Larry and Catherine's Story:

Cat and Larry came to Gallaudet from very different backgrounds.

Cat grew up a “solitaire” in hearing schools with no support services and no knowledge of ASL. Gallaudet was a name she found in a book of colleges and universities; she initially picked it because it was French like her own name and she thought it was pretty, and she also liked the idea of living in D.C. After finding out that it was a school for deaf and hard of hearing students and visiting the campus, Gallaudet became her first-choice school. Cat entered Gallaudet in the summer of 1990, taking part in the New Signers Program (now JumpStart), and working in the Athletic Department as an assistant to the sports information director.

Larry attended the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind from age 8. He was already immersed in Deaf culture and fluent in ASL when he entered Gallaudet in the fall of 1988, in the very first class after I. King Jordan became university president after Deaf President Now. He played on Gallaudet’s football team, and Cat did football statistics for home games. That is how they initially met, but they really weren’t in each other’s orbits even though they had mutual friends.

In May of 1995, Cat and Larry had both graduated. Cat had a job working at the Clerc Center, and Larry was getting ready to return to Florida. They bumped into each other outside of Benson Hall, and they ended up chatting for 30 minutes. Both had some interest, but the timing was wrong. However, when Larry returned to Gallaudet as a special student in January of 1996, they kept bumping into each other in the Student Academic Center. During Gallaudet’s spring break in March, Larry asked Cat to come watch him play racquetball in the Field House after her overnight shift at MSSD. She did, and that was the start of their relationship.

Almost 26 years later (20 married), they are still going strong. They are the proud parents of an OHKODA teen, a deaf-disabled (“double rare”) son, and deaf fraternal twins. Cat is wrapping her 27th year at the Clerc Center’s National Programs and Outreach, and Larry is a biologist in breast cancer research at the National Institutes of Health.

If not for Gallaudet, Cat and Larry would never have met. In fact, maybe it was fate. When Cat worked in the Athletic Department, Sports Illustrated staff came to do a story on Gallaudet’s football team. Their photographer took all kinds of photos to illustrate the article. After the article photos were chosen, extra prints were given to the Athletic Department. The sports information director allowed Cat to choose several of the photos she liked best. She chose a captivating black and white photo of two football players—one of whom was Larry—staring intently and unsmiling at the camera. So, Cat’s had a photo of her future husband since she was 18, and it still hangs on the wall of their home!