John Tracy, the deaf son of actor Spencer Tracy who inspired his parents to establish the pioneering John Tracy Clinic in Los Angeles to help young hearing-impaired children and their families, has died. He was 82.
Tracy died Friday night at his son's ranch in Acton, where he had lived for the past five years, said his sister, Susie Tracy. The cause of death was not specified.
He was 17 when his mother, Louise Treadwell Tracy, first spoke publicly about rearing a deaf child. The speech at USC led her to found the clinic in a campus bungalow in 1942, and she helped build the nonprofit into a leading institution for deaf education. For the first few years, Spencer Tracy was the clinic's sole support.
"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.
