70 Years of HEAR-ing

Set amidst a garage warehouse full of gleaming, pristine historic and classic automobiles, Pasadena’s HEAR Center celebrated 70 years of service to the hearing-impaired community in the San Gabriel Valley on Sunday at the Flying A Garage.

The organization was also presented with a congressional recognition from U.S. Congresswoman Judy Chu’s office.

“We’re here celebrating 70 years in the community,” said Ellen Simon, HEAR executive director, “and we’re really trying to create an awareness of our work.

“Since we’ve been here since 1954,” Simon added, “we’ve served thousands and thousands of people. Many free of charge, and many at a very low cost. We do see people for a fee, a fee for service, but we are contracted with very low reimbursement insurances.”

Simon explained that HEAR is a “one-on-one therapeutic program where patients work with a speech language pathologist, one-on-one to improve their speech, be it from hearing loss or spectrum disorder, all those things. And our audiology program serves everyone.”

As Simon noted, “The problem of communication disorders is so detrimental to people’s lives. And although people don’t think of speech and hearing as a real cause, everybody, it’s not a gender or ethnicity. It hits every population, every age group.”

The HEAR (“Help. Evaluate. Advise. Resolve.”) Center was founded in 1954 by Ciwa Griffiths, Ed.D., who developed the Auditory Approach, which helped hearing-impaired children speak through early identification of hearing loss, amplification with hearing aids, and training in learning to listen and speak.

In 1969, supporters Glen and Margaret Bollinger provided funding to the HEAR Center to expand its work in new headquarters in Pasadena.

Dr. Griffiths promoted placing hearing aids on children identified with hearing loss at a young age so that the child could have a significantly increased chance of learning to speak normally.

She studied the specialized education of deaf children in London with educators who were performing groundbreaking research. It was there that Dr. Griffiths first observed the impact of early amplification.

As the HEAR website notes, Dr. Griffith’s advocacy helped to bring about the awareness that these children could learn to listen and speak.

The application of Dr. Griffith’s Auditory Approach has become standard operating procedure in hospitals across the nation, and the HEAR Center has become internationally recognized for its innovative and extensive testing and therapy programs.

For more information about the HEAR Center, click here.