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Helen Hulick Beebe
 Helen Hulick Beebe was an internationally known speech-language pathologist and educator of the deaf who devoted her life to bringing sound to the ears of children who are hearing impaired. Mrs. Beebe was a pioneer in teaching these children to listen and to speak by using what was then known as the "Unisensory approach," a method to develop and use whatever tiny amount of residual hearing a youngster who was deaf or hard of hearing might possess.
Under Mrs. Beebe's method - an extension of a principle put forward earlier by Max Goldstein - even a profoundly deaf child was fitted with binaural hearing aids. The child was then taught to process spoken language through their ears and to get maximum use from their hearing aids.
A tall, elegant woman, with clear, sharp eyes and a firm but warm manner, Mrs. Beebe learned her methods while studying under the eminent Viennese physician and speech pathologist, Emil Froeschels, and later, after he died, continued to develop and promote the technique, now known as the Auditory-Verbal approach. She wrote numerous journal articles and spoke at scores of professional engagements and conferences.
Mrs. Beebe convinced many people that profoundly deaf children could learn to listen and to speak. She demonstrated this for decades within her Easton practice, founded in 1944.
Students praised her methods -and the results. In a 1983 interview, David Davis, a profoundly deaf high school senior bound for Harvard University, said he could not have done so well in school if he had not started at the Beebe Center as small child.
 "Beebe teaches you how to discriminate, how to respond to sound," Davis said. "It's more of a mental process, involving logic and rational thinking. I learned language one small step by one small step."
"...What I could do in first grade or kindergarten in hearing is nothing like what I can do now. Five years ago, I could only hear squawks on the radio. A year ago, I was able to hear the weather forecast for the first time. Maybe ten years from now I'll be able to distinguish the direction a sound is coming from."
One of Mrs. Beebe's methods for increasing exposure to the technique she helped pioneer was to take in numerous younger teachers at her therapy center.
 Born and raised in Easton in 1909, where she lived most of her life, the former Helen Hulick attended Wellesley College from 1927 to 1929 and graduated in 1930 from the Clarke School for the Deaf/Smith College deaf education training program in Northampton, Massachusetts. She initially taught in schools for the deaf in Oregon and California before returning to the East Coast in 1942 and beginning a twenty-year association with Dr. Froeschels. In 1978 Mrs. Beebe donated her private practice to the Larry Jarret Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit foundation started by a small group of parents of Mrs. Beebe's students and named after a child with whom Mrs. Beebe worked. The Jarret Foundation later renamed her practice the Helen Beebe Speech and Hearing Center. Mrs. Beebe continued to serve as a therapist, teacher and adviser until her death in 1989.
"Her expectations for children were always tremendously high. She always held out hope for children, even those in whom others had given up hope."
Mrs. Beebe's work was featured in the 1986 book Sound Waves by David Colley, which focused on her teaching and the experience of one family and their profoundly hearing-impaired daughter.
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