The Adventures of Buddy Schmitz - Tapa blanda

About "The Adventures of Buddy Schmitz" ... Joe "Buddy" Schmitz was born deaf in rural Nebraska, the youngest of four children. The first part of "The Adventures of Buddy Schmitz" is a memoir of his growing up in the 1940s at his home on the family farm, in a world that offered everything a boy could want, including plenty of time and room to run around or ride bikes with his friends, a nearby swimming hole with a rope swing, and older siblings that doted on him. Different than many other memoirs of that time is that Buddy only lived with his parents during summers and the occasional weekend during the school year, since, like other deaf children of that time, he lived at the school for the deaf during the school year. It's also interesting that few of the hearing people closest to Buddy used formal sign language. However, he and his family communicated well by means of "home signs", gestures he and his family invented over time to meet their needs. The memoir, however, is not about growing up deaf; it's about growing up in a German-American family in rural Nebraska without electricity, indoor plumbing, or other modern conveniences. Instead of a refrigerator, they had an ice box for keeping food cold and a trip to the ice house in town on a hot summer day made up for the inconvenience (for Buddy at least, if not for his parents). The second half of the book builds on the memoir with a fictional mystery that Buddy and his three closest hearing friends solve together, the richest (and least liked) man in town disappears one day and the local townspeople assume that he has taken unfair advantage of someone for the last time, that someone has been pushed too far. Buddy and his friends are shocked to find that the adults are jumping to conclusions about what happened and who is responsible for the disappearance. Fortunately, the children figure out what really happened, saving their friends and surprising their proud parents. This book makes an engros

Now a retired teacher of the Deaf, Joe is married with two adult children (both Deaf) and three grandchildren (two of whom are Deaf). He lives in northern California, where he continues to enjoy teaching American Sign Language to hearing college students at his local community college, where he uses stories from his childhood to entertain and expand students' understanding of ASL.