LBJ granddaughter helps rededicate NTID

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With touching recollections Friday of the beginnings of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology, officials rededicated the groundbreaking institute to celebrate its first 50 years.

The event capped months of anniversary events, for both NTID and RIT, including a reunion of more than 3,500 NTID alumni last summer.

Echoes of the past ran throughout Friday morning’s ceremony, starting with video of the late Professor Robert F. Panara – the first deaf faculty member the institute hired – performing the poem he wrote about NTID. And it continued with a tribute by Lucinda Robb, granddaughter of Lyndon B. Johnson, the president who signed enabling legislation into law in 1965 to create the institute, and of former first lady Lady Bird Johnson, who visited the campus in 1974 to dedicate the NTID building named for her late husband.

The ceremony was held in the theater named for Panara, which is inside Lyndon Baines Johnson Hall.

“He would have been glad to be here because — to be completely honest with you — he did appreciate when people named things after him,”  she said. LBJ used to give a Texas longhorn steer to friends who honored him by naming their sons Lyndon, she said.

Robb brought instead a pen from those remaining that the president had had engraved so he could hand them out to friends. Unlike the pen used to sign the legislation that created NTID, this one didn’t have to be archived at the university, she said, and could be used if it still works.

Robb also helped unveil a facsimile of a plaque commemorating the rededication that will be mounted next to the one mounted on the building when it opened.

NTID President Gerard Buckley shared some of LBJ’s history as it connected with the deaf world. LBJ’s childhood neighbor and lifelong friend, Homer Thornberry, had deaf parents; LBJ learned to fingerspell so he could communicate with them. Thornberry was elected from Texas to the U.S. House in 1948 to take the seat LBJ vacated when he moved up to the Senate.

At least two alumni who attended the original dedication when they were students were present for the  rededication ceremony, including Frank S. Sklarsky, now a member of the board of trustees at RIT, and Robert Sidansky, a retired college administrator from California who was president of the NTID Student Congress during Lady Bird Johnson’s visit.

Sidansky recalled accompanying the first lady and her entourage during her visit. As he related his memories, a slide on a screen above him pictured a young man with a full head of chin-length, dark hair and a brass-buttoned, double-breasted blazer. He was holding the official visitor’s log of NTID so Johnson could filled the first line with her signature. Sidansky described the first lady planting a tree outside the building and how she politely greeted him with his full name when they were introduced at the beginning of her campus tour and personably said farewell several hours later, calling him “Bob.”

She shook his hand, and signed “thank you” as she prepared to leave, Sidansky said. Lady Bird Johnson taught him a lesson about remembering people’s names that he tried to emulate as a leader throughout his career, he said.

Two deaf students – RIT Student President Robert Moakley (who wears a cochlear implant) and NTID Student Congress President Taylor Repetski — were the last to offer remarks, in a nod to the institution’s future. Repetski said she and the congress’ vice president have vowed to be present at NTID’s 100^th anniversary in 50 years.

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