New York Times
Item Information
- Title:
- New York Times
- Description:
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Mrs. Anne Sullivan Macy, 70, who for forty-nine years was the companion-teacher of Helen Keller, died this morning in the home she shared with Miss Keller and Miss Polly Thomson, who is Miss Keller's secretary, at 71-11 112th St., Forest Hills, Queens. Mrs. Macy became ill last summer and seemed to be recovering when she suffered a setback last week. She had been in a coma for the last six days. Miss Keller and Miss Thomson were at Mrs. Macy's bedside when she died. Miss Keller was overwhelmed with grief. "My teacher is free at last from pain and blindness," she said. "I pray for strength to endure the silent dark until she smiles upon me again. She has gone from me for a little while, but I shall feel her presence anew when my eyes are blessed with light, my ears saved unto harmony, and my imprisoned life set free." Anne Sullivan Macy's life was inextricably woven into that of Miss Keller. The results of Mrs. Macy's work with Miss Keller, who blind and deaf from childhood, became the world's marvel, are better known than Mrs. Macy herself. Mrs. Macy's life, nevertheless, was a thrilling and heroic one. A few years back Mrs. Macy lost her own sight, which had been dim since childhood. And Helen Keller, whom Mrs. Macy had taught to read and to speak through her finger tips, returned the service and kept the world alive for her friend by teaching her Braille and reading to her with her magically fluent finger tips. On April 23, 1935, hope dawned again for Mrs, Macy, Dr, Conrad Berens, noted specialist, had decided to operate on her her left eye. The operation was performed at Doctors Hospital. It involved the removal of a cataract and the correcting of other defects which had been with Mrs. Macy since childhood. Saw Again It was a difficult and delicate surgical feat, but eight days later, the bandages were removed from Mrs. Macy's eye. After two weeks she was reported still improving. Less than a month after the operation she returned home at 71-11 112th St.. Forest Hills, which she occupied with Miss Keller. She had regained her sight and her physician informed her she would be able to see better than ever before. The next year Mrs. Macy and Miss Keller received word that on October 27, 1936, the birthday of Theodore Roosevelt, they would be awarded Roosevelt medals "for co-operative achievement of heroic character and far-reaching significance - the release and development of an imprisoned personality which, by its emergence and its effective activity, had become a symbol of hope and an inspiration to effort." Mrs. Macy at that time was 70 years old. Miss Keller once wrote, "What a blind person needs is not a teacher but another self." With the death of Mrs. Macy, Miss Keller has lost that other self. Began in 1887 Mrs. Macy came into Helen Keller's life March 3, 1887, when Miss Keller, daughter of Southern aristocracy, was not quite 7. The little girl's violence of rebellion was overcome by Anne Sullivan's sympathy, fortified by patience and authority. Those qualities which Mrs. Macy had emerged from her own terrible struggle. She was born in 1866 in Massachusetts, the daughter of outcast immigrants whose own memories were terrible with pictures of the great Irish famine of 1847. Her mother was crippled and tubercular, and her father a drunkard. Abandoned by him, on her mother's death, she was dumped into Tewksbury Almshouse. Her sight was dim but no one bothered for years, when a priest took her to Boston for the first of innumerable operations on her eyes. When investigators came to the almshouse for an investigation of its horrors a girl followed the party from ward to ward and at last, when the men were standing by the gate about to go, hurried blindly into the midst, saying, "I want to go to school." The girl was Anne Sullivan. A little later, at 14, she entered the most famous of all the blind schools, the Perkins Institution. She remained there for six years when she went South to teach Helen Keller. From the letters that have been preserved by her friends, it is clear that the young girl who never met a normal, happy child until she was 20, groped through her adversity to educational principles that later were to inspire the work of Madame Montessori for defective children, and more recently have become the cornerstones of modern education. All through her life she was content that the limelight should fall on Helen Keller. Miss Keller always came first. Even when she married the brilliant young teacher and critic, John Macy, it was understood by all that her work for Helen Keller must come first. Through that marriage and after it, Helen Keller remained the center of her life. Funeral services will be conducted at 2 P. M. Thursday in Park Avenue Presbyterian Church in Manhattan by the Rev. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick.
- Name on Item:
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New York Times
- Date:
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1936
- Format:
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Newspapers
- Genre:
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Clippings
- Location:
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Perkins School for the Blind
Samuel P. Hayes Research Library - Collection (local):
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Condolence Letters and Clippings
- Subjects:
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Blind
Perkins School for the Blind
- Permalink:
- https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/b8516394g
- Terms of Use:
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Samuel P. Hayes Research Library, Perkins School for the Blind, Watertown, MA
Contact host institution for more information.
- Notes:
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Newspaper clipping from the New York Times. Headline: Anne Macy Dies; Helen Keller Loses Teacher- Two Women Were Close Companions For the Last 49 Years- Stricken Last Summer- Tutor in Coma for Six Days - Her Pupil Overwhelmed with Grief
- Accession #:
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AG88-n-2