Deaf community fetes foundation milestone
[attach]907[/attach]Reverend Bob Rumball has spent more than fifty years acting as the voice for those who cannot speak and the ears for those who cannot hear.
But the local hero, who celebrates his 80th birthday this month, has taken an unusual route to get to where he is today.
During his career playing football in the 1950s for the then-Ottawa Roughriders, Rumball attended seminary. One year after graduating and being traded to the Toronto Argonauts, Rumball left football to begin preaching full-time.
He was invited to deliver a sermon at the Evangelical Church of the Deaf on Wellesley Street and became its full-time minister in 1955, mastering sign language in just three months.
After decades of service to the deaf community, the [url=http://www.bobrumball.org/]Bob Rumball Foundation for the Deaf[/url] is celebrating his birthday and the 30th anniversary of the foundation’s community centre on Bayview Avenue with a banquet Nov. 5.
The 9,300-square-metre centre, which houses 75 people in its residences, offers the deaf community services like sign language classes and preschool programs, along with basic community centre offerings like sports facilities and games.
Aside from its main community centre in Toronto, the foundation now has three other locations in southern Ontario: a year-round camp in Parry Sound, a centre for those with special needs in Milton and a nursing home in Barrie.
In the early days of the foundation, Rumball would hand-pick each person he wanted to help, said Tracey Switzer, manager of the Progressive Independent Living Program at the centre for those with special needs.
Rumball once took a deaf and blind teenage boy from an institution, Switzer recalled. The teen’s family was told he was a helpless case.
“Here, he received surgery that allowed him to walk, and attention to learn new skills,” she said. “By the time he died, he knew every inch of this centre and walked all over it.
“What (Rumball) has accomplished in the last 30 years is truly inspirational.”
Bill Mayfield, 90, joined the seniors’ program when the Bayview centre opened in 1979 because he thought it would be a great way to meet others in the deaf community. Now it’s his second home.
The centre offered him “a rare chance to use our language exclusively without worrying who will understand,” he wrote in an email.
“(The centre is) one of the few places for chatting, socializing, mingling, meeting friends and being social that I have that are totally in my language: American Sign Language,” Mary Micetic, also 90, wrote in an email.
Like Mayfield, Micetic has been using the centre since it opened in 1979.
“It is a chance to be part of my community,” Micetic wrote. “I always know I will be understood here.”
Rumball’s legacy working with the deaf has been passed onto his children.
Three of Rumball’s five daughters work with the hearing impaired. The other two have impairments themselves.
Derek Rumball, one of two sons, is now the executive director of the foundation and has worked full-time at the Parry Sound camp.
“I think I’m able to do what I do not because I share the skills or talents that Rev. Rumball has, but because I have an understanding of what the deaf community wants and needs,” he said. “It’s allowed me to carry on with my father’s vision.”
Rumball said that his father, who has retired five or six times now, is still involved with the centre.
“We’ve always been known as the people that go over and above,” the executive director said. “We’re not a business that closes at five.
“The need doesn’t stop at five o’clock.”