Dora Bradley

By Emmalie Vance

It sounds like a gun went off.

There it goes again.

Over and over the sound continues to make its way into Dora Bradley’s ears. She ignores it at first but after a few minutes she interrupts herself and asks what that sound is. Taking a break from jotting a few notes in my notebook I look around the room. I see computers on the far wall and behind me but no one is working on them. I hear people opening and closing doors outside the hall but nothing too loud. Then I hear the printer in the far corner as its inner workings smash against each other as it pulls a piece of paper through then doubles back with a loud crash to retrieve the next piece. I listen to this process for a few seconds, grab Dora’s attention then point to the object with a slight squint as if to say, “that?” She spins around in her chair, takes a long look at the printer and laughs. Turning back around, she nods in recognition and makes large explosions with her hands in the air. To me, the printer was just an ambient sound but to Dora, who is almost completely deaf, it sounded like a gunshot.

Bradley, an American Sign Language (ASL) professor at SUNY Plattsburgh and mother of 6, was born hearing but at the age of 18 months she contracted spinal meningitis, which attacked the nerves in her brain that allow her to hear, rendering them useless.

“I wear hearing aid,” she said, “but I can only hear environment sounds.”

Sounds such as a phone ringing, the printer sounding in the far corner or the sound of a voice are recognizable to Bradley, but just because she can hear it doesn’t mean she can distinguish it.

“I can hear a person’s voice as they talk, cry or scream but I won’t know if a person calls my name,” Bradley says.

At home, Bradley enlists the help of several aids such as special flashing lights or objects that vibrate so she can recognize when the phone rings or when someone is at the door. Almost every room in the house is equipped with a flashing light except the bathroom and her alarm clock vibrates instead of rings.

The rest of Bradley’s family—five sons, one daughter and her husband, Dr. Charles Bradley—can all hear normally.

“We’re pretty much a normal family,” Charles said, “with the exception that we all sign.”

All six of Bradley’s children learned ASL before they could speak, making it their first language, but Charles learned sign language in college, which is also where he met Bradley for the first time.

Charles was attending graduate school at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) when a certain job opportunity caught his attention. Students would spend eight weeks over the summer on campus learning ASL and living with Deaf students. Once the training was finished, they would be able to accompany a Deaf student into their class and interpret lectures for them.

“It was more or less an immersion program,” Charles said. “It was a much better way to learn the language than taking the language for only a few semesters.”

A year after Charles started with the interpreter program, Dora came to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf on the RIT campus where they met and fell in love.

After a few moves from New York to Missouri, Illinois and North Carolina, Charles and Dora finally settled back in New York’s North Country and Charles’s hometown of Plattsburgh. She had been working at a mainstream school as a teaching aide before she was asked by her friend Mary Beth Napoli to teach ASL III at SUNY Plattsburgh.

“If students sign up for a class with Jill, myself and Dora,” Napoli said, “they are exposed to several different aspects of the Deaf community because Jill is a Child of Deaf Adults, or CODA, I am Hard of Hearing and Dora is Deaf. We are glad she joined our team.”

“I've been teaching my language my whole life but teaching at a university was huge step for me,” Dora said. “Of course, I was nervous on my first day of teaching.”

Dora began teaching only third level ASL in 2006 but took on a second level course in 2008.

The was one specific event in Dora’s life that inspired her to teach:

“My daughter was five and invited her classmates for her birthday party,” Dora said. “No one came. When she went to school on Monday she asked her friends why they didn’t come to her party and they said it was because my deafness was spreadable. Since then I have educated people and spread awareness.”