Midwest Living magazine

Here's something I found interesting. Dan Kaercher who helped start Midwest Living magazine grew up with deaf parents.

Kaercher compiled his travel notes into a chatty book, "Best of the Midwest: Rediscovering America's Heartland" released this May. His observations and experiences also formed the basis for "Dan On the Road," a one-hour special airing on Iowa Public TV and other Midwest PBS stations this spring and summer. A series of half-hour programs based on the trip will debut this winter.

It was Kaercher's ability to read other signs, though, that fostered such storytelling abilities. Kaercher's parents, Edward and Lillian, both were deaf and mute.

"Some of my verbal skills came from the fact that I was their interpreter many times from an early age," Kaercher says during a phone conversation from his office in Des Moines. "They would call on me to talk to the guy at the furniture store, to call my grandmother in Omaha. I had to develop my verbal skills very early."

It was a unique parent-child bond that came to an end only last summer when Kaercher's mother died at 95 years old—days before he was to begin the second leg of his journey. Lillian Kaercher caught a cold, then developed pneumonia. She spent one day in the hospital before dying. "Somebody who's 95 dying that mercifully and swiftly, if you will, was a blessing to us," Kaercher says.

Still, "it was a shock. It was tough. We buried her in Council Bluffs on Monday and then Tuesday afternoon I had to be in Chicago to start the next leg of the trip. I thought, ‘How can I get through this?' But . . . sometimes parents are helping you along when they're not physically along."

Roots

Married later in life, Edward and Lillian Kaercher were "totally not expecting a child" when their son came along in 1949. "Life was hard for my parents because life was hard for disabled people then," Kaercher says. "It's not easy now. Employment and things like that were very difficult."

Kaercher's father, a Philadelphia native, graduated from Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, Gallaudet College and Lutheran Theological Seminary. He is cited in the book, "Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America," as being the first deaf Lutheran pastor to be ordained, in 1929. Edward later established "preaching points" in various East Coast cities before illness forced him out of the pulpit in 1942.

Sometime after that he came to Nebraska, ostensibly to visit his sister, Hilda, who in 1943 formed Immanuel Lutheran Church in Bellevue. His real motivation was to meet a woman spoken of by a friend from Gallaudet College—Lillian, a Nebraska School for the Deaf graduate and recent widow. "There aren't all that many people to pick from, sometimes, if you have this disability of deafness," Kaercher says. "At that time, a deaf person almost always married a deaf person."

Edward and Lillian did just that, then moved to the Finger Lakes region of New York. Kaercher was born there, in Elmira, N.Y. "Despite that blemish," he jokes, "I can claim safely that I've been a Midwesterner for 52 out of my 56 years. I couldn't have asked for two better parents. Both very loving. My father . . . really opened up the world to me. He loved to travel."

When he was 4, the family "got a fresh start," moving to Omaha. They lived in Logan Fontenelle Homes, segregated public housing in North Omaha. Edward began a new career, teaching at Iowa School for the Deaf. Their son attended Kellom Grade School at 24th and Paul streets. "The project we lived in was segregated until the mid-'50s," Kaercher says. "The school was integrated. The majority of students in my grade school through fourth grade were black, which opened my horizons, too. At the time, I thought it was just normal."

The family moved to Council Bluffs in 1959, Kaercher attending Hoover Grade School and Abraham Lincoln High School (which has inducted him into its hall of fame). At Hoover in the fifth grade he met his wife-to-be, Julie. The two didn't begin dating until their senior at A.L., however. They graduated in 1967, Dan heading for the University of Omaha, Julie for Iowa State University.

Just to let you know that Julie and Dan Kaercher donated money to the Iowa School for the Deaf and was mentioned in the 2009/2010 newsletter. But upon researching the video magazine of Midwest Living as seen in YouTube isn't captioned which is strange considering Dan Kaercher's background on having deaf parents. I wonder if he realizes that there are over 30 million people in the United States with hearing loss that could benefit a lot from captioned videos?