We, David Johnston and Susan C. Searls, have several common bonds: growing up Deaf in Deaf families, having Deaf children, and working at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), located in Rochester, New York, the only technical college for the deaf in the world. We considered ourselves as being unique at the workplace because only a few of us have both Deaf parents and children. Even though we both grew up in Deaf families in the 1950s and 1960s our experiences differed quite considerably. In those times, there were no TTYs (the teletypewriter, a device that enables deaf people to communicate through phone lines), no closed captioned television programs, no legislation mandating increased interpreter services, nor were deaf people viewed as a cultural and linguistic minority. Growing up in two different geographic locations, each of us went to different types of schools: one went to a manual program which used sign language for instruction and the other went to an oral program which used only speech as the mode of instruction. For our college educations, we chose the opposite directions. We shared our experiences and visions in an ASL conversation.