Local Businesswoman Gets Opportunity of a Lifetime with Obama Campaign
By Dave Thomas
Citizen Journalist

For more than half of her life, Fran Smithson has been providing an invaluable service to the deaf community through sign language interpretation. Recently, she was given the opportunity of a lifetime, through her company Accessible Languages, Inc., to do the sign language interpretation for President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign when he stopped in North Carolina and Virginia. For Smithson, being a part of the Obama campaign was more than she had ever dreamed possible.

Born in Henderson, Smithson moved to Garner with her family when she was three years old. She attended Garner schools, graduating from Garner Senior High School in 1975. During her senior year at GSHS, she enrolled in a class that allowed students to get class credit for volunteer work. Smithson and three other girls elected to volunteer at the Governor Morehead School, which helped deaf and blind children in the area. That volunteer work served as the spark that ignited the bonfire of service within her.

Immediately after high school, she took a job as a receptionist at a women’s correctional facility, while she figured out what to do next. After six months, she left her receptionist position and began taking classes at N.C. State University. While enrolled there, she took classes that would help her in her pursuit of a career in counseling the visually and hearing impaired.

Her first job in this field was with the state government’s division of services for the blind. While there, she began to work with both the visually and hearing impaired and yearned to learn more about how to help both groups.

To do this, she enrolled in training at the Helen Keller National Center for Deaf-Blind Youths and Adults, in Sands Point, N.Y. It was there that Smithson truly found her niche.

After completing her training there, she trained at Gallaudet University, and then began immersing herself in the deaf community in order to learn as much as she could about their communication behaviors and patterns.

Eventually, Smithson went into business for herself. She had been tossing around the idea for some time, but needed to find her unique spin that every business needs to be successful. Then she realized that the need for the interpretation of foreign languages was becoming greater, and that would be her angle.

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