JEAN UTLEY LEHMAN LEAVES $1.5 MILLION LEGACY
FOR TEACHERS OF THE DEAF

For more information, contact Kim Readmond, 314/977-0243, kreadmond@cid.edu
 

ST. LOUIS, Missouri, July 2008 – The late Jean Utley Lehman, PhD of Covina, California, has left $1.5 million to CID - Central Institute for the Deaf (CID) in St. Louis, Missouri. The gift will create an endowment fund to help support teacher education in perpetuity. Robin M. Feder, MS, CFRE, executive director of CID, announced that the generous bequest will help CID achieve strategic goals in training current CID teachers as well as teachers who serve children who are deaf and hard of hearing in mainstream schools.  

Dr. Lehman died in May of 2007 at the age of 96. Before retiring as a professor from California State University in Los Angeles in 1974, she taught at eight schools, directed the Speech and Hearing Rehabilitation Clinic at the University of Illinois College of Medicine and served on advisory committees to California State University and the U.S. Department of Education.

Dr. Lehman was a graduate of CID’s teacher training program in 1932. She earned a master’s degree from Wayne State University in 1938, and in 1945 became the first woman to earn a PhD in speech and hearing from Northwestern University. Her publications included What’s Its Name? A Guide to Speech and Hearing Development, Bobby and His Hearing Aid and The Utley Lip Reading Test, a widely published classic in the field and the only standardized lip reading test at the time for words, sentences and stories. Chapters in books, articles and class compendiums further document her expertise and contributions to the field. Her long and prolific career motivated her contemporaries, prepared future leaders and inspired her to leave a generous bequest to help others.   

“We are honored that Dr. Lehman chose to entrust her legacy to CID,” Feder said. “It is a fitting legacy for a woman whose personal and professional life were dedicated to learning, teaching and achievement.”

Dr. Lehman’s close personal friend Ruth McGrath of Covina, California, remembers her as a brilliant woman with an inquisitive mind who looked at all possibilities and could readily separate “the wheat from the chaff.”

“She laughed easily and could out-think most others,” McGrath said. “Her friends were professional colleagues, students and those whom she met in daily life. She had a life full of people who loved and respected her.”  

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Editor’s notes: CID was founded in 1914. It is located at 825 South Taylor Avenue, at the southern end of the Washington University Medical Center/Central West End neighborhood of St. Louis (63110).