And Some Won’t Hear : Pageant Contestant’s Pleas Fall on Truly Deaf Ears

What we have here, perhaps, is a failure to communicate.

That’s the positive spin on the story that I’m about to tell. There are less charitable ways of looking at it too.

This is about Lynn Lochrie, a 24-year-old woman a variety show host might introduce as “the beautiful and the talented.”

Lynn seems as if she would be comfortable with that. She is vivacious, thoughtful, determined and self-confident. She stands up for herself, with a smile. She has many friends in both of her worlds: the hearing and the deaf.

Lynn and I met the other night at the Miss Anaheim Scholarship Pageant, where she was competing with 13 other women for the crown. The contest winner goes on to the Miss California Pageant in San Diego this June. The winner there will compete in Atlantic City for the mantle of Miss America 1991.

Lynn did not finish in the top four, which, for better or worse, is the judges’ call to make. But I wonder if Lynn Lochrie, the only deaf contestant, was given a fair shake.

Lynn, a former Miss Deaf California, asked the pageant for an interpreter to help her decipher the judges’ spoken questions during the interview portion of the contest, which counts for 30% of the final score.

The request was flat-out denied, no ifs, ands or buts.

Earline Jones, the Anaheim pageant’s executive director, says this: “I just didn’t feel she needed one. Why should she have someone up there with her? She did fine . . . . There can only be one queen. There were four girls who made it and 10 that didn’t.”

And Bob Arnhym, who as president of the California pageant, oversees the local contests, adds:

“There is a policy of the Miss America pageant, and it has been in place for quite a number of years, that a contestant may not compete if she is assisted by anyone.

“It was originally designed because of talent, things like back-up singers or spotters for a gymnast . . . and the intent at this moment in time is that all contestants must be on an equal footing. Many, many young deaf women have competed at the state level and they have not had an interpreter.”

And only one of them, from Tulare County, has won. She went on to compete for the California title in 1984.

Still, Lynn Lochrie, who reads lips and speaks with her voice and hands, was reluctant to make much of a fuss when Earline Jones told her that she couldn’t have any “help.” She says her denial was so adamant that she knew she couldn’t make the director budge.

And Lynn really did want to compete. When I got in touch with her before the pageant, she asked that we wait to talk until after the judges’ votes had been cast.

So-called trouble in a beauty pageant never does go over too well.

Another deaf beauty pageant contestant, Julie Rems, caused a stir last month when the director of the Miss Culver City Scholarship Pageant suggested that she not use an interpreter, even though she had used one in the same contest the year before.

Julie, who placed second last year, was angered by the lack of sensitivity and threatened to quit. The pageant director eventually gave in. Julie competed, but did not place in the top four.

Julie, also a former Miss Deaf California, was at the Anaheim pageant to cheer Lynn on. I talked with her there. She is still angry over what happened in Culver City and suggests that she may sue. She doesn’t like anybody putting limits on what she, as a deaf person, can do.

Lynn, too, has had her fill of ignorance--some of it innocent, some of it turned mean. Of the pageant officials, she says she believes they just don’t understand what using an interpreter really means.

It is not a way to cheat.

“Reading lips is an art,” Lynn says. “It can take a while to get used to how somebody speaks. It’s like a fingerprint. Everybody is different.”

During the competition, Lynn says she did not understand three of the questions that the judges asked. And some of the judges appeared to have had trouble understanding her too.

In addition, one of the judges told me that during dinner before the Anaheim pageant, officials and judges discussed the controversy over Julie Rems. Bob Arnhym and Julie had had a heated discussion broadcast on “The Home Show” earlier in the day.

It is not my point here to say that Lynn Lochrie should or should not have been crowned Miss Anaheim 1991. I suppose beauty contest judging, not my strong suit, must be something of an art too.

No, not everybody can be a queen.

Still, why not make the rules as equitable as they can be? Contestants for Miss Universe, for example, are not penalized if their language happens to be Greek, or German, or Chinese. Common sense dictates that interpreters be used.

And some may argue that what’s at stake here is only a beauty title, piddly, some say degrading stuff.

I say the implications are much broader than that. What about Rosa Parks? Should she, too, have gone along with the majority’s rules? After all, it was only a bus.

And a people’s civil rights.

“We are not zeroing in on the deaf,” says pageant president Arnhym. “They are zeroing in on us . . . . I’m not suggesting our policy will change. Imagine having to compete on an equal footing with hearing girls and then winning. What a triumph! And what a shallow victory it would be to gain an advantage in the judging because she was deaf.”

Bob Arnhym, and others, just don’t get it. As I said, that’s the charitable spin.

“This may be a trite analogy,” Arnhym says. “But there’s a program called the Special Olympics designed for those who wouldn’t be competitive in the regular Olympics without changing the rules . . . .

“I’m 5-11 and I like basketball, but if I want to compete in basketball, I can’t ask them to lower the net. That is a fact of life. I chose other sports. I didn’t feel discriminated against because I wasn’t tall enough.”

Nor, says Arnhym, should deaf women feel discriminated against within the Miss America pageants. They are welcome here.

So long as they abide by the pageant’s unfair rules.