Helen Keller & Peter Fagan

Helen Keller lived a rich and exciting life. She traveled the world, dined with royalty, and fell deeply in love with Peter Fagan. But her abelist family didn't seem to think one of the most accomplished women in the world could handle marriage! Through it all, the love that Helen, Anne Sullivan, and Polly Thomson shared was unbreakable.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody. Hey, I'm Eli, I'm Diana, and we are
back here with another exciting episode of Ridiculous Romance. Welcome
to the show. If you're new, welcome, We're getting new
listeners all the time and we love you so much.
You were great today, by the way. Yeah, hell yeah.
Maybe you heard about us from a recent episode of
The Daily Zeitgeist, which yeah, I was fortunate enough to

(00:23):
guests start last week on their show, and Diana did
just yesterday as of the air date for this episode. Yeah,
it was really fun. I had a great time talking
to them. Yes, Jack and Miles are awesome. Yeah. If
you don't listen to The Daily zeit guys, a good
way to get some get some comedic, comedic take on
the news it is. You know, I really prefer it
to just like the Twitter scroll in the morning where

(00:44):
I'm like, what's trending? Oh? Horrible, terrible, not funny? Uh
oh a celebrity name? Oh god, why is this celebrity trending?
Oh it's just their birthday, you know that kind of thing.
It's good stuff. Yeah, it's good time. Go check out
our episodes if you haven't, and if you have heard them,
and that's why you're here then, we're so happy to
have you yea. And of course our returning listeners as

(01:06):
well are the nearest and dearest to our hearts. Oh
my god, yeah, I love you. You look great today
as well. Hell yes, uh, what have we been up to?
We haven't checked in lately, I guess not. Yeah, but
we we started watching Why the Last Man is one
of my favorite comics from back in the day two two,

(01:27):
I think it came out and I love it. It's it.
It's a good time right now for people who liked
comic books in two thousands two. I just say, because
Watchman came out was amazing, and like Sandman is about
to come out and it looks really cool. I hope
it's good. Fingers crossed And yeah, we got Why the
Last Man. Preacher was pretty good too. I know we

(01:48):
kind of fell off there, but that first season was
pretty dope, so anyway, I don't know. I was just like,
that's the thing about all these things that we read,
swapped Mick novels amongst all our friends to get through
all of them because we're broke and now they're all
TV shows. But anyway, all out aside Ashley Romans, who

(02:09):
plays Agent three is incredible. Uh in five episodes. I'm
just like, so good, this is so good. The acting
has been really impressive. Diane Lane legend Dane Lane, legendary,
Diane Lane Lane, who looks incredible by the way, Like
her skin is so smooth. I'm just like, what are

(02:29):
what moisturizer? What what is it? Just tell me what
it is. She's just got that Lane look, she's got
that Lane look. But we're not here to talk about
Diane Lane, sadly. No. Uh, We're here with a brand
new episode today. But first I think we got to
check inside this deep little mail bag here. Yeah, it

(02:49):
looks like we've got time for a mail called Awesome.
We've got a review from a user called little park
Bow on Apple Podcasts that we wanted to share. They said,
I was skeptical at first, but the first episode I

(03:10):
listened to about Maha would your long Corn was well
done and as a thie person knowing what I believe,
to just assume that the hosts are not Tie did
a pretty good job at pronunciations. Only constructive criticism is
episodes run a little too long. Great concept, though, kudos
to the creators. Thank you little pork back. So that's

(03:31):
so great to hear. Really, that's the thing. We don't
want to just read every review blow and smoke up
our ass. But were the main ones to be honest,
because feeling but correct, we are not tie. We are
not tied. So but that did mean a lot to us,
um that we got this pronunciations right, because we definitely
spent some time on YouTube trying to make sure, yes,

(03:53):
we got them all right, because you don't want to,
you know, I mean, and I'm very glad we did
because I was like really pronouncing it phonetically a lot
of the names, and I was very off. You know,
It's like, oh, I really thought that this would be
a lot closer to the truth, but I was wrong.
So I'm very glad we checked about and I'm glad
that it worked out. And you know, sometimes I think

(04:16):
these episodes run a little long too, I mean, as
the as one of the researchers, one of the speakers,
and the editor. Yeah, sure, these episodes weren't a little long.
Sometimes you know, we just get too into it, That's
how it is. We love finding out about the story,
so we get real into the research and then when
we're telling the story, we get real into it. So, yeah,
some of them are a little long. It's fair. It's

(04:38):
a fair constructive criticism. And very nicely said, trust me,
they're not as long as what we recorded. Yes, that's
very true. I think we've got time for another little
reach down into the mail bag here and yeah, here's
one at Emma Lennon three. On Twitter, she commented on

(05:00):
our post about the Jackie Robinson episode Jackie and Rachel Robinson,
we did good. I love that episode. Uh that I
mentioned branch Ricky sounded like Kevin Klein character Kevin Alert
and because Kevin could play anything, and it just sounded
like a part he'd play in the movie. Well, actually,
in the movie forty two that starred Chadwick Boseman may

(05:23):
he Rest in Peace as Jackie Robinson, that character branch
Ricky was played by Harrison Ford, everybody's favorite curmudgeon. There
you go. Yeah, totally. I could see branch Tricky being
played by Harrison Ford. Absolutely just the right kind of grump.
Yeah for brand Tricky to be like, you know what,
I'm unders do whatever I want to do and y'all

(05:44):
can follow a line. I see it, I said, we
need to watch that movie because I love you. We
haven't watched again, but yeah, really want. We are a
house that loves Chadwick Boseman, so that's a good one.
So yeah, thank you, Emma Lennon three. If you're telling
us to watch that movie because I do, you want
to see it? Yeah. So we're here today to talk
about the famous, the legendary, the household name we all

(06:09):
know and love, Helen Keller and her lover, Peter Fagin.
You probably don't know by name. I sure didn't, so yeah.
Helen Keller was only nineteen months old when she got
so sick that she became deaf and blind, and for
much of her childhood she could only communicate with her

(06:30):
family with a variety of home signs and gestures, until
a young teacher named Anne Sullivan arrived and taught Helen
ways to communicate, opening up her world. But many of
us only know about Helen's childhood. Very few people know
how she spent the rest of her life or what
she used her hard won communication skills for. Helen was

(06:52):
a prominent activist. She was a socialist. She wrote several
books and articles. She did lecture tours to advance her
various causes, and she fell in love too. So let's
learn about the real Helen Killer and her star crossed lover,
Peter Fagin. I'm ready, let's go. Hey, they're French. Come listen. Well,
Elia and Diana got some stories to tell. There's no matchmaking,

(07:15):
all romantic tips. It's just about pridiculous relationships. A lover
might be any type of person at all, and abstract
concert at a concrete wall. But if there's a story
with the second glance, ridiculous roles. A production of I
Heeart Radio. Helen was born in Tescumbia, Alabama, in eighteen eighty.

(07:37):
When she was nineteen months old, she was stricken with
what her doctors called an acute congestion of the stomach
and brain. So today they're kind of like, could be meningitis,
rebella scarlet fever, something els. You know, they're trying to
figure out what it might have been. But at the
time they were just like, there's demons in your skin,

(07:57):
you know, something like eighties practice, Like I guess I'll
bleed you out and then give you some cocaine see
if anything changes. But whatever it was, it did leave
the previously perfectly healthy and precocious baby, both blind and deaf,
and as Helen described it in her autobiography, she quote

(08:20):
lived at sea in a dense fog. Boy, that is evocative.
I know it. Like just those words, I feel like
I know exactly what she means as well as I can.
You know, Yeah, yeah, she's good at that. Surprise spoiler alert,
she's a good writer. The writer is a good writer.

(08:41):
Helen and her family both kind of described her as
being sort of feral in her childhood, Like she'd kind
of wander around. She'd grab food off of their plates
and like eat with her hands, and she would scream,
she would slap their faces. She quote cried for no reason,
which has like, I think you have a great reason

(09:03):
to cry. Any child has a good reason to cry.
First of all, any child has a good reason to cry.
And if any child has a good reason to cry,
I feel like it's Helen Keller who could not see
her hear or anything or communicate. Yeah yeah, yeah, I
was like, so something, you know, she was missing something
she needed and she wasn't getting something she needed, and
so she was crying for oh, great reasons. But I

(09:26):
guess to them it appeared to be for no reason
at all. I don't know. She just started crying out
of nowhere. Again, we were busy with other things. You
think if she wanted something, she'd let us know. Come on,
come on now. It's not like she had no communication
at all. Kind of As I mentioned, she did have
some home signs, which are basically they're signs that are

(09:46):
understood by your immediate family. But they're not like a
formalized language, you know, like they're very personal. Yeah. Yeah,
So she had about sixty home signs that that everyone
in the house understood. She could tell which family member
was which based on the vibrations of their footsteps. So
she had kind of an idea like who's in the
room and stuff. I mean, you know, she's she's got

(10:08):
some rudimentary stuff getting down. You know, I can tell
when you're coming sound of your footsteps. I knew you
were going to say that when I wrote that. Dear listeners, Diana,
if you don't know, is a tiny girl. Hunter pounds soaken, wet.
She will rattle your neighborhood. She has walking from the

(10:29):
living room, put all hundred pounds down on each foot.
I think we've found a couple of hundred extra because
I have lost fragile things off of shelves. That's nice,
walk by to get a glass of water, listen it.
You know, I wanted. I wanted a presence, all right,
found one. I actually don't know why I walk like that.

(10:50):
Do people know why they walk the way they walk? Oh,
there's a whole like body language studies about how you
walk and what it means. Yeah, definitely. I guess I
should look that up and see what it says about me.
I feel like they'd charge us double. We had to
put her on the sprung dance floor. Geez alright. So yeah,

(11:12):
so she's she can definitely tell when I'm coming, and
she knows when you're coming to more likely if she's
met you before, she's figured some way of of you know,
identifying the people around her. Um. So there's some rudimentary stuff,
as I say, but she's still mostly stuck in her
own head, you know, for the most part, and she
you know, they can't figure out how to help her

(11:33):
progress in the house, so her parents were looking for solutions.
Of course, her mom had heard about this woman named
Laura Bridgeman, who was the first deaf and blind person
to get a full education. They wrote to a specialist
in Baltimore, who referred them to a man named Alexander Graham.
Bell might have heard of him if you've ever made

(11:55):
a phone call before. He was working with deaf children
at the time, and he suggested to them that they
should contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, where Laura
Bridgeman had been educated, and that director of the school
asked his star pupil, recent graduate and valedictorian and Sullivan

(12:17):
to be Helen's instructor and Sullivan the Miracle Worker. You
might know her as the Miracle Worker if you've ever
seen that play, the famed show stage play I saw.
I think I saw it in high school at like
Thespian conference or something, but I blocked so much of

(12:38):
that out. I remember with the whole thing and I
and you know what, there's a bunch of theater kids
out there being like, yeah, there's been conference. That's where
we got to cut loose and do drugs and have sex.
And you know that was just not my experience. My
Thespian conference was I saw a bunch of mediocre high

(13:01):
school theater shows. UM performed in a few mediocre high
school theater shows and then went home. So once again,
everybody in high school was having more fun than was having.
You'll never have to go back, I hope not if

(13:22):
I end up as a high school drama teacher. Something
went wrong. Yeah, right. Shout out to the high school
drama teachers out there who are uh, you know, creating
the ellis of the future right now, for better or words. Yeah,
maybe it's something for the best. It's for the better
because it means that there's money for a drama teacher

(13:42):
freaking school. Yeah. So yes, And Sullivan was asked to
be Helen's instructor, and it sounds like a great choice honestly.
When you look at Anne Sullivan's life, her early life
was pretty marked with tragedy. When she was five, she
got a bacterial and action called trachoma, which caused painful
infections in her eyes and made her partially blind before

(14:05):
she had learned to read her write. When she was eight,
her mother died of tuberculosis, and two years later her
father abandoned the family, just abandon his children because he
was like, I don't think I can raise them on
my own, which made me be like, oh, so they
should raise themselves. On their own. That's a better option.
I don't talk about privilege. Right to go, Nah, not

(14:28):
doing this. Yeah, by he's like, oh, things are difficult.
You know what I'm gonna do. Walk the funk away,
no more problems, dust off the hands, and to go. Boy,
my life is so much better now. I can't wait
to make some new problems for someone else who really
dodged a bullet. They're raising that terrible family I didn't want, jeez,

(14:51):
So yeah, he's stucked. And Anne and her younger brother James,
who was also disabled, they both went to go live
in this poorhouse basic It was a hospital for orphaned children, UM,
particularly if they had any kind of disability, mental or physical.
And only four months later James would also die of

(15:12):
tuberculosis at the hospital, and she underwent like a number
of unsuccessful operations to restore her eyesight, which is like
sounds just just frustrating to have to go through all
that and then not get anything out of it. Um
And she got sent to the Perkins Institute after the
hospital she was in, which was called Tewksbury Almshouse, was

(15:33):
accused by Massachusetts Governor Benjamin Butler of abusing and neglecting
their patients, of killing orphaned babies and selling their bodies
to doctors for dissection and study, and even of cannibalism.
So he was making a big stink about Twokspaire Almshouse,
and I'm like, what happened at Dukesbury eating babies, selling babies? Well,

(16:00):
apparently that was not unusual. And you know, eighteen eighties
was a prime time for grave robin for science purposes,
so it was not unusual for that to happen, actually,
and especially among the poor. If you were poor and
you died, that's probably what happened to you. You know,
Dr Frankenstein's out there looking for subjects, dig holes. I mean,

(16:22):
apparently a lot of his more outrageous claims were disproven,
so it sounds like maybe he was just trying to
kick up a big old dust to get the real problems.
That they weren't sexy enough on their own or something.
But the conditions there were still extremely bleak and abusive.
And Anne wrote about it. She she you know, and
kind of in support of his his whole investigation, and

(16:43):
she's like, oh, yeah, it sucks there. I lived there.
It sucks. And Tewkesbury underwent several inspections, and one of
the inspectors was the head of the Perkins School. So
and like pleaded with him to please let her come
study there, and he said all right, And so she
arrived at the school in eighteen eighty. So ask never
heard ask I like that he was inspectors there, and

(17:06):
She's like, get me out of here, please look around you.
So at the Perkins Institute, teachers found Anne to be
rude and defiant. They called her miss Spitfire, which I
mean would be a total fucking badge of honor. Please
call me now. But back then they was like, probably

(17:27):
like a scarlet letter. She had rough manners, but she
was also super smart. She graduated in seven the valedictorian
of her class. And maybe in talking to Helen's mother
and father about her, the director of the school might
have been like, I've got an idea of this child,

(17:47):
and we'll know how to deal with her. Yes, And
you know, he might have been right, because An knew
something about being lonely, about being isolated, about not having
anyone to talk to. When she arrived in Alabama in March,
she wrote, The Loneliness of my Heart was an old

(18:07):
acquaintance anyway, I had been lonely all my life. My
surroundings only were to be different. She arrived at Helen's
house on March five, a day Helen called my soul's birthday. Hm. Wow, yeah,
banner banner day, red letter day. Oh yeah, I mean,
and I get it, just like finally somebody is here

(18:29):
to like freaking change my life. So An almost immediately
got into an argument with Helen's parents because Helen's parents
Helen's family, you know, I mentioned they were kind of
rich Southerners. Well, yeah, no surprise. They had had enslaved
people and they had fought for the Confederacy during the

(18:51):
Civil War. So Anna is still a spitfire. She was
fully willing to enter into a battle with her employers
at their home about this serious issue, which I think
is kind of awesome. Hi, thanks so much for hiring me.
First of all, I got something to say. But she
did manage to really connect with Helen. I mean eventually,

(19:13):
it took. It did take a few weeks to make
a significant breakthrough with Helen because and first of all,
was like, she needs to not be wandering around and
grab it. She's a human being, Like she can't be
wandering around like this. She's got to be taught manners,
and she can learn manners. It's totally fine and it's doable.
So she's going to sit at the table and she's
going to eat with a knife and fork, and she's
going to you know, like act like a normal child

(19:35):
as much as possible. And she was very strict about that,
and that made Helen really frustrated. Of course, she had
not been doing that before. Um. And also she was
constantly grabbing Helen's hand and like spelling words into her palm.
The first words she spelled for her was doll d
O L L because she had brought her a doll,

(19:56):
so she spelled it and then she hands her the doll. Um.
But Helen didn't know what words were really at this
point because again she was just a baby really when
she lost those senses. Um. She had not been taught
to speak, to read to you know, she didn't have
any of that concept brain at all. The idea of

(20:17):
assigning a word to a thing, yeah, was foreign to her.
So I imagine a lot of her home signs were
like verbs like get you know that, I need to eat,
drink something like that, but not so much like this
is a glass, this is a thing. Yeah, I mean,
that's that's so interesting to think if you didn't if
you didn't know, God, it's hard to even wrap your

(20:39):
brain around because you do know words, right, I mean
because we learned them as babies, so we don't remember
not having that concept. Our brains form around that concept, right.
So yeah, So when she's grabbing Helen's hand and spelling
words into her palm, Helen just thought it was a
fun game she was doing, and she immediately started trying
to mimic the hand movements herself. But again, she just

(21:00):
thought it was a fun things she would go and
show her mom. She thought was like a fun thing
they were doing together, So she didn't know what they
meant at all. She she called it monkey like imitation herself.
So she's like, I really, I was just like cool whatever.
But Anne was always constantly grabbing her hands spelling something,
grabbing her hands spelling something, and so they without being

(21:21):
able to understand what she was doing. Obviously, it was
a very frustrating experience. She threw lots of tantrums. They
had a lot of clashes, She broke some stuff, like
she was they were having a hard time for a
little while, but then finally one day and followed Helen
out of the house and they ended up at the
water pump. And this, if there's any part of this

(21:41):
story that you've heard, it's probably this. While Helen held
her hand under the flow of the water and spelled
out the word water in her palm, and like magic,
it just clicked that it has a name. Is the
famous scene from the Miracle Workers. But yeah, it's just
the suddenly the idea just all came together. Things have names,

(22:05):
words have meaning. Helen describes the moment herself. She said,
I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions
of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness, as
of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, And somehow
the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew

(22:26):
then that W A T E R meant the wonderful
cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living
word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free.
That's amazing. The idea just suddenly, like a spark of
conscious thought, just exploding into this whole realm of knowledge

(22:50):
that you hadn't realized before. That's so cool, it's so fascinating. Well,
and for someone to be old enough to be able
to remember that happening, I think, like I said, we
all have that moment, but we can't remember it because
it happens when were really young. So it's kind of
cool to have someone tell you what that would have
been for your little toddler self when you would have

(23:11):
learned that concept. Does that make sense? Yeah, definitely, So
that's kind of cool too. And again, just a great writer,
and yeah, after that, she became a voracious learner. She
almost exhausted and being like spelled this, what's this? What's this?
What's this? All over the house. She'd be like, oh
my god, it's a table, you know whatever? Right, she

(23:31):
was suddenly why why why? I? And all over the house.
But Anne was only when it could answer her. So
Anne got tired, but Anne loved it. She talked a
little bit about her educational how it changed, because she
said she showed up with a very strict curriculum in
mind of like we're going to do this for a
certain period of time, and this is how we're going

(23:51):
to do it. And then she was like I quickly
realized that was not working. It was just causing a
lot of frustration. If I just follow what interests her
and tell her about it, she'll be excited to learn
about it. And she was like, honestly, it's not just
a deaf blind child that can learn from that that method.
That's the way to teach kids, period because if they're

(24:12):
as long as they're engaged, they're learning. But once they're done,
they're done. You can't force it anymore. And I thought
that was really interesting because again, she's teaching in eighteen
eighty we're still learning a lot about education. You know.
We talked about that kind of in the Margaret Wise
Brown episode, and um, I thought it's so interesting that
she's kind of saying what we're all saying now. And

(24:32):
I think she's a contemporary of the modest story. Then
you started the Mones story school, so makes sense. But yeah,
so AND's like killing it telling her all these words.
Within six months, Helen had learned five seventy five words,
she had learned some multiplication tables, and she had learned
the Brail system. She could read, and she had written

(24:53):
her first letter as well. I mean, Cohen from nothing
to like just having the concept of words, to all
that is like pretty quick, that's amazing progress. She's only seven,
by the way, at this time. And so Anne told
her parents she should really be educated at Perkins, Um,
she should go to that school now she's she's ready

(25:13):
for school. And so the next year they went together
and accompanied Helen back to the school. She continued to
kind of head up her instruction, and Helen got real famous,
real fast for how bright she was, how much she
had overcame, you know, and how smart she was and
how quickly she learned and everything, and so she kind

(25:34):
of became a symbol for the school and she raised
a lot of money for them, like indirectly she you know,
just through her accomplishments, um, until they became the most
sought after school for blind people in the country. But
when Helen was eleven, she wrote a short story called
The Frost Giant. I'm sorry you waited it like like

(25:55):
Loki of Yodenheim. Yeah, she was writing a story about
Loki of Yoda and how Odin rescued him as a baby. No,
I'm sure it was about something completely different, um, But no,
she was actually accused of plagiarizing this story whatever it was.
And this totally piste off an that they would come

(26:17):
for Helen like this, so much so that she left
the school and never taught there again. She was like,
excuse me, you're gonna be talking about Helen like that,
thrown shade at my Helen right, goodbye. Hell No, still
had ties with the school, but she just was like,
I'm good with you. We're good. And Helen had to

(26:40):
go before a panel of suspicious teachers who did not
believe her at all, including the director of the school
who had made her this symbol of the school's quality,
like he had been a passionate advocate for her. We're
teaching Helen Keller here, everybody come to this school. Gather round.
Look how great she's doing. Look at this amazing work
we're doing with Helen Killer And then as soon as

(27:02):
things turned he turned real quick. He called her a
living lie. I mean, you're eleven years old and you're
going to call me a living lie. I'm sorry. Have
you been telling this living lie all the time that
you were using me to get people to come to
your school, sir? I feel like probably several people out there,

(27:22):
eleven year olds were like, oh, they lie, sure, which
is fair. Also, if an eleven year old plagiarizes. You
don't like drag them before a board. This is an
educational opportunity, and let me teach you about plagiarizing. Why
it's bad at any rate, especially because apparently was a
little gift for the director, like she wasn't turning it

(27:43):
in for a grade. Oh my god. So this Slate
article titled did Helen Keller really do all that? Says
that Mark Twain, who was later a close friend of Helen's,
called the panel a bunch of decayed turnips case looking
for a new and Philly Congress is full at thecaide turnups.

(28:04):
It also says that the experience taught Helen how easily quote.
The same people who had put her on a pedestal
found it to turn on her cruel Yeah, welcome to
the world, Helen, Man, it's so true. So at fourteen,
she and Anne moved to New York so she could
attend the right Humiston's School for the Deaf. In nineteen hundred,

(28:25):
she was admitted to Radcliffe College at Harvard University. Hey,
that's would have been the same school shortly before Elizabeth Marston. Yeah,
that's from William and Elizabeth Marston and Olive Byrne, who
all created Wonder Woman together. Yeah yeah, check out that
episode if you haven't heard it, it's a hot one. Yeah.

(28:46):
Mark Twain helped arrange her tuition because he introduced her
to this like super rich oil magnate or whatever who
paid for everything. Thanks Mark Twain. Way to get some
some way to ring money out of an oil magnate.
First something good. In nineteen o three, she published her

(29:06):
famed autobiography, The Story of My Life, um, and it
was very well received. As you know, I'm sure many
of us were assigned it in school probably or whatever. Um.
She graduated in nineteen o four, becoming the first deaf
and blind woman to earn a Bachelor of the Arts degree.
And Helen was really determined to communicate as much as

(29:27):
possible and as normally as possible. She did learn to speak.
She went to speech therapy so she was able to
use her voice. She learned to hear people using the
Twodoma method, which is where the deaf blind person would
put their little finger on the speaker's lips and there
are other three fingers along the speaker's jawline, so while
you're speaking, they can kind of feel the puffs of

(29:48):
air coming out of your lips. They can feel the
vibrations of your vocal cords and kind of get a
good idea of what you're saying, which sounds I mean,
it sounds like you would never be able to know
what was happening. I don't know if I could get
much out of that, but it worked. It's one of
those things that I'm like, I would do it once
and I'd be like, no, this is impossible, I could
never hear. But you know, months and months of practice

(30:11):
you can learn lots of crazy shit. Oh yeah, totally.
It was. It was called tactle lip reading as well
as the Tudoma method. It's rarely used today, Um, no surprise. Yeah.
People don't like having fingers in their face, right, especially now.
I'd be like, please, don't put your hands. And of
course Helen also learned finger spelling in the manual alphabet

(30:31):
as well. So now that she was out of school,
Helen and Anne purchased a house in Rentham, Massachusetts that
they could live in and work in. This household grew
by one as Anne's suitor, John Albert Macy joined them.
It's kind of a bonus Romance for y'all and and
John as well. John was a Harvard instructor and a

(30:51):
literary critic, and in nineteen o two he helped Helen
edit her autobiography. For over a year. He asked Anne
to marry him, but she kept refusing. He was younger
than her, and she seems to have had kind of
those maybe the stronger personality of the two, right. And
she was Catholic and he wasn't. And though she wasn't

(31:13):
very religious, she was still reluctant to break that sacrament
of marrying outside of Catholicism. They really drill it India,
those Catholics, don't they They do. All my Catholic friends
are like, even though I am not religious at all,
everything they taught me is very deep, deep, and not break.
I recently saw a beautiful picture of a married couple

(31:33):
who had to be buried in separate cemeteries because they
were Catholic and Protestants, and so is a wall between
the Catholic side and the Protestant side. So they bought
their plots right up against the wall. They built like
a tower, and it has two hands reaching out and
holding clasping over the wall and it's beautiful, and I'm like,
you should just let them be buried together. The hoops

(31:57):
they make you jump through. They had to do a
whole freaking sculpture projects since they can be like, also,
we were married, even though there's a wall between. Let's say,
let's say the idea is like God would be angry
if a Protestant was buried in the Catholic graveyard. Do
you think God is like, Oh, they pulled one over
on me. I know they figured it out. Oh God,

(32:20):
bless him, me bless him now. Of course, both John
and Anne were very devoted to Helen, but and probably
also worried about how her marital status would change her
in Helen's relationship. Even though Helen was like, go for it,
do it, girl, go get married, she once told Anne, oh, teacher,

(32:42):
if you love John and let him go, I shall
feel like a hideous accident. I mean yeah, Which is
a great point because the truly the relationship between Helen
and Anne is the real story, because they had a
very deep bond as far as anyone can l of course,
I mean they're not here to talk about it, but

(33:02):
they really loved each other a lot, and there was
kind of like such a closeness that I think Anne
was really worried that John would never really be a
part of that and she could never let him in
like that, you know. So I think she was also
worried that he would always feel like an outsider in
his own house. It's fair, but I also see like

(33:23):
Helen saying this here. It sounds like she's saying, don't
let me, of course be different, don't let me be
you know, I'm just your friend. We do this thing together,
but you can have a relationship that that makes me
feel like a monster if I'm holding you back. I'm
just a regular person. Everything's going to be okay, Go

(33:43):
get married, yea dear thing. Yeah. And Anne does seem
to have been deeply in love with John and her
letters to him, she wrote, dearest heart, I am always
a little shivery when you leave me, as if the
spirit of death shut his wings over me. But the
next moment, the thought of your love for me brings
a rush of life back to my heart. I sat
a long time thinking of you and trying to find

(34:05):
a reason for your love for me. How wonderful it
is and how impossible to understand love is the very
essence of life itself. Reason has nothing to do with it.
It is above all things and stronger, lovely, And she
was funny too. She also wrote, how haven't you had
enough of New York idling about clubs and going to

(34:26):
the operas and so very much fun is it? Aren't
you longing to come back to your twelve or fifteen
hours of work every day? And me adorable? Now? Eventually
an acquiesced and they married in May of nineteen o five.

(34:47):
John became Helen's editor and manager, and he negotiated terms
for her domestic and foreign publications. In nineteen o nine,
Helen joined the Socialist Party, and John a big socialist,
and he would correspond regularly with other Socialist writers like
Upton Sinclair. And However, probably because of her difficult and

(35:09):
impoverished upbringing, was kind of skeptical that there was any
chance of society changing in any significant way. But Helen
had grown up more comfortable in this wealthy southern home.
You know, they had enough money to meet their needs anyway,
so she was a little more idealistic. She would correspond
regularly with Eugene Debs and even learned German brail so

(35:30):
that she could read Carl Marks, so she was never
a communist. She said, like that people who didn't like
socialism had heard of Carl Marks but didn't understand him
or hadn't read it at all, which is not untrue.
But yeah, she was never a communist, even though she
was monitored by the government at some point, but it

(35:51):
wasn't exactly amongst and as soon as Helen started to
write about something other than herself and her disabilities, again,
the same people who had put her on a pedestal
before totally turned on her. She was frequently accused in
the press of faking her disabilities. People assumed that someone

(36:14):
blind and deaf would be incapable of writing a book.
They also assumed that her politics and opinions had come
from outside influences in her life, which I was kind
of like, I mean, that's sort of that's everyone. I mean,
everyone heard about something from someone else more than likely,
so it seems like a weird criticism. But they were like,
there's caretakers around her, so she's just having people like

(36:36):
tell her what to think, which sort of takes away
her own working brain. But all right, yeah, exactly. In
nineteen sixteen, Helen donated a hundred dollars to the N
double a c P with a note ashamed in my
very soul, I behold in my own beloved Southland the
tears of those who are oppressed. Well, of course her

(36:59):
beloved south Land and did not like that. And Alabama
newspapers claimed she had been misled and quote trained by
those around her to pair it their own beliefs, like
I said, as if she was incapable of forming her
own opinions and things. And another writer said she was
socialist because of quote the manifest limitations of her development,

(37:20):
which is so patronizing. You'd have to be deaf and
blind to be a socialist. Like that's very rude. But
despite all of that, she continued to write. She often
rebutted this kind of criticism with humor um, but she
continued to write essays and articles about her politics. She
advocated for birth control and workers rights and women's right

(37:42):
to vote, especially particularly where intersected, of course, with with
issues of being blind or having any vision laws, because
she was talking a lot about like I went to
factories and wow, it's no wonder a bunch of our
workers are becoming blinded because you have terrible conditions and
all you're doing is pocketing all the profit you can
and you're leaving everyone else behind. Sure, glad that doesn't

(38:02):
happen anymore. I know, right, clean that one up, just
like Anne thought we wouldn't, And like I personally agree
with all those stances, and you know, maybe you don't,
but I do. Maybe you don't think women should have
the right to poe. Do you think you wish go
ahead and unplug your headphones on your phone? Uh, set
your phone on a dry towel and threw yourself off

(38:24):
a bridge towel, not a wet towel. Yeah, I don't
want to ruin your phone. I know, right totally. We
can recycle that. No, but it is not like Helen
was always right or that you can always agree with
everything everybody ever said. She did also right. In nineteen fifteen,
in support of eugenics UM, she thought that infants with

(38:45):
severe mental impairments or physical deformities should be denied life
saving medical procedures because they wouldn't lead quality lives and
they would probably become criminals, which I think is the
weirdest thing about to assume about people with severe deformities
or impairments or whatever. To assume that they would turn

(39:06):
to a life of crime, just trying to imagine that
all disabled like heist movie or they're like making plans,
you know, and like a discrete location like our stupe Driver,
and somebody should make that movie. I would totally watch it,
absolutely absolutely What are they What are they stealing? Um,

(39:26):
like decent health care, benefits, marriage equality, first floor apartments
because they're going to take all the first four apartments
in the city excessively. We stole accessibility and added it
to all these buildings, like they're going to a lot
of places in the stalling elevators. Really root for the

(39:49):
heist in that movie. I know, right, someone make that
movie for real. I would totally watch that and I
will I will say, just to put this in a
little bit of context. During that time, eugenics was like
a really hot science topic. A lot of science and
like intellectual thinkers were dabbling in eugenics theory, and it
was really some of it wasn't They hadn't quite got

(40:10):
to the whole thing where you should sterilize and all
that type of thing um, which is where it got
real dicey um so Helen, like many of those scientists
from this time period did move away from eugenics later
on in in in later years, you know what I mean,
they can they gave up on that idea when it

(40:30):
when again, when it got dicey, which you know arguably
started dicey. But I will just say just again, at
the time, it was just like talking about electric cars
or something. You know, it was like the science thing
of the day or something, and a lot of people
got got into it. You know, if we just let
a bunch of people die, then the humanity will be

(40:52):
better off. And then they're like, oh wait, I talked
to one of those people, and I realized that I'm
an asshole, right, I forgot they're like human beings. But
having opinions and the ability to express them wasn't the
only thing that people thought folks with disabilities couldn't do.
There was also a lot of debate about whether or
not anyone with disabilities should marry and have kids. There's

(41:13):
a blog called something Rind which said that Helen was
apparently very eager to be attractive to the opposite sex,
but when her mother found out that a young male
scholar was going to lead one of Helen's college exams,
she asked the school to replace him with a woman.
Anne was also so disapproving of the romance novels that

(41:33):
Helen liked that Helen would read her brail copies of
them in secret. So she was interested in love and romance,
and she felt natural sexual urges just like anyone else.
But because she was blind and deaf, people thought that
she couldn't be allowed to act on these impulses. I
don't know. We don't know if Anne was specifically against

(41:56):
romance for Helen or not being partially blind herself and
already married. We can kind of assume that she would
probably not have a big it's okay with you. It's
possible some scholarly types of the era just didn't like
romance novels on principle it was like a trash TV
of the day, So she might have just been like,
give me that garbage thrown in the trash. You shouldn't

(42:18):
be reading this smut, right, and be like, yeah, your
teacher being like stopped watching Real Housewives of Potomac and
freaking watching a documentary or something something to improve your mind.
But still, Helen's mother and other people of the day were,
you know, of the mindset that Helen, you you shouldn't
marry because marrying means having children, and you shouldn't have children,

(42:40):
and you know, all these kinds of just sucked up ideologies,
which is so weird because hers was specifically a sickness
to like, it wasn't genetic, so then what's the problem
with getting married? But they were just like you can't
have that for some like you're you're unfit to be
a mother. You can have everything else, but you can't
raise a child. A wife and a mother are a
very specific thing and you can't be those I think

(43:01):
was weird. Like, yeah, still, Helen's life was being deprived
of romance, you know, in many different ways like this.
But fate was soon to intervene, just as these commercials
are about to intervene in our podcasts. Take a quick break,
we'll be right back. Welcome back. Lovely is to the show. Sadly,

(43:25):
by nineteen fourteen, Anne and John's marriage had really disintegrated,
and the reasons not fully clear. It might be that
the financial situation around the house was produce shanking. It
might have been Anne's fiery personality. Um, she might have
found it a little bit harder to like rain in
her her temper. Maybe or again, she was the stronger

(43:47):
personality of the two, so maybe he felt kind of
domineered by her something um or could have been that
devotion to Helen outweighing her devotion to John, and he
did feel like an outsider in their marriage, like like
she made a may have worried about. But whatever the cause,
John and Anne separated. They were never formally divorced, but
they did separate, and Anne was really heartbroken. Helen wrote

(44:12):
for days she would shut herself up, almost stunned, trying
to think of a plan that would bring John back.
Or weeping as only women who are no longer cherished weep.
Oh my god, Helen ouch, as only women who are
no longer cherished weep. I get it, though, I mean,

(44:33):
when you go through a dumbing right, that's what it
means you're not special to someone anymore. And that's really painful.
Singular sound. I mean I feel it, I hear it. Yeah. Again,
she really like brought it right to it. I mean
it's like it's almost like a girl whose entire education
was very focused on words them very well. Anne herself

(44:58):
said of the many friendship tips that have enriched my life.
None is more interesting than that with John Macy. So
John eventually moved out and a scotswoman named Polly Thompson
moved in to keep house, and not long after they
all went on a fifteen month lecture tour. Lucky Polly,

(45:18):
I know, right, pretty sweet, click me pretty a good
job here, Polly, My goodness, you're brogue is so thick.
A couple of years later, now nineteen sixteen, and Anne
got really sick. She was misdiagnosed with tuberculosis. Something's telling
me the early late eighteen hundreds medical care was not

(45:41):
quite up to par. She was recommended to go convalesce
somewhere warm, and she decided to travel to Puerto Rico
with Polly. Sounds great, yeah, I mean I'd like to
travel to Puerto Rico. Somebody misdiagnosed me with tuberculosis will
be on my way. But that, of course meant Helen
was going to be home alone and that she would

(46:02):
need a full time private secretary while Anne was away,
So a friend of John Macy's, nine year old named
Peter Fagin, came to rent them. Peter was a young,
handsome journalist also a socialist, and as he spelled words
into her palm to help her keep up with her
correspondence and writings. They learned more and more about each

(46:24):
other and quickly fell in love. And they knew that,
you know what kind of prejudice they would be facing
in their decision to be married because they were in
love get married? Dare you fall in love and get married?
So they planned to marry in secret. Peter actually investigated
the possibility of marrying Helen by telephone, which I thought

(46:47):
was very nine six especially. I mean it's like a
like a switchboard wedding. Yeah, totally like Hello, Obretta, how
can I take your call? Ah? Yes that bar? Will
you tell a klondike one nine five that I say?
I do? Yes? Whatever it was, Yes, says I do

(47:08):
your responsib please, Oh I do too. Thank you for
using the telephone. I guess there's only want you kiss
the receiver of your telephone. Well that's probably what he

(47:28):
was planning. But no, they wouldn't let them marry by telephone.
So they applied for a license in Boston, and they
intended to Elope, but a reporter in Boston got wind
of it and they published an article about it, like
TMZ Action happening. God in Boston. He's like X three

(47:48):
x three, read all about it. Let's collectively ruin one
woman's only chance to love it. Happiness five cents a copy. Well,
i'll take a copy of that, young man. Oh woman's happy.
We'll have none of it. Not my country. Gross. Well,
so his article comes out and Helen's mother found it

(48:11):
and read it and got super mad and was like,
oh hell no. One source said she didn't like Peter
because he believed in equality between black and white people,
and of course she did not, so she was like,
oh no. Um. Other sources said she probably wouldn't have
let Helen marry anybody. Maybe it was a bit of both.
I'm pretty sure it's both. Yeah, that's She's probably like, Okay,

(48:33):
if it was a rich like Southern Confederacy doctor asshole,
then maybe you could have talked me into it. But
it's not. It's a socialist from Boston. So yeah, it
was probably a bit of both, and she immediately fired Peter.
She hustled Helen onto a train back to Montgomery, Alabama
to get them as far as part apart from each
other as she could, And it's possible that Peter was

(48:56):
even threatened at gunpoint by someone in the Keller family,
probably want Helen's brothers, Um, but that might just be
an exaggeration. Now the story kind of gets a little
muddled here. The most common version is that letters between
Peter and Helen were smuggled back and forth between them
by their friends, and they decided to marry anyway. The

(49:16):
plan was for Helen to sneak out of the house
and be on her porch in the middle of the night,
and then Peter would come and get her and she
would be gone before anyone knew anything about it. Happily, ever,
after ding dong wedding bells were gone, so Helen packed
her bags, she sat on the porch waiting, and Peter
never showed up. Helen was heartbroken and they never saw

(49:39):
each other again. But Peter's daughter and Fagin Ginger says
that is not quite how it went down. Um. She
told the American Foundation for the Blind that Peter wrote
did write a secret letter in Braille arranging for Helen
to wait on her front porch for him. She said
it was arranged in that fashion because my father was

(50:00):
not an athletic man and didn't want to get into
a physical scuffle with Helen's brothers, which makes sense to me,
especially if they threatened him at gunpoint already. Like what
Anne continued, He came down from Boston at the appointed time,
but Helen was not waiting on the porch. He never
saw her again. Oh damn. The common thread there is
that they never saw each other again, and they were

(50:22):
probably forced to part by their families. Yeah, somebody by
her family, I should be more specific. One of them
was there at the porch, and one of them wasn't.
But neither of them chose that. Neither of them was
like no, never mind, fuck you right right, because that
wouldn't make sense. Jim Nielsen wrote in Helen Keller's Selected

(50:43):
Writings that quote her extended family vigorously squashed the relationship.
All felt adamantly that marriage and childbearing were not options
for a deaf, blind woman. She apparently acquiesced to this belief.
Peter Fagan disappeared from her life. Damn again, just the rudeness,
the cruelty, So sad to just be like, well, something

(51:10):
happened to you as a baby, so now you have
to be alone forever. That's not very loving, And I
decide what you can do with your life, and what
a person can do with their life in general, and
what you're capable of, Yeah, exactly. Helen herself wrote that
Peter's love quote, which had come unseen and unexpected, was

(51:33):
a little island of joy surrounded by dark waters. But
her obituary in The New York Times indicates that she
never forgot Peter or her yearning for romance. It says
for years her spinsterhood was a chief disappointment. If I
could see, she said bitterly, I would marry first of all, heartbreaking.

(51:57):
M hmm, God, it just makes me angry. That's sad
for stupid reasons. Seriously, And Peter never forgot about Helen either.
Another of his daughter's, Jean Fagan Yellen, responded to a
post about Helen and Peter on the blog of Battered Aspect,

(52:17):
and she said that Peter ended up marrying a teacher
named Sarah Robinson, and they were the center of a
small radical circle in East Lansing, Michigan. So he kept
that radical politics up and everything, And she wrote, my
father did not often mention Helen, but when he did,
he spoke of her with warmth. It is my understanding
that he left her. When his life was threatened, he

(52:40):
kept the ring Helen gave him, and when I was
in my teens, seeing it in a drawer, I asked
him if I could wear it. It has been on
my finger ever since. So it's kind of a few
different little stories. And it's funny to see his family
respond to these, because some of them are like, according
to I'm his you know, my mom is his Graham
or whatever, and they all have kind of a little

(53:01):
different story, you know what I mean. So it's just
funny how memory works kind of. But yeah, the real again,
the main threat is that they never got to get
married and they never saw each other again, because people
are assholes. Star cross love for real real? Uh, Romeo

(53:22):
and Juliette's story if Romeo doesn't have a family involved
that we know of, and Juliette's family was a bunch
of racist assholes. But soon the whole country would become
preoccupied when America declared war on Germany in nineteen seventeen,
formally entering what was known as the Great War. I

(53:44):
don't know if you've heard of it, um, but it
was kind of a big deal. Had a big franchise,
at least one sequel. So far, so far. Helen wrote
to Anne and Polly to let them know that this
war was happening, and they came back to the US,
which thank god, because Anne said she hadn't gotten a
newspaper in like weeks. Right, Oh, yeah, she's in. She's

(54:07):
like in Puerto Rico. Is just like some of the
males not coming through. We don't have a newspaper. I
hope we're not at war yet, but I know we
probably will be soon. So let me know, dear Anne,
stop it's happening. Stop We're at wars. Yeah, I wish
we could stop. Stop. So both Helen and Anne now

(54:29):
had very sad memories of their lost loves in the
Rentham House, so they decided we're gonna sell this place,
get the hell out of here, and start over in
New York. Yeah. Now, Helen was a pacifist, so she
wrote anti war articles and gave anti war speeches for
several months. Then in nineteen eighteen, she got a call

(54:50):
from Tinseltown and they traveled to California to work on
a silent film about Helen's life called Deliverance. I saw
Deliverance and I don't think it had anything to do
with Helen Keller. I guess I just misunderstood what was
happening there. I hope not much in the movie Deliverance

(55:11):
is related to Helen Keller's life. No, I uh, I
believe that they are unrelated movies. But this film, Deliverance
was considered too artsy, so it was kind of a
critical hit, but commercially it was a flop. People weren't
going to see it. Plus the studio got upset at

(55:32):
Helen because she took the screenwriter to a dinner for
Walt Whitman, which was full of like artists and radicals,
and that apparently reflected poorly on the film. I guess
they were like Whitman dinner, what did you do plan
the next Bolshevik revolution? And now what a bunch of pinkos?

(55:53):
You know. So you know, after all that, Helen and
and Polly came back to New York and by people's
literary tastes are kind of change in Helen's writings, aren't
selling your like as well as they were, And they
needed some money up in the house, you know what
I mean, I gotta have money, So naturally they turned

(56:15):
to vaudeville. Oh sure, I know, that when I needed money,
theater was the way to go. Get up a variety show. Today,
I can't believe your funds need. I can't believe I
gave up all that sketch comedy money to come to
a podcast. Yeah but no, Yeah, Helen Keller was on vaudeville.
If you didn't know that, because I didn't. I thought

(56:35):
that was super cool. They Helen and Anne joined a
variety show circuit and quickly became the most popular act
in the whole lineup. It was like a twenty minute
routine where Anne would come out, she'd tell a little
bit about Helen's life, you know, give her a little
intro um, and then she would do a question and
answer session. Helen, and bear in mind this is right

(56:56):
after prohibition started. Would you like to hear some of
the hell yeah, yes, welcome bill variety, hurly early extravagance.
I'm dazzling display of splendor to uplifted if I educate
and a maze. Would you believe it? We have the
miracle Worker herself and Sullivan Macy here with the one
and only Hella Killer was so good and so this

(57:25):
is their routine. Can you feel moonshine? No? But I
smell it. What is your definition of politics? The art
of finding and holding onto profitable jobs. Do you think
America has been true to her ideals? I'm afraid to
answer that. The ku Klux Klan might give me a ducking.

(57:49):
Do you close your eyes when you sleep? I guess
I do, but I never stayed awake to see. What
do you think is the most important question before the
country today? How to get a drink? Can you suggest
any tax the people would pay willingly? Yes, a tax
on millionaires. Do you believe a woman can keep a secret.

(58:10):
Of course we can. It's the person we tell it
to who can't. What can a person do when his
constitution is gone? Do as the United States does? Live
on the amendments. That's pretty good comedy, Honestly, I liked
it pretty good. I mean, a couple of singers in there,

(58:31):
how to get a drink? How long was the whole bit?
It's about twenty minutes? Yeah, just that, Yeah, pretty much
minutes of Q and A loved it, Yeah, yeah, it killed.
The show toured from nineteen twenty to nineteen twenty four,
and even though many of Helen's friends like found it

(58:52):
to be scandalous, that this was happening. Helen enjoyed herself
hugely and said that she was helping the causes of
blind people. She's getting a real kick out of this
Bodville tour. And though she had already met and befriended
tons of famous people in her life, including Mark Twain
and Alexander Graham Bell, she also made friends with vaudeville

(59:13):
celebrities like Sophie Tucker, Charlie Chaplin, Enrico Caruso, and Harpo
Mark cool legends. And then in Helen and and Polly
started working with the American Foundation for the Blind and
a f B had just gotten started in one because
so many soldiers came back from the Great War blinded

(59:35):
by mustard gas and so there, you know, they need
a lot of advocacy, their lives who completely changed, and
there wasn't a lot of that going around for people
with disabilities until there were veterans. Yeah, there's so much
packed into that because I'm like, wow, the mustard gas
was so bad they had to start a whole foundation

(59:56):
out of this, And also, wow, you wouldn't start a
foundation for the blind until a bunch of soldiers came
back from the war blinded, Like you weren't worried about
it until then. Yeah, they were like, there's like, what
a few schools whatever, They're fine, fine, I was like, okay. Anyway,
So they had just they were still a pretty new organization,

(01:00:16):
and the idea was that Helen, Ann and Polly were
going to be this instrumental in fundraising. They would do
all these appearances and people would just give, give, give money,
and together the women did address over two hundred and
fifty thousand people in a hundred and twenty seven cities
by nine to raise money for the f B. But unfortunately,

(01:00:37):
they had made an incredibly ambitious two million dollar goal
fundraising goal. And that's almost thirty two million dollars. Like,
just speaking as someone as to fundraise, that's a lot.
I mean, jeez. But even though they weren't as successful
at fundraising as they wanted to be, they were still

(01:00:59):
in valuable to the organization just raising awareness period for
the need for you know, these services and this kind
of advocacy, lobbying and all that kind of stuff. And
the director of the a f B dubbed Helen and
and Polly the three Musketeers and thanks to their work
traveling around the United States. State commissions were created, rehabilitation

(01:01:21):
centers were built, and education was made accessible to people
with vision laws amazing Throughout these years with the a
f B and was getting older, her health was deteriorating,
her eyesight was failing more and more. Polly started to
take over more of Ann's secretarial duties for Helen. When
she had joined the household back in nineteen fourteen, she

(01:01:42):
was just there to keep the house and she never
worked with anyone blind or death before. She had only
heard about the job through her hairdresser, who was also
Ann's hairdresser. Your hair dress talked your hair dresser, you know.
Polly came in and she was like, I'm still looking
for work, to find any saying I come to America
and there's no there's no bag pipes to play, there's

(01:02:06):
no opportunities. But a Scott's woman liked me, and their
hairdresser is like, you know, actually I heard about a job.
She ended up getting this gig. She was interested in
it because it involved a lot of travel, and Polly
loved it to travel sounds good to me. I would
take a job with a lot of travel. But she
deeply respected Helen and quickly she learned to communicate with

(01:02:28):
her and ended up just as devoted to Anne as
she was to Helen. This trio just bonded really tightly,
and she also apparently had a very strong personality. She
was very protective of Helen. Just just awesome that these
three very strong personalities had all come together to live
together and dominate and spread the good word and raise

(01:02:51):
this awareness. Really just a incredible meeting of minds. Like,
it's amazing that these three people ended up in the
same place at the same time. Yeah, could have gone
very differently if she'd if Helen had had you know,
a less competent teacher or a less uh disciplined teacher,
someone who wasn't as focused and intense or wasn't ready
to improvise her methods um and then yeah, what if

(01:03:15):
Anne never talked to her hairdresser? But if Paul, you know,
I mean, like, that's the great thing about history. It's
just these little weird coincidences that changed everything. And along
came Polly and changed the game. Came I never saw
a long pain Polly. I'm going to assume that it
was about this, all right, Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson.

(01:03:37):
No clue. I think it's Owen Wilson, and I think
it's about wow. What's wow wow wow wow wow Wow. Whoa,
I think it's about a parrot. No, that's Polly with
Jay Moore. Anyway. Yeah, Anne had to have one of

(01:03:58):
her eyes removed. You that's how bad it was getting.
And the doctor was like, listen, I know y'all bitches
love to work, Okay, but you need to take a
break and heal because you just had like a really
invasive surgery. Um. So they decided to go overseas to
go abroad. Okay, you know what, You're right doctor, I
do need to rest and heal. Time for a world

(01:04:19):
to right. Yeah, and totally I'm sure they were like, look,
I haven't been overseas. Let's do this. And they went
to visit Polly's family in Scotland, and then they also
hit up Ireland too while they're over there. Classic trips
Scotland and Ireland would love to do that one day.
And over the next few years they took a few trips.
They went to Europe, they went to Canada, Jamaica, bunch

(01:04:42):
of places. But Anne's health and her vision just continued
to deteriorate. Helen wrote about her feeling the toast to
make sure it was cooked, and listening intently to the
coffee as it percolated so she would know when to
take it off the heat. Um. And she kind of
wrote it like she was sort of feeling sorry for
her having had vision for a period of time not

(01:05:04):
have it anymore. She was kind of like seemed to
be feeling a lot of sympathy for that. She was
in a lot of pain. Her eyes bothered her constantly,
got to the point where like even a white tablecloth
was like painful for her to look at. They talked
about how much the spotlight in the Vaudeville act must
have affected her eyes, that it did Um And she

(01:05:25):
was also diagnosed with like gastric problems and sinility. So
she's just not doing very well here at the end,
and by five she was fully blind, Helen wrote in
a letter for fifty years and Sullivan Macy, my beloved teacher,
has been the light in my life. Now she is ill,
and the darkness that covers me has fallen upon her.

(01:05:46):
Still the light of her love shines amid the encircling gloom,
and we are happy on October, Anne had a coronary
thrombosis and died in Queens with Helen holding her her hand.
Helen's teacher and companion of fifty years, was gone shortly
before she died, and dictated this message to Polly. Goodbye,

(01:06:10):
John Macy, I'll soon be with you. Goodbye. I loved you.
I wanted to be loved. I was lonesome. Then Helen
came into my life. I wanted her to love me,
and I loved her. Then later Polly came and I
loved Polly, and we were always so happy together. My Polly,
my Helen, dear children. Maybe all meet together in harmony.

(01:06:34):
My Jimmy, I'll lay these flowers by your face. Don't
take him away from me. I loved him, so he's
all I've got. People attended Anne's funeral. She was cremated
and her ashes were interred in a memorial in Washington,
d c. Which is only reserved for people who made

(01:06:55):
a significant contribution to the country. She was the first
woman to receive this prom ledge on her own merits.
It just makes me cry because Jimmy is her brother,
you know, and like that's so sad. I mean, it
makes sense that she would be thinking of him, you know,
at the end of her life. But it's just sad
from so long ago, when they were so young. She

(01:07:17):
was thinking about him. D Yeah, I'm gonna go cry.
Let's take a commercial break. Sounds good, okay, welcome back.
I feel better, dry well Helen and Polly. Of course

(01:07:38):
we're both heartbroken after Anne's death. In Helen's journal, she wrote,
most of the time, I appeared to myself to be
a somnambulist, impelled only by an intense faith. They decided
to get back to traveling, get back to the work
doing something positive for blind people in the world, and
Helen and Polly went to Japan for the first time

(01:07:59):
to help raise money for Japanese deaf and blind people.
She gave nineties seven lectures in thirty five cities and
raised around three hundred and thirty thousand dollars. She continued
to publish books and essays. One of her pieces explaining
her socialist politics was burned by Nazi youth, which is

(01:08:19):
like what a feather in my cap. I'd be like,
I wrote something good, the Nazis are burning it. And
she did write an open letter condemning German censorship, and
she lobbied the government. She got blind people included as
recipients of federal aid in the Social Security Act, including
aid for diagnosis and treatment in the bill known as

(01:08:41):
Title ten, and she pressured the President to authorize funds
for recorded books to be made for the Library of Congress.
So she got real close with Fdr. And Eleanor Roosevelt
throughout this time and when during the war she worked
with soldiers a lot. She that was her particular interest.
During the war, she would go visit hospital wards, especially

(01:09:02):
of newly blind soldiers, if they had any kind of
of um, any kind of injury, you know, that that
had caused a disability. She was particularly interested in going
to visit with them and uplift them and kind of
let them know that like life was not over, they
could be just as cheerful and jolly as she was
and have a great time be all right. So after
the war, Helen and Polly got back to traveling, and

(01:09:25):
between nineteen forty six and nineteen fifty seven she visited
thirty five countries on five continents. She met Winston Churchill
golden Meyer, who was the Prime Minister of Israel at
the time Jawaharlal Nehru, who was the PM of India,
and she met privately with Pope Pious the twelfth and
the Queen of England too, And then in nineteen General

(01:09:52):
Douglas MacArthur sent her back to Japan as the first
good will ambassador. I love him being like, hey, uh,
you go say something, Go go go make sure everything's cool.
All right, tell us and I Helen. We just dropped
two enormous bombs on these tiny islands, so we really
need somebody to go over there. Charm um mancho, say

(01:10:15):
something nice. Go over there and hand him this note.
It says do you like me chick? Yes or no?
Are we cool? Yeah? Try try and smooth things over. Geez.
Her appearance in Japan drew a crowd of two million people.
They loved her in Japan. Yeah. They toured the Middle

(01:10:37):
East and they received an honorary degree from the only
integrated university in South Africa. It's pretty cool. When she
was seventy five years old, Helen went on her most
grueling trip yet, a forty thousand mile five month long
tour of Asia. As they both got older, Polly became

(01:11:00):
more and more possessive of Helen. She didn't like it
when people could hold conversations with Helen without her, because
then she wouldn't know exactly what was said about it,
you know, everything. And Helen's friends started to worry that
it would become impossible to train a replacement for Polly,
you know, because Anne, of course had trained Polly. She
wanted Helen to be able to talk to both of them,

(01:11:21):
and wanted both of them to be able to talk
to her, but Polly was really like proprietary about being
the one the middleman between Helen's uh, you know communications.
And they were right to worry because in n seven,
Polly had a stroke while she was in the kitchen
with Helen, and Helen was able to lower her to
the floor so she not like crashed to the ground

(01:11:42):
or something, but she had no way to call for help,
like it's just her and Polly and no way to
call for help at all. Two hours later, a neighbor
noticed that the door was open, and so they poked
their head in to see if everything was okay, and
they saw Helen sitting on the floor next to Polly,
and finally she got taken to a hospital. Polly did

(01:12:04):
not die, but she did suffer some brain damage, and
two caretakers named Winifred and Evelyn came home from the
hospital with Polly to take care of Polly and of Helen.
Polly unfortunately never fully recovered. She passed away in March
of nineteen sixty after forty six years with Helen, which
was more than half of Polly's life incredible. In nineteen

(01:12:27):
sixty one, Helen was one years old and her health
started to fail as well. She'd had a series of
small strokes and she had developed diabetes, and she began
to spend her days in a wheelchair. She became too
tired even to read sometimes, and she continued to receive
honors and awards, but after Polly died, she never really
became close to anyone again. She stopped traveling. In May

(01:12:51):
of nine sixty eight, she suffered a heart attack, and
a few days later, on June one, Helen died in
her sleep. Her ashes were all interred next to her
lifelong companions and and Polly in Washington, d C. I
think that's sad because it kind of indicates like how
hard it would be to become close to someone like
by the time she's in her eighties, She's like, I

(01:13:12):
just don't have anything. But that makes it such a
lonely last few years. Although apparently Winnifred and Evelyn were
pretty fun loving. They're very different from Polly in that way,
so she did have some good times with her caretakers.
And like, obviously we're talking about a huge legacy of
Helen Kelly. I mean, besides the many plays and movies

(01:13:35):
and books about her life and all the work she
did for people with disabilities around the world, and the
hundreds of essays and articles and thousands of speeches and
dozen books that she wrote, and then honorary degrees and
awards and honors and medals, like all her celebrity friends,
Like she met every president from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon Johnson,

(01:13:57):
and she was I mean, she would have met Grover
Cleveland two nonconsecutive occasions. I didn't think about that. She
was friends with Albert Einstein and Will Rogers, and there
are museums and foundations bearing her name. She's also one
of the original members of the A. C. L U.
Her autobiography from three is still in print all over

(01:14:20):
the world today. I mean, this is the legacy, right,
but there's also kind of a weird piece to this
legacy around TikTok. Conspiracy started, of all places, you know,
the best source of information, TikTok, and this conspiracy said
that they didn't believe Helen Keller was really disabled. I

(01:14:43):
just like people from back in the day. They questioned
whether someone with disabilities was capable of doing all the
things Helen did, writing books and going on lecture tours.
Either Helen was faking one or both of her disabilities,
or someone else was really creating the work and Helen
was just the gimmick personal they put up there in front.
Pretty insulting take, honestly. Now, apparently this post originally was

(01:15:07):
started as a joke and probably still is intended as one,
but of course people jumped on board and started to
believe it. You can't play with conspiracy theories these days,
even though, as a Guardian article points out, quote after
a stroke left him with locked in syndrome, Jean Dominique
Bobie wrote the Diving Bell in the Butterfly by blinking

(01:15:30):
his left eyelid. Naoki Higashida, who is severely autistic and
has limited verbal communication skills, wrote the Reason I Jump
using an alphabet grid Donna Williams overcame shocking abuse and
prejudice to produce her memoir Nobody Nowhere. And these are
just a few examples of an entire body of literature
produced by disabled authors over the years. So not that

(01:15:53):
anybody needed to prove it to you, but yes, there
are many examples of people with disabilities doing incredible, incredible things. God,
I haven't read it, but I saw the movie Diving
Bell in the Butterfly and it is something I am
still terrified up to this day. Oh my god. But
also like, well, if he can do it. It was

(01:16:14):
a good movie, but yeah, markable story, surprisingly funny. But
I was definitely like, if that happened to me, I
feel like I would go insane. But I was like,
you know he hated all right, Yeah right, maybe you
could keep that in mind if it happened. Just think
of Jean Dominique. Absolutely, if it ever happens to me,
I think about it all the time, whatever happens to me.
I just got to think of that movie. This guy

(01:16:35):
wrote a whole book. I can do it. I wrote
a whole book. Yeah. Well, and not just able bodied
people were questioning Helen keller Um. Some people with disabilities
really resent Helen Keller because she's always held up is
this like saintly figure who overcame so much to do

(01:16:57):
so much, you know, and because we all learned about her,
because all we learned about her is her childhood and
never really about the woman she became. Kind of besides
her long list of accomplishments. Of course, you just kind
of hear like Helen Keller couldn't see or talk or here,
and then Ann Sullivan came and held her hand under

(01:17:18):
water pump and suddenly at all became clear. And then
she got a bunch of awards and wrote a bunch
of books and did a bunch of things, and then
she died. Like that's sort of the Helen Keller story
we know. So because of that, she's really been very diluted,
like you don't know, we don't know really the real
Helen Keller getting a three dimensional picture here exactly. I mean,

(01:17:38):
in her lifetime, she was prevented from loving someone, sometimes
prevented from speaking out about things she cared about because
she was meant to be this inspirational example to everybody.
And you know, she'd been a celebrity since she was
eight years old. So that's insane, yes, crazy, And in
death she's still depicted mostly as a pre pubescent girl

(01:18:01):
at a water pump. So like, you know, even with
all the accomplishments that she made after that, that's the
image that is like drawn, you know, drilled into our
brain about her. But Helen Keller was a really accomplished person.
I mean, even without disabilities. Writing a dozen books and
contributing to multiple magazines and going on years long lecture
tours across the globe is incredible. I mean, for real, right,

(01:18:25):
please let me do half of that life. But she
wasn't a saint. She was a human woman. She was
someone who fell in love with this handsome journalist and
wanted to run away with him. She liked to go
out and get a hot dog from the stand on
the corner, or drink a few martinis before bed. She
loved a good joke. She had a calm, cheerful outlook
on life. She was just a lady. She's just a

(01:18:47):
cool lady. And she had a lot of really strong
opinions that a lot of people in power really didn't
want you to read about. So they were like, let's
forget that part her nineteen sixty eight New York Times
obituary sums it up well. Tall, handsome, gracious, poised, Miss

(01:19:09):
Keller has a sparkling humor and a warm hand clasp
that won her friends easily. She exuded vitality and optimism.
My life has been happy because I have had wonderful
friends and plenty of interesting work to do, she once remarked,
adding I seldom think about my limitations, and they never
make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of

(01:19:31):
yearning at times, but it is vague, like a breeze
among flowers. The wind passes, and the flowers are content.
Tell you just right. I just think it's important to
know how deeply she loved people and how I don't know.
She's just not not what what I knew about. Now again,

(01:19:53):
I read about an eight year old and that was it.
But I have to be gross, if I can be
gross for a minute, population stations. What it's all about
here in Ridiculous Romance? Do you think that Helen and
Peter ever had sex? Because I mean she was at
our mid thirties by this time, they were alone. I'm
not sure. I mean, why not? Come on, they must

(01:20:15):
have done something right. I kind of hope they did.
If it was like her one love affair, I feel
like I'm like, I hope she went all the way
with it. Maybe maybe they just did hand stuff. Oh my,
oh my god, I can't believe you just said that.
Oh no and stuff. Oh man, Look, we know they

(01:20:38):
did hand stuff. But yeah, you should leave. We should leave.
I'm jumping right to the email address after that one.
You've said enough, I'm sorry canceled. Look if you wanna,
if you want to really give Diana what Stern talking to,

(01:20:59):
then you can send us an email at Romance at
I heart media dot com, or or slide into my
d M. I guess I'm on Twitter and Instagram at
dianamite boom and I'm at oh Grade. It's Eli and
just remember who said it. The show is at riddic Romance.
If you want to tag us and I hate posts,

(01:21:21):
please don't. I didn't mean it like that. I know
you didn't, but it was. It came out. It's pretty good.
It's pretty good. Um. We're so happy to have you
as always, And I hope that you enjoyed this episode
about Helen Keller and Peter Fagin and and hopefully learned
something about people of disabilities. I certainly did right and

(01:21:45):
how they're perceived and right, you know what that's like
going through I mean, and still today they have a
hard time getting married, especially to each other, because of
the way the benefits work and disability benefits, and so
they're they're still fighting for urge equality. This seems like
an old, old timey thing, but it's it's happening right now. Well,

(01:22:07):
we hope to hear from you soon, and we will
definitely be here for the next episode because if we weren't,
there wouldn't be one. But we'll look forward to seeing
you then. Thank you so much for tuning in as always,
and we'll see you next time. So long, friends, it's
time to go. Thanks so listening to our show. Tell
your friend's name's uncle Sandance to listen to a show

(01:22:28):
ridiculous Well Nance