One reason I read so much as a child, was the lack of access to television, because there were no closed captions then. I would try to watch the popular programs of the seventies with my family. But more often than not, my persistent questioning "What's so funny? Why are you laughing?" or "What's happening?" would get me chased out of the room with, "Stop bothering us! We are trying to enjoy our programs!"
So off I would go to do my homework or read my books. What else could I do? I could not understand what was being said on television. All the while, I was chafing because I was missing out on the experience of watching TV with my family, plus I would not be able to chat about the programs with the other kids in school the next day.
I tried to learn to lipread some of the characters on television, with minimal success. Some were easier to lipread than others. For example, I found I could understand Gary Coleman, but not his TV father, Mr. Drummond.
So what could a deaf Seventies kid watch on television? The menu of choices was severely limited because few programs had open captions (most hearing people did not want open captions on their programs). One option was the Captioned ABC News, which aired at the unholy hour of six-thirty a.m. in the morning, or late at night long after a little girl should have gone to bed. When I was still in elementary school, I was getting up early in the morning or staying up late to watch the news. Some PBS programs were available with open captions. One children's program that I was able to watch was Once Upon a Classic, a program I really enjoyed and wish was still on television. Another children's program that sometimes had open captions was I think, Zoom. I vaguely recall watching open captioned ABC Weekend Specials. I depended on open captioned broadcasts of Masterpiece Theater for my evening entertainment.
All in all, my TV diet was very limited compared to what was available to hearing kids. Then one day in 1979 I was reading the newspaper and there was a small article announcing the coming of closed captioned television. There would be decoders available! I was so excited that I immediately began saving to buy a decoder. It took me six months to save enough babysitting and allowance money to buy my first closed captioned decoder.
At last the day came when we could pick up the decoder from Sears. The parent who went with me to pick it up burst into tears when I finally had it in my hands. To this day I don't know if the tears were tears of joy, or -- more likely -- tears of relief at the thought that I would no longer have to badger everyone with questions about what was going on on the small screen.
As I settled down to watch my first closed captioned program (Barney Miller) thoughts of a world in which everything was captioned danced in my head. Little did I know that the future held years of advocacy for more closed captions by the deaf/hoh community and that I would grow up to become the webmaster of a site on closed captioning.
