Annette Funicello and John Tracy Clinic

Annette Funicello, former Disney Mouseketeer, died to day at age 70. RIP.  The photo seen below (circa 1959) is Annette reading a Teen magazine to a deaf boy wearing a hearing aid on his chest.  Annette was introduced to John Tracy Clinic by the JTC founding board member Walt Disney.

Perhaps the greatest link was John Tracy, Spencer and Louise Tracy’s son, who was born deaf. John had an interest in art and as a child started a newspaper. The first issue sported a Mickey Mouse cover with an inscription by Disney which read, “Good Luck to Johnny Tracy.”

Louise Tracy spent a great deal of her life establishing the John Tracy Clinic for families with deaf children. Having struggled to understand the best way to educate her son, she wanted to provide the best medical advice to other parents in the same situation. Disney donated $100 at the clinic’s inception and was a member of the original board of directors. When Disney toured the facility in 1043 and saw that the children were napping on mats on the floor, he donated cots and at Christmas sent over “a truck load of gifts – puppets and toys, all Disney-licensed, that could be used in teaching.”

Disney later funded a $12,000 short film, Listening Eyes, made by the clinic to explain its procedures and supplied the director, Larry Lansburgh, from his studio.

When the Disneys sailed on the Queen Elizabeth to Europe in July of 1952, Spencer Tracy was also on board and they socialized during the trip.

In 1957, Disney hired John Tracy, who by then had attended Choinard, to work at the studio. He eventually was in charge of the cel library. John left Disney when his sight deteriorated and he was no longer able to do the job.

In 1961, Disney was on the ticket sales committee for a fundraiser for the John Tracy Clinic and in 1967 after Walt’s and Spencer’s respective deaths, the Disney Foundation donated $100,000 to the John Tracy Clinic.

In the photo below the poster behind Annette announcing the annual Benefit Bazaar. 



John Tracy was the inspiration for Spencer Tracy and his wife to start the John Tracy Foundation.

"As a child, John Tracy couldn't have known that he would be the inspiration of a whole movement to give new hope to parents of children with hearing loss," Barbara F. Hecht, president of the clinic, told The Times.  

The clinic was among the first to start a hearing-impaired child's training in infancy and make parental education a critical component. It has helped an estimated 245,000 parents and children.  

It tries to educate "deaf children through their mothers and fathers, who otherwise would not know what to do with them.... I hoped it would help a great deal," John Tracy wrote in 1946 in the Volta Review, the journal of the Alexander Graham Bell Assn. for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.  

The story, written when he was 22, was headlined "My Complicated Life."  

John Ten Broeck Tracy was born June 26, 1924, in Milwaukee to two actors who married between a matinee and evening performance.  

When Tracy was 10 months old, his mother became alarmed when a door that accidentally slammed shut failed to wake him.  

"I stopped suddenly.... I stood motionless beside his crib. I called his name again -- and then I shouted it. He slept on. And so I discovered our baby was deaf," she said years later.  

Afraid to tell anyone, even her husband, she consulted several doctors who told her that her son had "nerve damage, cause unknown." They also said he would never talk.  

The Tracys refused to accept doctors' advice to "wait -- in a few years he'll be old enough for a state school," a reference to deaf education that would start when he was 6.

"We went right on talking to Johnny, singing to him, telling him nursery rhymes, and as it turned out, that was just the right thing to do," Louise once said, according to a 1983 Times story.

You can read more of John Tracy's bio here who later in life in his old age became blind as well. John was born with Usher Syndrome and eventually became legally blind in the 1990s.

After attending what is now the California Institute of the Arts,

Tracy worked for several years in the art props department at Walt Disney Studios; Disney was a close family friend. Tracy stopped working when his eyesight started to fail in the late 1950s.

Well into adulthood, he learned that his deafness was due to Usher syndrome, a genetic disease that was also to blame for his fading vision. By the early 1990s, he was legally blind from retinitis pigmentosa.

John Tracy died in 2007 at the age of 82.