Hinrichs, Barbara Ann

Born as Barbara Ann Smith; deaf at 8 months from spinal meningitis. Daughter of a U.S. Army career man, she lived in various places in the U.S. and Germany while growing up. Her parents rejected signing schools for her, although she knew from personal experience that signing was best for her. At first she went to the William S. Baer School for Crippled Children, an oral day school at Baltimore, MD, beginning at age 6, then about age 11 to the private (hearing) Friends School in Baltimore. She continued to battle with her parents for going to signing deaf schools and to clubs for the deaf. She skipped 9th grade and attended 10th grade at a private (hearing) boarding school in CT. Her father then transferred to Germany in 1946, and she attended schools for hearing American children in Frankfurt and, briefly, in Berlin. Then she attended the Kendall School for the Deaf, but did not graduate because, to please her father, she went to work in the Federal Civil Service as a clerk/typist in various U.S. locations for 37 years, retiring in 1985. She then worked for the Colorado Clearing House for the Hearing Impaired, then at the CO Center on Deafness, taking final retirement in 1998. She met her first husband, Dick Anderson, at a hard-of-hearing club in Denver, CO, and was married to him for 14 1/2 years. She remarried to a deaf man, Rea Hinrichs.