Wheat, Alice Louise

Alice Louis Wheat (MS Sweet)                                                       

“It isn’t possible to look into a child and know what possibilities are there. If we assume, they will succeed, then most of them will look beyond their handicap and see themselves as the many-faceted beings that they are …and then other people will see that, too.”

Alice Wheat, 92, of St. Louis, Missouri, sadly passed away on Friday, August 16, 2024 in St. Louis, Missouri.

Alice Louise Wheat was born on Valentines’ Day, February 14, 1932, to Alice Elizabeth Sanders Wheat and Roscoe Conclin “Ross” Wheat, St. Louis Missouri. Alice had two brothers, John Leroy Wheat (Jack) (died 1960) and his surviving spouse Catherine Wheat and Louis Wheat and his wife Sally Wheat, all in Missouri.

Alice Wheat was a child of the Great Depression and World War II.  Raised in a strict Catholic family, she married in 1950 when she was eighteen to Ralph Robert Roesler (deceased 2013).  Alice’s first child Jill, was born with a severe hearing impairment and was almost completely deaf.  Alice would go on to have eight more children.  Four of her nine children, two daughters and two sons, would be diagnosed as severely deaf.  A recessive gene, unknown at the time and not evident in either parent’s families, was eventually identified as the culprit for the impairments.

Alice’s children are: Jill Marie Wheat of New York, Lawrence Edward Roesler, of OR, Ann Wessler, of MO, Susan Mary Faerber, of MO, Jeanne Marie Pease of TX, Sally Marie Peat, of MO, Ralph Ross Roesler, of TX, Stephen Louis Roesler, of MO, and Paul John Roesler, of MO.

Despite the challenges of raising nine children, especially when four were identically handicapped, Alice persevered with their education, first with the assistance of the nationally recognized Central Institute for the Deaf (CID), and then with several parochial schools, and finally through public education.  It was her belief, not widely held at the time, that the hearing impaired would have a much wider opportunity in life if they were trained, at school and at home, in interactions with the hearing world, as opposed to living in a cloistered fraternity of the deaf. A testament to her determination and insistence that her hearing-afflicted children be treated no differently from her other children, or indeed other children in their world, is the fact that ALL would go on to complete not only high school and then college, but most would go on to achieve degrees in advanced studies

In her late forties, Ms. Wheat decided to further her education and enrolled in college. During this time Alice wrote stories. She has written poems, letters to newspapers about her political opinions and her deaf education opinions, stories about her then grandchildren, and about Jill’s First Day of School, a true story of a ten-year-old Deaf Girl, which became a book. Her curriculum would include a semester in Germany- as a fifty-year-old foreign exchange student!   She graduated in 1981 from the University of Missouri, St. Louis campus, with a dual degree in Psychology and German. After graduating, she worked in many positions, including as an independent counselor for abused women in Ashville, N.C.  She lived in her beloved North Carolina home for 30 years.

Alice relocated to St. Louis in 2015 when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.  She has lived at the Sarah Communities Facility for the past 8 years and enjoyed being close to her family.  She is survived by her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren (and even some great-great-grandchildren), Kay and Ed Lewandowski, and other family and friends.

SERVICES:  Memorial visitation at Kutis Affton Chapel (10151 Gravois Road Affton, Missouri 63123) on Saturday, August 31, 1:00 p.m. until memorial service at 3:00 p.m.