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A Ravenous Reader Takes His Deafness in Strides to the Top

Recovered: Nancy Beeghly's July 21, 1999 Vindicator profile of Robert McConnell at 14 — reading, Academic Bowl, Gallaudet, and an early Internet life described as a level communication field for hearing and Deaf people.

Recovered History · Deaf · Internet History · Youngstown

On July 21, 1999, Nancy Beeghly profiled me in The Vindicator. I was 14.

Newspaper clipping of Nancy Beeghly's 1999 Vindicator profile, “A ravenous reader takes his deafness in strides to the top.”

The headline was “A ravenous reader takes his deafness in strides to the top.” The piece is a remarkably dense snapshot of the life I had at that moment: books everywhere, a signing family, the Ohio School for the Deaf, Academic Bowl, a Gallaudet summer science program, and a plan to attend the Model Secondary School for the Deaf the next year.

What catches my attention now is a sentence in the middle of the story. Beeghly wrote that by age seven I was already making friends around the world through the Internet. She described it as “a level communication field for the hearing and the deaf.”

That line matters to me because it is contemporary evidence for something I remember as foundational: networked communication did not feel like a novelty. It felt like a place where the usual asymmetry disappeared.

The chronology is striking. The article was published in 1999, but it reaches back to roughly 1991–92 — before the commercial web became ordinary — and places online communication inside my childhood rather than as something I discovered later.

The rest reads almost like a list of future preoccupations already hiding in plain sight. I was captaining an Ohio School for the Deaf team in the Midwest Deaf High School Academic Bowl; had finished third in the National Academic SuperBowl at Gallaudet; was one of four Deaf students selected for the first national all-Deaf “51st state” team at the Panasonic Academic Challenge in Orlando; and had just returned from a Gallaudet-sponsored summer science program.

There is also a perfect closing joke. After meeting Apollo 11 astronauts during the 30th anniversary of the moon landing, I told Beeghly that if I ever became the first Deaf astronaut, NASA would need one rule: no reading during launches and landings.

Twenty-seven years later, the line about the Internet is the one I keep coming back to.

Source: Nancy Beeghly, The Vindicator, Wednesday, July 21, 1999. View the original scan in the Google News Newspaper Archive.