It's Thursday morning, and Don Poore is tickled.
Adult Loss of Hearing Association - ALOHA - volunteer Lou Touchette has just helped him overcome a problem with the induction-looping system that helps him hear the television and other entertainment units in his Foothills-area home.
The solution boiled down to an easily installed signal booster for the system, which sends out a wireless signal to certain hearing aids or to portable headsets.
When someone is "in the loop," he or she can hear speech clearly because sound is being delivered directly from the source, be it a television or a live person, without any background noise.
Touchette spent hours, Poore said, researching what could be causing the sound on Poore's system to be so faint.
He went back and forth with the television manufacturer, Panasonic, until the company suggested the signal booster to beef up the satellite television signal.
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It worked.
At one point, Poore - who is treasurer for the ALOHA board of directors - was ready to just give up and go back to the older, inferior technology he was using before.
Not Touchette.
"Never say die," Touchette said as the men chatted in Poore's living room after the problem was fixed.
That attitude recently garnered Touchette the honor of being named "Hard of Hearing Leader" for Arizona by Hamilton Relay, a company that offers a variety of communications services for the hearing-impaired.
Touchette spends a good deal of time - and gas money - traveling from his Green Valley home to help deaf and hearing-impaired folks all over the Tucson area learn about looping technology and troubleshooting their technical problems.
It's earned him the nickname "Loopin' Lou," ALOHA board member Dale Henson wrote in an e-mail.
When Henson met Touchette two years ago, he was struck by Touchette's down-to-earth qualities - he seemed knowledgeable and eager to help but didn't have an agenda or need for recognition, Henson wrote.
Hamilton Relay has given awards to community leaders every September for the last five years, during Deaf Awareness Week, spokeswoman Lisa Furr wrote in an e-mail.
This year the company added an award to recognize an individual who is hard of hearing during Better Hearing and Speech Month in May. That's what Touchette, who is profoundly hard of hearing, received.
Touchette said he was astonished when he found out about it.
"I do a lot of things, but you never think the things you do are going to result in some kind of award," he said.
He likened his work with the community to his wife's penchant for crossword puzzles: He enjoys the challenge.
"I love doing things and seeing things work. And when it doesn't work, it gets my juices going," he said. "It's a hobby. I just love looping."
HELP FROM ALOHA
ALOHA, the Adult Loss of Hearing Association, formed in Tucson in 1984 to help people coping with losing their hearing. The group offers the following services, some of which include the help of Lou Touchette:
• Weekly peer support meetings.
• Cochlear implant information meetings eight times a year.
• Lip-reading classes.
• Conversational sign language classes.
• One-on-one demonstrations of assistive listening devices.
• Lending library of videos, books and magazines for members.
• Loop-amplification demonstrations for homes and businesses.
For more information, go to www.alohaaz.org or call 795-9887.
Contact reporter Shelley Shelton at sshelton@azstarnet.com or 807-8464.
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