Thief Steals More Than a Keyboard : Communication: For Glenn Gershan, who has cerebral palsy, it was his voice.

A lot of people have experienced losing their voice but probably none like Glenn Gershan.

His was stolen.

Gershan--who has cerebral palsy--relies on a communication device to speak. The machine, a keyboard that “speaks” electronically, was taken Oct. 21 from the cafeteria at Valley College when the 31-year-old man took off his backpack to eat lunch, said Los Angeles Police Officer Bob Mosley, who has befriended Gershan.

“I need the machine for my class, and for a messenger job I have applied for,” Gershan said, using the Telecommunications Device for the Deaf to type his responses during a recent telephone interview.

“I would say to anyone who knows me, please return it.”

The replacement cost for the kind of machine that Gershan uses, a 16-year-old prototype, is about $4,000.

Jan Toppel, Gershan’s mother, said the device had become like “his right arm” and has enabled him to be more independent.

“He is very good on this machine, but to someone else it would be a toy,” she said. “Anyone else would think it was a computer, open it up, see it has no value and probably trash it.”

Even without the voice machine, Gershan always has been independent, Toppel said. And although doctors told his mother that he would never walk, he has learned to run, jump and drive a car, and has lived on his own for the last three years, she said.

“His mental age is still that of about a 13-year-old, but he has never said ‘poor me’ or ‘why me,’ ” said his father, Howard Gershan.

Since the device was stolen, Toppel said, her conversations with her son have been reduced to him tapping once for yes, twice for no, or interpreting his grunts or his handwriting, which sometimes is indecipherable.

The voice machine--a 9 1/2-by-11-inch keyboard that weighs about 4 1/2 pounds--allows Gershan to program and store phrases and words, spell out words and make new ones using a combination of 26 phonetic keys, said Rick Pimentel, the vice president of Phonic Ear, the Petaluma company that manufactured it.

Gershan was one of the first people in the nation to use the device, Pimentel said. And he’s used it to pry open a world that was closed to him before.

It has enabled him to use the telephone, a development that people at Phonic Ear said they learned about almost immediately--when Gershan started burning up their toll-free service line.

“He has an aunt up here in the Bay Area, so he would come and visit people at our office,” Pimentel said. “If he wasn’t coming up, he was on the phone.”

He has demonstrated his expertise on the machine as a spokesman of sorts at conventions that Phonic Ear representatives have attended in Southern California, said Pimentel.

Gershan, by all accounts a gregarious man, has appeared as a guest lecturer twice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, said RaeLynne Rein, who taught the classes.

“The students were overwhelmed and they were totally moved and said so in an evaluation at the end of the quarter,” Rein said. “It wasn’t until he left the room that I explained to them that he went to the elementary school on the campus and that he did not hold a B.A. from here.”

The theft of his voice machine is not the first time that Gershan has been a crime victim. In the last month, thieves have twice broken into his Panorama City home and taken a VCR, a television and a microwave oven, his father said.

Glenn Gershan’s friendship with Mosley, the police officer, has become very important to both men.

“Bob is the most important guy to me,” Gershan said. “His personality is just great, and when we work together, I forget he’s a cop.”

Mosley too says he is honored to be Gershan’s buddy. Mosley works as an off-duty security officer at the Hollywood Bowl and Greek Theatre, where Gershan works as a parking attendant.

Since the theft, Mosley and other off-duty officers who know Gershan from his work as a parking attendant have decided to pitch in to help defray the cost of another machine.

Mosley wonders sometimes if Gershan isn’t smarter than he is because of the ease with which Gershan understands computer systems and mechanical things.

“That could be true,” Gershan said.