In Memoriam
Remembering Patty
by Dan Veltri, friend, colleague and business partner
What follows is a brief and incomplete story of the interpreting side of Patty’s life, pieced together from my recollections of conversations we had over the years.
Patricia “Patty” Lessard, author of the Classifiers: A Closer Look Full Curriculum and Self Study series, was a passionate scholar of ASL, ally of the Deaf community, and leader in the field of ASL interpreting and interpreter education.
Patty was born and raised in the Bay Area, mostly in San Leandro. She graduated from the University of San Francisco sometime in the mid-70s. While working a summer job at a photo developing lab, she was assigned to train a new Deaf employee. She had learned fingerspelling as a girl scout and developed a friendship with this Deaf woman, who taught her more ASL and began introducing her to other Deaf people at the Deaf club and other events. She was never enrolled in a formal ASL class or interpreter training program. Her training was through association with Deaf people. She was a teacher of the Deaf for a short time. She earned her Comprehensive Skills Certificate (CSC) from the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) in the late 70s and was active in NorCRID, the Northern California chapter. When I moved to San Francisco in 1981, Patty was the Local Test Administrator for RID. She had just left a position as coordinator of interpreting services at Laney College in Oakland at that time and was primarily freelancing with the Deaf Counseling, Advocacy and Referral Agency (DCARA) and St. Benedict Center.
Our paths began to cross frequently around 1984 when an interpreter, Greg Smith, passed away from HIV/AIDS. Greg’s illness and passing brought several interpreters together. Through another mutual friend and interpreter, Garet Stark, we would often work together volunteering for various meetings and trainings for Deaf People with AIDS. I was impressed not only with her skills but also her willingness to volunteer countless hours to make sure Deaf professionals had access to the latest information so that they could work to educate the Deaf community about safer sex practices.
By the mid-80’s, the practice of “team interpreting” – where two interpreters work together and rotate with each other at regular intervals in an assignment – was just beginning to take hold in the Bay Area. We worked together monthly for trainings put on by the UCSF Center on Deafness, where I was the staff interpreter. We were often working from ASL to English at these presentations. Our styles and approach to the work just clicked, as if we could read each other’s minds. In the late 80’s, the “Deaf President Now” revolt at Gallaudet University was energizing Deaf professionals all over the country to take control over the leadership of Deaf education. The “Bi-Bi” (Bilingual-Bicultural) movement was emerging as a new idea in Deaf education, and Deaf professionals at the California School for the Deaf (CSD) in Fremont were leading the way. Patty was coordinating interpreting services at the school at that time and we began working together frequently at their professional faculty and staff meetings.
During this time Patty was an adjunct faculty member in the Interpreter Preparation Program at Ohlone College in Fremont. She began reading voraciously about the research on ASL linguistics which was going through an amazing revolution. She attended and interpreted for ASL linguistics workshops and began to incorporate concepts from the research into her teaching. In the mid-90’s, we were teaming together regularly with Deaf Ph.D. students in education and linguistics. At the same time, I developed my interest in educational media production and started Treehouse Video.
For hearing students of ASL who don’t have the benefit of native exposure to the language, the most difficult part of ASL is developing visual-spatial skills. Patty could see that this was one of the major obstacles to her students’ progress. She cracked the code and came up with several novel ways for students to incrementally develop and exercise that skill and begin applying it. When I’d see her at work, she would complain that she needed to haul several bags of bulky VHS videotapes of Deaf signers up the steep steps at Ohlone to provide examples of classifier constructions and other aspects of ASL to her students. I not so subtly suggested that I was a video producer and could help her put all her videos together. The more we talked, the more we got excited and decided to go ahead and develop a full curriculum and produce our own videos. In 1999-2000, we hired Ben Jarashow, who had just graduated from CSD, to be the sign model for the video content. Marlon Kuntze, who was in the middle of earning his Ph.D. served as an advisor as Patty developed several drafts of the lessons. The curriculum is now widely used in ASL and interpreting programs throughout the US and Canada.
Patty was frequently called upon to interpret conferences on signed language linguistics all over the world. Those of us who had the privilege to work with her could count on her fierce devotion to clarity and accuracy in the work and a strict adherence to preserving the purity of ASL. Wherever she worked – large public events, conference presentations, theatrical performances, concerts, comedy shows – she brought her best and quickly became one of the most preferred interpreters in the Bay Area and beyond. She was a leader, serving on the boards of DCARA, NorCRID, and the Conference of Interpreter Trainers (CIT) over the years.
She was also incredibly generous and dedicated to the causes she cared about – too many to mention here, but one in particular stands out. Patty voluntarily coordinated and interpreted for the AIDS Walk in San Francisco since its beginning in 1987. I don’t think there was a single year she missed. In July 2018, the Walk fell on a Sunday when Patty was in the middle of a job out of town. She struggled to find someone to cover for her. When she realized that there was a break in the job and that she would not be needed until the evening of that Sunday, she booked a flight to leave early in the morning, arrive in SF in time to interpret for the Walk, then fly back to the assignment that evening!
She had other passions as well, including adopting rescue dogs – specifically border collies, and was a certified ranger for the annual Elephant Seals tour at Año Nuevo State Park. She organized and conducted the ASL tours every year and they became very popular in the Deaf community. She was also very adventurous – she loved the outdoors, backpacking and caving in caverns. She is survived by her devoted husband, Paul Bisbiglia. Together they developed strong friendships with many people in the Deaf and interpreting communities.
Patty was always pushing herself – and those she worked with – to a higher standard. What a debt of gratitude we owe her for inspiring us to do better. She is gone but will never be forgotten.