Rice
One of Daisy Rice’s friends had a story she said summed up Rice’s approach to life pretty well.
Audrey Kern said Rice, who had always had hearing impairment, one time had a chance to get surgery at a clinic in the Midwest that might improve her hearing. The downside was the procedure could also make her deaf.
Unfortunately, the worst happened and Rice became totally deaf after the surgery.
Kern said she went to the train station in Santa Fe to pick Rice up, not quite sure what to expect.
“When she got off the train, she was helping a young lady who was coming to Highland University with her luggage, and just being as helpful as she could be. She wasn’t feeling sorry for herself at all,” Kern said.
Rice died last month at the age of 85.
The longtime Las Vegas, N.M., resident was an advocate for the disabled in her own community and nationally.
Rice was instrumental in starting a program for communication disorders at the New Mexico Behavioral Health Institute in Las Vegas.
Her daughter Linda Beck said Rice volunteered at the institute.
“One time she was helping patients plant flowers, and she realized some of them were having difficulty not because they were mentally disabled, but because they couldn’t hear,” Beck said. “She started helping, talking to staff people, and she wrote a grant to start the communication disorders department. She worked with a lot of deaf, blind and aphasic people.”
Mia Lundergan, a speech pathologist in Las Vegas, worked with Rice at the institute for a while.
“It was very rewarding. Working in a mental hospital is a little scary, but Daisy was so matter of fact about the patients and their needs, it made it easy for the rest of us. She just had a very forthright, very dedicated attitude,” Lundergan said.
She said Rice’s own hearing problems never seemed to be an issue.
“Daisy really felt like she had been given so much. She didn’t see herself as someone who had something taken away,” Lundergan.
Lundergan said Rice helped set up closed captioned films for the hearing impaired community in Las Vegas.
“Back in those days it was really difficult to obtain materials for the blind and deaf. She took her time to do the legwork to find out about captioned films, so that not just the deaf community but older people and hard of hearing people, could have films specifically captioned,” Lundergan said.
Rice’s work extended beyond New Mexico.
In 1976, she was appointed as a representative from New Mexico to the President’s Committee on the Employment of the Handicapped. In 1977, she was appointed to the first White House Conference on Handicapped Individuals, which conceived and wrote the first drafts of the laws that protect and support the disabled.
She also wrote many articles that appeared in the Alexander Graham Bell Society Journal.
She was a featured speaker at the World Conference on Deafness in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1978.
In 1981, Rice was named the Quota International Deaf Woman of the Year for her “outstanding contribution and personal achievement in Education and Communication.” The People to People Committee on Disability awarded Rice the Kathleen C. Arneson Award in 1995.
Beck said her mother worked hard at home, too. Now a musician and a singer, Beck credited Rice with allowing her to follow hear dream.
“Probably the greatest gift she ever gave me is she used to take me to concerts and the opera. And she couldn’t hear it, but she wanted me to have the pleasure. She said, ‘Well I can still enjoy watching.’ And she never made me feel guilty that I could hear and she couldn’t,” Beck said. “She just wanted to participate in everything and didn’t have a ‘poor me’ syndrome.”
— This article appeared on page F3 of the Albuquerque Journal
Reprint story -- Email the reporter at jrodriguez@abqjournal.com.
