tPARA lPAR@ ` ┤TEXT ` ªMacy, Anne Sullivan1866╨1936educatorBorn in Feeding Hills, Massachusetts, on April 14, 1866, Joanna Sullivan was known throughout her life as Anne or Annie. When she was eight her mother died, and two years later her father deserted the three children. Anne, whom an earlier illness had left nearly blind, and her lame brother were placed in the state almshouse in Tewksbury, where the brother died a short time later. In October 1880 Anne entered the Perkins Institution for the Blind. Surgery the next year restored some sight. She graduated from Perkins at the head of her class in 1886. In March 1887, after several months of studying the records of Samuel Gridley Howe╒s work with Laura Bridgman, Sullivan arrived in Tuscumbia, Alabama, to become governess to six-year-old Helen Keller, who had been left blind, deaf, and mute by an illness contracted at the age of nineteen months. Since that time she had grown into an undisciplined, willful, and ill tempered child with no means of contact with the outer world but touch. Anne Sullivan╒s first task was to tame the child. She then began attempting to convey to her the idea of communication by finger spelling in her palm the names of objects. Great patience and unshakable determination were required for the job. One day in April Helen suddenly made the connection between water being pumped over her hand and the name w-a-t-e-r being spelled out simultaneously. Her progress was rapid thereafter. In 1888 the two began spending periods at the Perkins Institution, and Anne Sullivan subsequently accompanied Helen to the Wright╨Humason School in New York City, the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, and finally Radcliffe College, where she painstakingly spelled out the lectures to Helen and read to her for hours each day. After Helen╒s graduation in 1904 they settled on a farm given by a benefactor in Wrentham, Massachusetts. In May 1905 Anne Sullivan married John A. Macy, a younger Harvard instructor who had worked with Helen Keller on a book. The marriage ultimately proved unhappy, and from 1913 they were separated. Anne Macy continued as Helen Keller╒s constant companion at home and on national and later worldwide lecture tours on the Chautauqua and vaudeville circuits and later for the American Foundation for the Blind. Her frequent overexertions taxed her strength, however, and as her health declined so did her always delicate spirits. By 1935 she was completely blind. She died in Forest Hills, Long Island, New York, on October 20, 1936. Her achievement in teaching Helen Keller, often minimized by uninformed commentators who celebrated only Keller╒s miraculous abilities, was given its full due in the pupil╒s book Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy, 1955, and was the subject of a highly successful Broadway play, The Miracle Worker, by William Gibson, 1959, which was also made into a motion picture.Movie: Macy with Helen Keller in the 1960 documentary ╥In Her Story.╙ vstyl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ ( !I Z 5¬ [ !I ║ !I ▐ ╚ !I !I ▐ " !I y 5¬ z !I
