Every Sunday the San Francisco Chronicle has a feature, Wayback Machine, that runs stories from its past. In an article dated February 25, 1934 there is an announcement of a silent movie, “Eskimo,” showing in town. The Chronicle would be hosting 100 deaf persons. During the previous decades movies were silent and had superimposed titles—open captioning, if you will. I think I had briefly realized that those silents were accessible to the Deaf and hard of hearing, but hadn’t really thought about the implications. Going to the movies during the teens and twenties must have been part of the Deaf experience.
On this day after the Oscars and the lack of news coverage of the Jerry Lewis protest I was struck that in 1934 there was more news about us in the paper than today.