A Proud History - 1960's

Dr. Palmer traveled to Japan on a trip sponsored by the World Health Organization to survey needs and programs and make recommendations regarding speech and hearing services in that country.

Comedian Bob Hope, at the request of the Women's’ Advisory Council President and former U.S. Senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum, gave a show to raise funds for teacher training and research at the Institute.

The Institute’s facilities were in need of expansion, and on March 30 a Capital Development Fund Drive was launched to construct a chapel and new wing to the administration building. The new wing added space for classrooms, a library, speech training, research and administrative offices.

India Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in Wichita to lecture, visited the Institute at a reception given in 1962 by the Women’s Advisory Council.

Dr. Palmer took his expertise in the field of communicative disorders to India in 1963 as part of an international activity sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America named the Institute of Logopedics as its international service project, adopting the slogan, “We Sing That They Shall Speak.

This was a year marked with sorrow. Dr. Martin F. Palmer, Institute Founder and Director, died on August 13; his death saddened thousands of friends of the Institute and professionals in the United States and abroad. He left a 30-year Institute plan calling for enlargement of the clinical program, and increases in caseload and research efforts.

Frenchman Dr. Guy Perdoncini’s method of auditory training and language processing to develop oral language for the deaf was first used in an Institute preschool class.

A Champion International Golf tournament was held in Wichita to benefit the Institute. Celebrity golfers Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino and Yankee baseball great Micky Mantle, took to the greens to raise some $20,000 for the Institute.