Roy Kay Holcomb
(7/24/1923—11/26/1998)

Teacher and advocate

Roy Kay Holcomb began life in Texas, in extreme poverty, and worked his way up to becoming a pre-eminent teacher and administrator. At Gallaudet College, he earned a place in Deaf-sports history, as one of the “Five Iron Men” who won three sequential games to capture the Mason-Dixon Conference Basketball Tournament in 1943. A veteran teacher, frustrated with the narrowness and rigidity of oralism, he adopted a more inclusive, flexible combined approach, using signing and fingerspelling as well as speech. He first introduced Total Communication to a small public-school program in Santa Ana, California, in 1968, hired Deaf teachers, and offered Sign classes to the students’ families—a revolutionary notion. TC—a philosophy affirming the child’s access to all modes of communication—became the fastest-growing movement in the history of deaf education, although the methodological controversy rages on.