Robert Panara dies at 94; leading educator of the deaf

Robert Panara, who lost his hearing as a child and became a leading educator of the deaf and a pioneering scholar of deaf culture, has died. He was 94.

Panara died of natural causes July 20 at the Rochester, N.Y., nursing home where he lived, according to longtime friend and colleague Harry Lang, who recalled Panara as an educator whose influence went well beyond the classroom.

“Bob was passionate about his teaching,” Lang said. “He would often say [in sign language], ‘My classroom is my stage.’ I have never met a person so happy with life, so inspirational to both students and colleagues, and so respected and loved.”

Panara’s career included teaching at Gallaudet University and the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he was a founder of the school’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf. He also was a founder of the National Theater of the Deaf in Connecticut. He was the first deaf person to earn an academic teaching position after graduating from the New York School for the Deaf in White Plains, N.Y., and the first deaf person to earn a master’s degree in English from New York University.

When he retired from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in 1987, the college named its theater after him and created a scholarship fund in his honor.

Born in 1920 in the Bronx, Panara contracted spinal meningitis at age 10 and became deaf, but the loss of hearing never deterred him. His strong reading and writing skills allowed him to attend mainstream public schools, and he often relied on classmates to take notes for him or mouth words so he could read lips.

Panara learned sign language at the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Conn., and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1940 at Gallaudet in Washington, D.C., where he wrote several papers that established him as a leader in the field of deaf education.

In 1965, he was invited by U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare John Gardner to serve on a national advisory board for the establishment of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. He began his career there in 1967, becoming its first deaf professor, and also established the English department, where his son John teaches.

For more than two decades, Panara enthralled both deaf and hearing students with his vivid interpretations of literature and poetry, often weaving his passion for baseball into his teaching.

Panara wrote “Great Deaf Americans” and a collection of poems, “On His Deafness and Other Melodies Unheard.” His poem “On His Deafness,” written in 1946, won first prize in the World of Poetry contest in 1988.

news.obits@latimes.com