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Elizabeth Helm Nitchie
American educator and expert on lip reading From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Elizabeth Logan Helm Nitchie (May 2, 1880 – February 16, 1961) was an American educator and expert on lip reading.
Early life and education
Elizabeth Helm was born in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, the daughter of William Logan Helm and Florence Murray Helm.[1] Her father died when she was a little girl. She was from the same extended family as John L. Helm, governor of Kentucky, and Benjamin Hardin Helm, a Confederate Army general during the American Civil War. (Her grandfather Henry Benjamin Helm was the first cousin of the governor.)[2]
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Career
Nitchie worked as a stenographer as a young woman.[3] In 1917, Nitchie succeeded her late husband as principal of the New York School for the Hard of Hearing, later known as the Nitchie School of Lip-Reading,[4] in New York City.[5][6] She frequently spoke and wrote about lip-reading in the 1920s and 1930s.[3][7][8] "My own greatest handicap in teaching lip reading to the deaf is that I myself have normal hearing," she told a Brooklyn Daily Eagle interviewer in 1927. "All my teachers are either totally or partially deaf, and the general feeling is that only a deaf person can understand the attitude of the deaf and be a successful teacher."[9] She retired from running the school in 1928.[3]
In her later career Nitchie worked in advertising at The New York Times, and ran a stenographic bureau. She taught lip-reading to children in St. Louis in 1937.[3]
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Publications
Personal life
Elizabeth Logan Helm married Edward Bartlett Nitchie in 1908.[13] They had a son, Edward Jr.[14] Her husband, who was deaf, died in 1917,[6] and she died in 1961, at the age of 80, in New York City.[15] Her grave is in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
References
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