Episode 230: Helen Hulick Takes the Stand

the memory palace

Nate DiMeo

Radiotopia, Publicradio, History, Natedimeo

4.8 • 7.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Order The Memory Palace book now, dear listener. On Bookshop.org, on Amazon.com, on Barnes & Noble, or directly from Random House. Or order the audiobook at places like Libro.fm.

During mid-April, 2025, I'm doing a southern book tour, with stops in San Antonio, Houston, Gainesville, Montgomery, New Orleans, and Oxford. Find out more at www.thememorypalace.us/events.

The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Radiotopia is a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts that’s a part of PRX, a not-for-profit public media company. If you’d like to directly support this show, you can make a donation at Radiotopia.fm/donate. I have recently launched a newsletter. You can subscribe to it at thememorypalacepodcast.substack.com.

Music

Hallway Rug and a bit of Watering Plants by Omni Gardens
Dripping Icicles from Lalo Schiffrin's great score to The Fox.
Girl Talk by the Howard Roberts Quartet
Jules et Therese from the score to Jules et Jim
Franz Waxman's main title theme to Woman of the Year
Your Love from the legend, Frankie Knuckles
Then we go back and forth between Joe Morello's Timeless and Lara Downes playing Leonard Bernstein's Big Stuff.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMaio. It is not the life she lived afterward, from the end of
0:08.4	1938 until her death in 1989 at the age of 80, that caught the nation's attention. Nor are
0:14.2	those years the focus of this story. Though the character of Helen Beebe, the woman she was during
0:19.4	that period, the woman she spent
0:21.0	the rest of her life being, is certainly in this story, was certainly on full display
0:26.2	during the brief time she spent in the spotlight.
0:29.5	And it is not the case, as so often happens to be the case, with people in history who were
0:33.7	once briefly famous, that the rest of her life wasn't documented.
0:42.8	She was, in her way, in this sort of narrow niche in which even the most successful among us can only hope to gain prominence.
0:45.2	A public figure.
0:47.2	At least to a small section of the public.
0:49.9	Her obituary was in the New York Times, though it is short, and rather to her credit, honestly, makes no mention of the couple of weeks in the winter of 38 in which her fame briefly came.
1:00.0	That obituary tells of Helen H. Bebe. Her names was changed from Helen Hewlich after a marriage, the obituary, in her rather robust Wikipedia page and her numerous publications, do not mention.
1:12.2	It hits the highlights of her professional life.
1:15.1	Spent is a renowned educator of deaf children,
1:18.3	a president and honoree of the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf,
1:22.8	and a one-time board member of the Foundation for Children's Hearing Education and Research.
1:29.3	She herself was hard of hearing. The condition came on as an adult in the 1940s, inspiring a career switch.
1:34.3	She went from teaching kindergarten to becoming a renowned expert and pioneer in what is known as the
1:40.3	auditory verbal method of speech instruction and language development.
1:43.3	We do not know how severe her hearing loss was, though.
1:47.0	She did wear hearing aids for decades.
	...

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