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VOICE ONE:
From that time on Helen left the house each day, searching for things to learn. Each new name brought new thoughts. Everything she touched seemed alive. One day, Helen remembered a doll she had broken. She searched everywhere for the pieces. She tried to put the pieces together but could not. She understood what she had done and was not happy. Miss Sullivan taught Helen many things -- to read and write, and even to use a typewriter. But most important, she taught Helen how to think.
VOICE TWO:
For the next three years, Helen learned more and more new words. All day Miss Sullivan kept touching Helen's hand, spelling words that gave Helen a language. In time, Helen showed she could learn foreign languages. She learned Latin, Greek, French and German. Helen was able to learn many things, not just languages.
She was never willing to leave a problem unfinished, even difficult problems in mathematics. One time, Miss Sullivan suggested leaving a problem to solve until the next day. But Helen wanted to keep trying. She said, "I think it will make my mind stronger to do it now."
VOICE ONE:
Helen traveled a lot with her family or alone with Miss Sullivan. In eighteen eighty-eight, Helen, her mother and Miss Sullivan went to Boston, Massachusetts. They visited the Perkins Institution where Miss Sullivan had learned to teach. They stayed for most of the summer at the home of family friends near the Atlantic Ocean. In Helen's first experience with the ocean, she was caught by a wave and pulled under the water. Miss Sullivan rescued her. When Helen recovered, she demanded, "Who put salt in the water?"
VOICE TWO:
Three years after Helen started to communicate with her hands, she began to learn to speak as other people did. She never forgot these days. Later in life, she wrote: "No deaf child can ever forget the excitement of his first word. Only one who is deaf can understand the loving way I talked to my dolls, to the stones, to birds and animals. Only the deaf can understand how I felt when my dog obeyed my spoken command." Those first days when Helen Keller developed the ability to talk were wonderful. But they proved to be just the beginning of her many successes.
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VOICE ONE:
You have been listening to the first part of the story of Helen Keller. It was written by Katherine Clarke. Your narrators were Sarah Long, Ray Freeman and Shirley Griffith. Listen again next week at this time to People in America, a program in Special English on the Voice of America.