Stolen: One Voice : Missing Keyboard Allowed Man With Cerebral Palsy to Communicate

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 helps him “speak” electronically, was taken Oct. 21 from the cafeteria at Valley College when he 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 a telecommunications device for the deaf, or TDD, 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 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 enabled him to exert his independence.

“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.”

Gershan, 31, walks on his own, and although he has problems with motor control characteristic of the disease, he has shown abilities that doctors said he would never develop.

Even without the voice machine, Gershan has always been independent, Toppel said. And though doctors told his mother 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 his voice device was stolen, Toppel said her conversations with her son have been reduced to his tapping once for yes, twice for no, or deciphering his grunts or his handwriting, which sometimes cannot be done because of his disability.

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.

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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, also 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,” said Rein. “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 BA from here.”

The theft of his voice machine is not the first crime to which Gershan has fallen victim. In the last month, thieves have twice broken into his Panorama City home and taken a VCR, a television and 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.

“When he pals around with us, no one makes fun of him,” Mosley said.

Mosley said that other off-duty officers sometimes give Gershan a ride home when he misses his bus after late-night events.

Since the theft of his voice, 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.

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Mosley knows what Gershan can do when someone takes the time to let him try.

“We had the end-of-the-season party for the staff of the Greek Theatre last Sunday, and none of the idiot policemen knew how to work the computerized bowling scores, but Glenn did.

“Another time, I goofed up a video camera that runs in our theater office, and he fixed it for me.”

The ease with which Gershan understands computer systems and things mechanical makes the police officer wonder sometimes if Gershan is actually smarter than Mosley.

“That could be true,” Gershan said.