stepma's" harsh treatment. Thus Julia's delight when she subsequently wins a scholarship to Gallaudet College in Washington, D.C., the world's only college for the deaf.

Philip had already been at Gallaudet for three years when Julia arrived. Also deaf from early childhood disease before the 1900s, Philip had spent his childhood on the great plains of North Dakota, eldest son in a large family of German immigrants, and attended the North Dakota School for the Deaf.

Philip is smitten with Julia from the beginning and courts her for two years before their elopement causes a scandal at Gallaudet just days before Philip is to graduate. Julia's diary tells part of the story. Photographs Philip took as campus photographer tell the story visually. Years later, Philip writes about it for their 50th anniversary celebration in 1968.

Gregarious and outgoing, Philip and Julia were at home in deaf communities wherever they lived and traveled-from Akron, Ohio, where they raised their own family of five children, to Southern California, where they retired in 1959.

Out of Their Silence captures Philip and Julia's voices as they speak to us as young college students, parents, and grandparents. We also hear their daughter Lou's voice as she experienced what it meant to be a child of deaf parents. These voices are enriched by over 100 photographs, many taken by Philip.

ISBN 0-9770608-0-2
ISBN 13: 978-0-9770608-0-1

About the Authors

Luella Dorothy Heupel Cordier, the second child and oldest daughter of Philip and Julia, frequently wrote about her parents throughout her career as a journalist. After her retirement as Editor of the Kent-Ravenna Record-Courier in the early 1990s, she recorded many stories about Philip and Julia and about her childhood with deaf parents. She lives in Akron, Ohio.

The book remained unfinished for many years until Lou asked her oldest daughter, Kristine Cordier Karnezis, to help her finish it. An attorney and professional legal writer, Kris worked with her mother's manuscript, solicited stories from Philip and Julia's other children and their many grandchildren, re-read Julia's diary and Julia and Philip's letters for additional material, sorted through old photographs, and shepherded the book through the publication process. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

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