My Life Transformed

by Helen Heckman

"Deaf, dumb, and mentally undeveloped at twelve years -- now an able pianist with a pleasant speaking and singing voice and a successful professional dancer, in spite of the fact that she cannot hear the music to which she dances -- this is in brief the story of Helen Heckman." Although I've seen her referred to as a "noted dancer and beauty" of the 1920s, my research has turned up only scant information about her career -- which I suspect may have involved her stepmother touring her and her sister (who played the violin) around the country (and to "the Continent") and putting them through their paces in front of sympathetic audiences. The caption on a 1923 L.A. Times photo of the trio calls Helen "the wonder girl of Oklahoma," that being where she spent much of her childhood, and where her widowed father met and married stepmom. To be fair, though, the stepmother, Vina Janet Heckman (née French), was definitely the "miracle worker" in Helen's life, having refused to institutionalize the girl at about age ten, instead taking responsibility for educating her new stepdaughter herself.

202 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1928