Eighth graders sit, legs crossed, on an outdated linoleum floor, their eyes riveted on Kenny Tedford, a 56-year old storyteller and a graduate student in ETSU’s world-renowned storytelling program. His tales come to life with humor, movement, and sound effects, and today he’s telling the kids about a young girl named Alice, who convinced Abraham Lincoln he’d look more presidential if he grew a beard.
Kenny finishes his story with a trademark word of inspiration to his audience. “You can do anything you set your mind to, just like Alice. Even one child can make a difference,” he says. The kids lean in, transfixed. “Just be careful how you tell someone they’re ugly.”
The cafeteria rings with laughter, but as the story comes to a close, no one claps.
Instead, the kids raise both hands above their heads, twisting them back and forth. Kenny bows. They are acknowledging his performance with American Sign Language applause, because Kenny Tedford is deaf.
The two hundred hearing children in the cafeteria know how to show Kenny their appreciation because he teaches them the sign before he begins his tale-telling. “I’m deaf,” he says. “Love it.” The kids giggle, mostly because it’s unheard of, at their age of thirteen, to both acknowledge and embrace your own flaws, and they instantly fall in love with Kenny for his candor and self-deprecation before his story even gets off the ground. As he explains the sign for applause, he asks, “Can you hear me back there? ‘Cause I can’t hear me up here!” The kids laugh, and practice applauding, their skinny teenage wrists twisting at the ends of their long, gawky arms.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. Growing up in the fifties, Kenny explains, he was placed in classes for mentally handicapped students, left in the back row with what he calls a “magical crayon” that helped him embrace his creativity, even though he was trapped in a silent world. As his teachers and parents realized the extent of his true abilities and he was moved into mainstream classrooms, his flair for drama and humor revealed itself, and he was recognized as a child with a gift.
His talent for making others laugh has come in handy through the years, with life throwing one obstacle after another in his way. His parents both died within months of one another when he was in second grade. The woman who became his foster mother died before his senior year of high school. It was hard for him to be motivated to finish school, but he credits his foster mother’s own determination as well as his strong faith for his decision to complete his high school education. He says that he became a Christian as a junior in high school, and his spirituality gave him strength. “When my foster mother died, I was mad at God,” he quips, “Even though I had only known him a year.” Even in discussing the tragedies of his childhood, his irresistible, inspirational sense of humor is evident.
After high school, Kenny’s path took the unexpected twists and turns of an entertainer’s life, each bringing him closer to his current work as a storyteller. He received a bachelor’s degree in theatre at the University of Tennessee, worked for the office of the Governor, became a comedian and a motivational speaker. In the meantime, he fought personal battles with heart problems and is a ten-year cancer survivor.
For a time, Kenny traveled and spoke to crowds with his friend Marty, a quadriplegic entertainer. Through humor, the duo spoke to people about determination, respect, and the will to overcome, until Marty was killed in a car accident. Sometimes, when Kenny starts feeling depressed about his deafness, he says, he can sense Marty’s admonition to get over it. When he talks about Marty, in fact, it’s hard to tell whether Kenny will laugh or cry. In the end, he sums it up this way. “Marty was always with me in his wheelchair, and we talked to people like that, and we could laugh at each other.” He knows now, he says, “that anytime I’m talking to people, telling a story, he’s standing with me now. Not in his wheelchair, but standing with me.”
The devastating trials of loss and struggles with his own health frustrate Kenny less because of any penchant for wallowing—he doesn’t have one—but because there is so much he wants to do, and such limited time in which to do it. He tells me that there are hundreds of thousands of deaf children in the United States, but only two psychiatric counseling centers that specialize in providing support to children with hearing loss. One of his dreams is to establish a faith-based center to address this need. He imagines a future of traveling around the world to tell stories to the hearing and non-hearing, and expanding his audience through audio recordings, print, and film.
In the next year, Kenny will finish his graduate program at ETSU. He’s got big plans for life after graduate school. His first is a capstone project, an interactive storytelling production based on the life of his grandmother, Birtie Tedford. He talks about following her around everywhere as a young kid, because, he says, “I had never seen anyone so wrinkled.” In the show, he'll perform as Great Granny Parker. The character will work as a theatrical vehicle to deliver stories about his own childhood—its graces and grinds. He envisions the first production here in the Tri-Cities, with his audience of children around the rocking chair, snapping beans while the yarn spins around them, weaving them into a world where Kenny Tedford, a child born without hearing, grew up to tell the greatest stories of all.