Bob Rumball

Location: Ontario | Profession: Football Player/Humanitarian

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Karen Kain 1971

Bob Rumball received his university degree, became a preacher, played in the CFL, worked with death row inmates, travelled around the continent on a motorcycle, learned sign language and became an icon of the deaf community, all before the age of 30. And he hasn’t slowed down since. Now at 76, he is a little older, his hair is a little greyer and his legs are not what they used to be. But Rumball still has the fire in his eye.

Karen Kain 2005

Profile

Finding his Calling:

In 1954, at 25 years of age, Bob Rumball finished his seminary training at the Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Chicago and began preaching on Sundays. The following year he was traded to the Toronto Argonauts. He played there for a season but never felt comfortable. He needed to do more with his life, so he ended his CFL career. “I left because I insisted they fly me back for my Sunday services. And if I was in Vancouver or any place else, that wasn’t going to work.”

That same year, he found his future calling. As a registered minister, Rumball travelled around preaching to different churches throughout Ontario. One Sunday, he delivered a sermon to a deaf congregation on Wellesley Street in Toronto. He was struck when no one watched him as he spoke from the pulpit. Their eyes were on the interpreter below. “I spoke simply to them and clearly, and they just wanted to know if I would hang around because they were losing their minister.” W.A. Ethridge, an American marine who shared Rumball’s tough religious zeal, had just left The Evangelical Church of the Deaf to set up a mission in Jamaica, and a position opened up. “I knew nothing, so the deaf didn’t know what they were getting into.”

Rumball took the position and all of a sudden he had a full-time job. He was thrown into the midst of the church’s problems. “There were so many things to do. When I first came, there were something in the neighbourhood of 64 people who were deaf and in mental hospitals – and nobody knew why – and there were 24 people in jail and they hadn’t been tried legally.”

He became immediately aware of Canada’s institutional incapacities. The problem for the deaf was not limited to those at the Evangelical Church. “The government had gotten rid of the last deaf teacher in the schools for the deaf in 1929 and they forbid sign language, so the deaf were coming out of schools and they had no intelligent language, and a lousy education and the government kept saying, ‘Well, we’re going to turn them into hearing people.’ Well, they haven’t made a deaf person hearing yet!”