Stuff You Should Know - Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan: Miracle is Right

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan were one of the most amazing non-magical duos in history. Imagine living trapped in your own mind – unable to see or hear – and then imagine learning to read, traveling the world, and becoming an ambassador of peace.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. I think this is a long time coming edition. Yeah, I mean, how have we?

not covered Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller at this point. It's kind of weird. I don't know, but this is the kind of thing that's like, yeah, we still got a few years left in this, you know? Totally. And we're not scraping the bottom of any barrels here. No. We're not even dipping into the top of the barrel yet, everybody. It's still full of pickles. That's right. Or cream that has risen to the top. Oh, that's even better. Pickles and cream. Right, but we're talking about Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan. You probably know who these people are, but if you don't just very quickly, we should say, that Ann Sullivan was a teacher of a young girl and others along the way, but mainly known for her work with a young girl starting from the age of six named Helen Keller, who lost her sight and hearing as a 19-month-old from what is what is.

likely bacterial meningitis, even though we don't know for sure. And it's one of the great inspiring stories of all time, and especially one that came early on to show to the rest of the world who at the time didn't think that people that had these kinds of afflictions like blindness and being deaf. Like if you had both of those, they were basically like, we're going to send you to an institution because we can't teach you anything, you know. You can't see, you can't hear. We're sorry. Yeah. And at those institutions, they likely died. A lot of them died

just from neglect or abuse or all sorts of different reasons just because they were unable to see or hear. And by this time, there was education for the deaf. There was education for the blind. But like you said, the deaf blind were considered,

like there's just no way you can teach them. And the reason why is because the only senses they have are touch, smell, and taste. That's about it. And they're just like, we don't know how to teach anybody by taste. Like, you just can't do anything with them. So when you really start to put yourself in Helen Keller's position,

totally cut off by the world or from the world, it's just mind-boggling and as inspiring as it gets to stop and think about what Anne Sullivan actually did. And then what Helen Keller was able to do after Anne Sullivan did her thing initially. Yeah, for sure. one of the great relationships and partnerships of history, of world history, and certainly American history, there had been some schools in place,

and there was one recorded deafblind person who had learned language. It was a woman named Laura Bridgman. In the 1830s, she worked with a guy named Samuel Gridley Howell, and he founded what's known as the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, which will come into play in this story. But he taught her, and this is what Anne Sullivan would teach Helen Kelly. or something called the manual alphabet,

which is, as Lisa Simpson would say, tapa, tapa, tapa, tapa, where letters correspond to taps on a palm, and that is how you, you know, very sort of slowly teach somebody language without, with them not being able to see or hear. Yeah, they figured out how to teach somebody language just through touch,

which is impressive in and of itself. But the fact that Laura Bridgman had learned that, It was a, it was considered like a curiosity and anomaly. Like, this is not, like, that didn't extend to the idea that you could teach deafblind people anything generally, right? Yeah, and we should say that Anne Sullivan was vision impaired herself. And that's how she ended up knowing Laura Bridgman from that Perkins School for the Blind. Right. And let's talk a little bit about Anne Sullivan.

She had an extraordinarily rough life leading up to about age 14. She was born in 1866 to parents. Her mother was an invalid. Her father abandoned them right after her mother died when she was, I think, eight. By this time she had lost most of her vision. She had suffered an eye infection. And so she and her brother, Jimmy, they have no, she's eight. And now she's in charge of her little brother.

She's blind. And there's no one helping them any longer. There's no one looking out for them. It's up to her to look out for the both of them in any way she can. And so they had to move into a public poorhouse in Tewksbury. That's right. And we should point out she's vision impaired at this point. I think until she was an adult, she suffered full blindness.

Okay. But, you know, rough life. This poor house was awful. There were rumors and reports of cannibalism at the shelter. It was filthy. They were constantly just threatened. and endanger, you know, health-wise and otherwise. And there was an inspection at one point of a state board of charities,

and a little teenage Anne Sullivan actually convinced them. She had no formal education, convinced a government official who was on site there to send her via tax dollars to that Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, where she enrolled and would eventually graduate as valid Victorian of her class. Yeah, and just to get that point across, When she was 14 is when she was sent to Perkins school. She lived in a poor house for six years. Her brother died four months after they moved there when he contracted tuberculosis.

She'd had an incredibly rough life. Her first formal education came at age 14 when she went to Perkins, and six years later, she was valedictorian. Again, despite being unsighted. Like her story in and of itself is incredibly inspiring, but it just picks up from there. Yeah, for sure. And the reason we sort of mentioned the Perkins stuff, because like I said, that's where she met Laura Bridgman.

And notably, that's where she learned that manual alphabet because she wanted to converse with Laura Bridgman. So Keller, like I said, probably lost her sight and her hearing from bacterial meningitis is what they suspect. Yeah. She was born in 1880. She was completely developmentally on track. when this happened at 19 months old. So her life just took a really unfortunate turn. And so from the moment that she was 19 months old

until she was six, she was, you know, what some people might call it in a trap state. She was just living in her mind, unable to communicate. Her parents, you know, she reacted very frustratingly, probably not surprisingly, and it got increasingly violent with her tantrums. And by the time she was six, her parents were like, I don't know that we can handle this safely anymore.

We don't want to institutionalize her. So they reached out somehow. I think her mom had just remembered, like, reading something about Laura Bridgman in that Perkins school. And I think this is before Helen was even born. And so they, I guess, hopefully put in a phone call to Alexander Grand Bell and said, first of all, thank you for this invention. This is pretty cool that we can call you the inventor.

He said, bully, bully. He said, bully, bully. And then they said, but I know you're active in deaf education, and I know your son-in-law runs the Perkins School. What do you think about our daughter? It's a pretty tough case. Yeah, and he was like, I think this is just the job for the Perkins School. So he pulled some strings.

And that kind of makes it sound like the Perkins School's in Massachusetts. Helen Keller's family was from Alabama. It sounds like her family was wealthy. They were not. Her father was a captain. in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. After the Civil War, her family was left poor. So they were not wealthy.

I think they had land and everything like that. But she was not nearly as destitute as Anne Sullivan. But I think it's worth the point that as she grew and started living her life, she supported herself. She didn't come from a wealthy family. Yeah, for sure. In the meantime, while, you know, when she gets sent to school there, Anne Sullivan had already gotten a job offer from Perkins.

She was a great student there. She knew that manual sign language, and they said, well, you should just work here. And so on March 3, 1886, Helen Keller would meet Ann Sullivan and later call that her soul's birthday. Yeah, so Anne Sullivan was basically sent by Perkins to Tuscbia, where the Kellers lived in Alabama. And when she got there, I mean, almost immediately, Helen threw a tanning. Yeah. So Anne Sullivan got to see firsthand right off the bat like, this is going to be tough. This girl has learned because her parents are letting her do this.

She's learned to express herself through violence, through anger, through intimidation, through the threat of throwing another tantrum if she doesn't get her way or she can't, someone's not listening to her or something. And Anne Sullivan was a scrappy Irish lass who, identified very quickly, like, if I'm going to get through this girl, that stuff has to end immediately. Yeah. And so they were like, she spent about the first week, essentially physically overpowering Helen

whenever she threw a tantrum. And by the end of the week had lost a tooth. I think she'd been punched many times. They went through it. But apparently, after just a week, Helen learned, like, okay, this lady's not going to put up with that. I should probably try a different tack. And it seems like from that point, she had gained Helen's trust and now they could start with Helen's education. Yeah, I mean, you think about it. Helen Keller didn't, she couldn't even figure out who this

person was all of a sudden, this new person in her life. Yeah. Who is now physically restraining her. I mean, that was sort of Sullivan's philosophy. She talked about the gateway was obedience. basically. Eventually, you'll get to love and knowledge, but at first I have to have to sit on this girl. Right. You know? Yeah. I mean, she's like she broke a tooth from me. Give me a break. Yeah, well, very encouragingly, and this is something as someone who's always believed in the healing powers of the great outdoors, getting Helen outside was a very big deal and a very good sort of second step because they could explore nature. It calmed Helen down immediately, and that's where her senses of, of smell and touch could really be engaged.

She later said, Helen did, that if you were deaf and blind, then out in the sun is the best place to be. Oh, man. Because you can really feel it, you know? Yeah. So it didn't really occur to me. Like, I knew that this is a really big deal that Anne Sullivan was able to teach Helen Keller, but it didn't occur to me until I was researching this,

that that wasn't even the first step. The first step, like, if you're teaching a kid something, they're in school, you're saying, okay, now we're going to learn the alphabet. Here's the alphabet. This is what you use the alphabet for to spell words. This is what this word means for this, right? This is the word for this thing.

They know that you're teaching them. So they're understanding that. They're accepting that information. And that's still hard. It is. That's hard in and of itself. Yeah. There was no way for Anne Sullivan to explain to Helen Keller.

I'm here to teach you language. Right. She had to essentially figure out how to break through to Helen Keller so that Helen Keller realized what was going on now and could take it from there, could start to learn. So there was this enormous obstacle before Helen Keller could even begin to learn, which was to understand that she was being taught. Yeah. To understand that what she was being taught was language that things had words associated with them. This was brand new to her because, again, she was 19 months old when she lost her sight and hearing, so she hadn't learned this stuff yet. Yeah, I mean, it's astounding that this worked, quite frankly.

And it's due to the hard work. And as we'll see, the fact that Helen Keller, it turns out, was brilliant. So she starts tap-a-tap-a-tap-a-tap-a-tap-a-tap-d-a-d-l. Every chance she gets. She'd hand her a doll, tap-a-tap-tappa-tta-d-d-l. she gives her some water tapa tapa tapa tapa w a teteer and like you said you know for a while helen's probably like what is this person doing yeah tapping on my hand all the time eventually she's doing it so much she learns to associate like oh when i get water i'm getting these same taps

and eventually there's like a literal aha moment where she gets it and she's like wait a minute I understand this person is representing a word for the thing that I'm experiencing by tapping into my palm. And she said it was, she said Helen's face lit up like it was a complete revelation. Yeah. This very famously happened at a water pump. They were on one of their outdoor walks or hikes, I guess. And they came upon the water pump, and she said somebody was pumping water. and Anne stuck Helen's hand into the stream of water coming out of the spout and was tapping the same letter, W-A-T-E-R, and just kept doing it over and over and over, and that's what finally Helen just put those things together. It just clicked, like you said. And there's a statue of her that was unveiled in the Capitol Rotunda in 2009, and it is of her as an eight-year-old girl standing at this water pump.

basically commemorating that incredibly just moving moment, but also incredibly unlikely moment, that she got it. She just got it. And now she was able to start to learn from there. That's incredible. So it went really pretty quickly from that point. She learned 30 words by the end of that day,

had vocabulary of a few hundred words within a few months. And by the time this started when she was six. and into seven. By the time she was eight, she had taught her to read words by feel. She was writing. She was composing sentences and writing in block letters,

which is an astounding rate of speed considering her scenario. And maybe that's a good time for a break? Yeah. All right. We'll be right back. Things are off to a really quick start, and we'll see what happens next

with Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan. What do you do in the headlines don't explain what's happening? inside of you. I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, is where culture meets the soul, a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people

from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, and we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff, identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore, loss that changes you purpose

when success isn't enough, peace when your mind won't slow down, faith when it's complicated. Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to if you can hear me on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Bowen-Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys' Five Rings podcast, and the lead-up to the Milan

Quartina, 2026 Winter Olympic Games. We've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Boe, hi, Matt. Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt, hey, Bowen. Hi, Cookie. Hi.

Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to two guys, five rings on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the unpurposed podcast. On a recent episode, sat down with Nick Jonas, singer, songwriter, actor, and global superstar. The thing I would say to my younger self is congratulations. You get to marry Priyanka Chopra Jonas. And also, you know, your daughter is incredible. That's beautiful, man.

Yeah. Thank you. That's so beautiful. I can see that got you a little. Yeah, for sure. Our daughter, she came to the world under sort of very intense circumstances, which I've not really talked about ever. Growing up on Disney in front of million, how did that shape your sense of self?

I went blank. I hit a bad note, and then I couldn't kind of recover. And I built up this idea that music and being musician was my whole identity. I had to sort of relearn who I was if you took this thing away. Who am I? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Chetty on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck. So like you said, Anne Sullivan quickly figured out that Helen Cal was a gifted child. She just had to learn how to learn. And once she learned that, she just took off, like you said. By the time she was a teenager, she was reading, I think, five different languages. She wrote poetry, and she was in public speaking. She did public speaking as a teenager on what's

called the Chautauqua lecture circuit, which was a movement to essentially bring culture and interesting topics to people who lived in rural areas who otherwise might not be experienced. supposed to that kind of stuff to give them something to talk about. And she lectured on this circuit. She appeared on this circuit with Anne Sullivan as a teenager. I think before this, though, she made her way to the Perkins School, right, for her formal education. Yeah, there were three kind of big things that followed education-wise. Between, what is that, like eight years, between 88 and 1896, she went to that Perkins School, like you talked about, got that formal education. education. She also went to a specialist at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, so she could learn to speak. And then the third one, they moved to New York City. So, and, you know, Anne's along every step of the way, as we'll see, obviously. Right. So Helen could go to the Wright Humason School for the Deaf, where it would continue to sort of improve her speaking, and she could learn to lip read. And this is like, Sullivan's there tap-a, tap-a-tap, every step of the way. When she goes on the left,

lecture circuit. She's tapping questions like during Q&A, and then Helen would tap the questions back to Sullivan, and she would translate for the audience. As we'll see, this would lead to some suspicion that it was all just an act, which is, you know, fairly upsetting, because what they did was remarkable. But this would all end up with Helen Keller eventually wanting to go to college. Yeah, and just stepping back for just a second, you mentioned how she learned a lip read, and that doesn't make any sense because she could, she was totally blind. She lip read by putting her thumb on, say, Anne Sullivan's voice box around, around, like under her chin, she put a finger on her lips and then put another finger on her sinus cavity. And through feeling what the lips were doing

and the vibrations the vocal box was making, she could discern essentially what the person was saying. That's, that's how she learned how to lip, breed. And eventually, that's one of the ways that she learned to talk, although she founded a failing of her life that she was never able to speak clearly enough that just a stranger on the street could understand her. Yeah. So she, like I said, she wanted to go to college. She goes to, she wanted to go to Radcliffe. It's the Harvard Sister School. And so Anne Sullivan arranges for her to go to a prep school to get her ready for this for the entrance exams. And again, translating all the curriculum, tapping out those lectures, tapping out the books, like reading

basically to her into her hand, and then translating back to the teachers. She's there every step of the way when she gets into and attends Radcliffe College where she eventually would graduate cum laude in 1904 as the very first person with deaf blindness to earn a college degree. And like you said, there were scoffers who were like, what is this? There's this woman who's like helping her, is this really a thing? And like you said, it is upsetting, but the amount of study and attention that was paid to these two, there's just no way they could have kept up a fraud like this for 50 years. It's quite clearly settled that Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan really did all the stuff

that they were thought to do. Yeah, for sure. And we don't want to get into this, but we just so we don't get e-mail. we will mention that just like this week, there is a really idiotic TikTok trend that started among Generation Z where they have put forth that Helen Keller did not even exist. And it's idiotic and ableist.

And so the only reason we mention is so we won't get emails about it, but we don't want to talk more about that. Yeah. Good point. So we should say that Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan by this time, they weren't just famous among deaf-blind advocates or blind advocates or deaf advocates or anything like that.

They were in that circle. They also were in academia because they were studied. But by this time, she's a teenager still, I think, or early 20s after she graduates from Radcliffe. They're world-famous. Like everyone knows who Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan are. Yeah, for sure. I mean, they knew the Rockefellers. They knew Henry Ford.

They had met with U.S. presidents. They met Charlie Chaplin when they would eventually film starring themselves as themselves, a movie deliverance in 1918. They knew Mark Twain. The book and eventually play title and movie title The Miracle Worker came from Mark Twain. He's the one that coined that term when he wrote a letter to Ann Sullivan, calling her that. But all this to say, I think that put a strain on Anne Sorrelman. Sullivan's marriage. During this period, she got married to a guy named John Macy. He was a

Harvard professor. And he actually helped Helen Keller write the story of my life, her autobiography. But they, you know, they were married for a little while. The marriage didn't work out. And I think a lot of it probably had to do with just their fame and their travels. And it was just a strain on the marriage, it seemed like. Yeah, apparently I saw a documentary called Becoming Helen Keller. It was really good. but it crushed Anne Sullivan when John Macy left. And, you know, Helen grieved along with her. She said it took a really long time. Helen almost exclusively referred to Anne as teacher.

So she was like it took teacher a really long time to basically get over that. She may have never really gotten over it. But they were a pair again at this point. So they were in the movie, as you said. Helen learns very quickly like, I like being on stage. This is kind of fun. It's a rush. She apparently could feel the vibration in the floor and through the air and knew when the audience was clapping.

Yeah, you know, interestingly, we can sense through the vibrations and through the air when a stuff you should know tour show is 40% full. That's right, man. That's right. But she loved that. She thrived on that. And it energized her. That's cool. Yeah.

She really liked this. She was also, one of her things was they would demonstrate, you know, how she learned and how she communicated through Anne. But she would deliver in like these demonstrations, like inspirational messages. This is the kind of message she's decided to take to the world rather than like get a load of me. She's like, you're paying me all this attention. Why don't you pay attention to yourself and how great you can be too? At the same time, she was shining. a massive spotlight on how few opportunities the disabled community in the United States and around

the world had at the time. And she was directly responsible for changing those attitudes. So by the time they hit the stage for real and go on the vaudeville circuit, which is not something I knew until we did this kind of research. It was pretty amazing. They had a third member of their group. Their star has risen so much. They were like, we know, need an assistant. Yeah. And so they hired Polly Thompson in 1914, and they were known as the Three Musketeers. So now they were a trio traveling around on the Valdville circuit.

They had a three-act act, wherein they told their story. They did a 20-minute bit where Ann had a monologue sort of giving you the background. It was almost like a live podcast looking at it. Keller would come in and demonstrate the process, like how she learned to speak. they would kind of show people how it happened, say some of those inspirational words like you were talking about. And then, obviously, with Anne translating, she would do a little Q&A.

This sounds a lot like our show, actually. Yeah, we were using the Helen Keller model of live shows. Yeah, except hers was sold out with roaring audiences. Yeah, they were performing in front of thousands and thousands of people. That's amazing. One of the things in that Q&A, there's a list that they compiled, and this list was compiled after they were. retired from vaudeville. So like these were they documented questions and answers that they

gotten. And one of the ones, so there's one, what's your definition of politics was the question one of the audience members asked. And Helen said the art of promising one thing and doing another. Very famous saying. I saw another one too. Can you feel moonshine? You know, like she could feel sunshine. And she says, no, but I can smell it. I saw that coming. So, I mean, like, she was a great wit. And, like, Anne Sullivan was translating this. Remember, whenever we're talking about, like, Helen Keller saying something or doing something,

Anne Sullivan is standing there holding her hand, tapping into her hand. Like, even though she learned Braille and how to write in block letters and all that, that was still the chief form of communication because Anne Sullivan was so good at essentially translating in real time what was going on. Just say it once. What? Tapa, tapa, tapa. I can't do it as good as you.

It keeps cracking me up every time you do. So they eventually get off the vaudeville circuit in 1922, so they had a good run of a handful of years. Anne was tired, basically. She was older than Helen, and so she kind of lost the pizzazz for it. So they went home for the rest of the 1920s. They still lectured, they still traveled,

they still did lobbying, and then fundraising and stuff like that, obviously working with all the causes you might expect, like the American Foundation for the Blind, also became very socially active. And we'll talk at the end of, you know, a little bit about Helen Keller's later work as a social activist, which was pretty vast.

But they were traveling all over the world at this point. And everyone loved them. Maybe we should take a break, though, because, you know, like every story of it, every great partnership, it was a little more complicated, than it might seem on the surface. Yeah.

All right, we'll be right back. What do you do in the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, is where culture meets the soul, a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people

from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, and we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest, about the big stuff, identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore, loss that changes you,

purpose when success isn't enough, peace when your mind won't slow down, faith when it's complicated. Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to if you can hear me on the I-HeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Bowen-Yang. And I'm Matt Roger. During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead-up to the Milan-Cortina-26 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Bois, hi, Matt, hi, hi, Mal!

Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt, hey, Bowen. Hi, Cookie. Hi. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the on-purpose podcast. On a recent episode, I sat down with Nick Jonas, singer, songwriter, actor, and global superstar. The thing I would say to my younger self is congratulations. You get to marry Priyanka Chopra Jonas. And also, you know, your daughter is incredible. That's beautiful, man. Yeah. Thank you.

That's so beautiful. I can see that got you a little. Yeah, for sure. Our daughter, she came to the world under sort of very intense. circumstances, which I've not really talked about ever. Growing up on Disney in front of million, how did that shape your sense of self? I went blank, I hit a bad note, then I couldn't kind of recover. And I built up this idea that music and being musician was my whole identity.

I had to sort of relearn who I was if you took this thing away. Who am I? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Chetty on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we promised talk, nothing salacious or anything like that. No, thankfully. But, you know, anytime you're working that closely with someone over that many years, there are going to be some, you know, it can get complicated. And it was complicated for them.

Except with us. Yeah, exactly. I mean, they were lifelong partners, but they were reliant on each other in a way that maybe wasn't always the healthiest for either of them. Like Helen wanted to get married when she was in her mid-30. She was engaged to a journalist named Peter Fagan, but Ann didn't think she should. And so she got together with her parents,

who also didn't think that she should, and they kept her from getting married. Yeah, and there's a quote from Helen who basically publicly embraced that decision. It was like, yeah, it was the right decision. She said, love makes us blind. Man, she was sharp. She was super sharp.

Seriously, go watch that, for everybody, go watch Becoming Helen Keller. I think it's about an hour and a half, and it is a really great documentary. So, you know, I mentioned not healthy for either of them. So Helen was dependent on Anne, obviously. Anne was also dependent on Helen because Helen was the one who had the benefactors. And, you know, they weren't cutting checks to Anne Sullivan.

They were sort of helping to support Helen Keller because everybody loved her and everyone wanted, you know, a little piece of her by helping, you know, out with finances. but Anne was basically dependent on Helen financially her entire life. Yeah, because, I mean, they both made their money on the vaudeville circuit and lectures, but Helen's books were pretty, especially the story of my life, her first autobiography. She ended up writing 14 books, Chuck. Yeah, it's incredible. But it was a really widely read, big best-selling novel.

So she definitely made money off of her books. And, I mean, Anne was just part of it. So I don't think Helen ever held any of that over her head. But she couldn't just be like, all right, so long, Helen, good luck. I'm going to go enjoy the good life eating caviar. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We, you know, we did talk a little bit about the controversy of people pooping them at the time.

But we should say kind of specifically that, like, Radcliffe didn't, it seems like they begrudgingly let her into the school. And there were some snobs there that, you know, one of the quotes was, we should just say outright that Ms. Sullivan is entering Radcliffe instead of Helen Keller, a blind, deaf, and dumb girl. So I just, we only mention that because it happened. It's really awful because what they did was nothing short of, well, miraculous. Yeah, and even earlier than that, Chuck, I saw that a lot of the people who were the heads of the Perkins School were essentially supported a smear campaign. that they were frauds because they felt that Anne Sullivan's success overshadowed, you know, the work that the Perkins School had done in educating Helen Keller. They weren't getting enough credit, essentially.

Right. And then also there was a lot of classism to it, too, because these were wealthy benefactors who started the school and ran it. And Anne Sullivan was a poor Irish girl who came from the bottom rung of society at the time. Yeah. So what could she do? Right. So, yeah, they were smeared, like, throughout their life.

and they were both aware of this. Like this wasn't like kept from them. They were too sharp women. So they knew that this was everything that they did was questioned. And they knew it. But rather than shout back of their critics or whatever, they just did more and more and proved over and over again that this was a, this was all legitimate.

That's what makes this story so wonderful is it actually happened. And when you stop and think about what's actually going on here just past the narrative it's like i've become an enormous fan of helen keller and and sloven just FYI your stand yeah i guess so i love it i am too i saw that miracle worker when i was a kid so it had a big impact on me as as a youth i've got it coming up yeah it's good patty uh patty duke fantastic yeah and uh and and bankcroft right yeah they walk alike and they talk to like So in the 1930s, this is when Ann Sullivan's health takes a turn for the worst. You know, she had a tough go of it.

She never had like the best of health. But in the 1930s, it really went downhill. She had completely lost her sight by 1935. And in 1936, she died from a coronary thrombosis. Helen Keller was right there holding her hand. I can't imagine what she was tapping. Hopefully that was between them. and she was, Anne Sullivan was the first woman to have her ashes interred at the Washington National Cathedral.

Wow. And was eventually laid to rest at the Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea. In the National Cathedral. That's right. That's amazing. It gets even better, as you'll see. This was a huge, huge blow to Helen because she lost her best friend. She lost her teacher.

Remember, she always referred to her teacher. and she lost her first and probably strongest bridge to the outside world. Fortunately, Polly had been around for more than 20 years now, so she was more than capable of stepping in and being the bridge between Helen and the rest of the world after Anne died. So it's not like Helen was, you know, just bereft. She was just grief-stricken. And one other thing, too, there's a New Yorker article from 1930 called Helen Keller at 40.

and it's just this profile on her while she's still living. And it's a really good, like just a peek into her regular life. But she fed herself, she did her own dishes, she dressed herself. She was very, very independent. But when she was trying to communicate with somebody, she had to have another person because other people couldn't understand her. And then one other thing, Chuck, I realize I'm on a tirade here. But the reason she couldn't express herself in other ways is because she didn't

know sign language because there was a movement at the time that sign language is not a valid way of communicating that everyone, including people who couldn't speak, needed to learn how to speak. That was the only way of communicating that was legitimate. So she needed somebody to translate for her because she could never get that down pat. And like I said, her inability to do that haunted her like a great life failing essentially, which is very sad. Yeah, super. sad. There is some kind of light here in the form of a trip that she took. Anne wanted Helen. There had been an invitation before I died from the Nippon Lighthouse in Japan to do a speaking tour there. And Helen didn't want to leave Anne behind because she was in Porth Health at the time.

Apparently in Japan then, about 1.5% of their deaf and or blind citizens were not able to be educated or didn't have access to that. And so after Anne died, Helen honored her by going to Japan and completing that trip with Polly as her companion. They went to 33 cities in 10 weeks, spoke in front of about a million people. And the next year, clearly as a result of this, Japan started expanding their public services for education and their accessibility programs for people with all sorts of other abilities. You said that Helen Keller went to Japan in 1938. She went again in 1948 after World War II, and it was essentially the first ambassador to begin healing

between the United States and Japan after she toured Hiroshima and came back and told everybody what she saw. Nice. So I think it was like a few decades that Helen Keller went on after Anne Sullivan passed. She lived all the way until 9th.

1968, which I don't think I knew. She passed away on June 1st, kind of in her sleep in 1968, and she was laid to rest with Anne and Polly, who died eight years previous at Washington National Cathedral. So that trio, the Three Musketeers, lived together in perpetuity, which is super sweet. Yeah, it is super sweet. And you mentioned the miracle worker with Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft. They both won Academy Awards for it. It's just a, again, I haven't seen it, but it's just this beloved story. It's great. And it basically ends after she starts to learn, right?

Like she's a young girl the whole time, correct? Yeah, I mean, I was a kid, so I can't remember if there's like a CODA or anything like that. But it's, yeah, it's about their sort of early days together. And certainly, I mean, there's more movies to be made. If someone wanted to make a movie about her activism later in life, that would be really something, right? Yeah, we should talk about that because there's a, there's a, there's a, that formed around her that everybody wanted, which was Helen Keller was this angelic, pure girl who

overcame incredible odds and proves that if you work hard enough, you can accomplish anything. And she realized that that's what people wanted. So that's kind of the part that she acted publicly. But this was after she had tried to take the limelight that she was in and cast it on a bunch of different social movements that she was genuinely involved in and like genuinely cared about. There was a bunch of them, actually. So even after she kind of stopped talking about the publicly, she was still involved in this stuff for the rest of her life. Oh, yeah. I mean, she was involved in the civil rights movement 50 years before the civil rights era during the Jim Crow era. And, you know, as you pointed out, she was an Alabama kid whose dad was a Confederate officer. And they didn't,

They didn't like her doing this stuff, not her parents necessarily, but just people and other family in Alabama. They didn't like it. They didn't like that she was working with the NAAACP. She was a founding member of the ACLU and also a staunch socialist and borderline communist at one point. Yeah, she was a member of the Socialist Party, and she appeared at rallies with Anne. And then she found that the socialists weren't effective enough in defending workers' rights. So she joined up with the industrial workers of the world, which was more radical, contained lots of anarchists. And it was like if being a socialist was a scandalous, like being a wobbly was like really scandalous.

And she was, she was a card-carrying member. She was also hugely into women's rights. She was a suffragist. Because remember, she was very active before women even had the right to vote in the U.S. and I believe the U.K. And she also talked publicly about stuff that you weren't supposed to talk about, but for really important reasons, right? Yeah. I mean, who's going to tell Helen Keller to stifle, you know? That's exactly right.

Like, she got away with a lot of stuff that someone who wasn't deafblind would have not gotten away with. Oh, for sure. She would talk about birth control in public way before anyone would venereal diseases for sure, especially gonorrhea, because that at the time would cause blindness and infants when a mother would pass it along at birth. And so she was in like the pages of ladies' home journal in the 40s and 50s talking about rates of blindness because of gonorrhea. And that's just not the kind of thing that appeared in those kind of magazines at the time. No, and there's one other thing, being a women's rights. advocate. She's, she had a quote that I saw in that documentary. It was, um, uh, women's inferiority is a man-made issue. Oh, man. She's just like a t-shirt factory. So let's, yeah,

nice. Um, yeah, well, let's make that a stuff you should know t-shirt, huh? Yeah, but, you know, give her credit, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dot, dot, dot, dot, Josh Clark. Right. So, um, I mean, Chuck, She couldn't possibly get any better than this, right? I mean, could she? She could. You have something else? I do. I have two things.

Okay. One, she loved dogs. She always had a dog. In fact, when she was living in Queens later in life, she had eight of them. That's great in and of itself. But in the lead up to World War II, her books have been translated into German, and they didn't like that. The Nazi part didn't like it.

So her books were among some of the ones. chosen to be burned at Nazi rallies. That's a feather in your cap. Heck, yeah, it is. So she was... I like to think that we'd have our book burned. I would like to think so, too. Yeah.

So she was this amazing person that all of this other stuff just gets overlooked. Because, again, her story typically stops at that water pump after she gets it, right? And she just led this incredibly full, rich life. What, I guess she was like 80 years old when she died. and, yeah, she's just in a genuinely amazing person. I think Josh Clark has a crush. Maybe. You're a smitten kitten.

I am. Tapa, tapa, tapa. Oh, there we go. You got anything else? No, sir. Okay. That's it for Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan and Polly Thompson. And let me say one other thing, Chuck,

because it's not talked about like it's just a matter of course. She wrote her own stuff after, like later in life, using Braille typewriters. So, I mean, she was just this fully competent person. I'm just going to keep adding facts until you start listener mail. Hey, guys. Love your show on data centers. I was giving you one more chance. Helen Keller was essentially a walking data center. People, but want to let you know people working from remote locations,

using IBM terminals actually happened in the early 1980s, and I was one of them. I worked remotely from home writing my dissertation in 1983. My equipment was an IBM 30-30 computer terminal, a 1,200-baud phone modem, a mainframe housed at a remote location, in my case, at Phillips, North America, in New York City. The software I used was an IBM program called Script. I think I remember script, actually. Oh, I do. I do.

Yeah, it's like free work. Word perfect. Yeah, I'm floppy disks, right? Yeah, it had to be. It was before Word Perfect would come into common usage, but script was basically using one step up for machine language. For example, if you wanted to indent for a new paragraph, you would type a period, I-N-5 to make it, you know, indent five spaces.

Or for double space, it was period, looks like, L-L-2, and so on, for all formatting. If it sounds primitive and cumbersome, it was. But far better than an electric typewriter, as you could correct anything without using wide out. So it was progress in a sense and actually saved a huge amount of time for me. So it was long before 2008 that people got to work remotely, though it was rather primitive.

Thanks for another great episode. That is from Danielle Greenberg. Very nice, Danielle. Yeah, it was pretty funny. It was funny. Antiquated, I guess, is what you call it today. Danielle, right? That's right. Thanks again, Danielle. And if you want to be like Danielle and send us a great email that takes us down memory lane in some ways, you can do that. Send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Bowen-Yin. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings Podcasts, in the lead-up to the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Bob, hi, Matt. Hey, Matt. Hey, Matt. Hey, Bowen. Hi, Kierke. Hi.

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