1. Heather Leigh Whitestone McCallum was born on February 24,1973 and is an American conservative activist and beauty queen who was the first deaf Miss America title holder, having lost most of her hearing at 18 months.
26 Facts About Heather Whitestone
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Heather Whitestone was unable to keep up with her classwork and began to fall behind her peers.
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Heather Whitestone asked her family to send her to a special school that would enable her to catch up with other students in her class.
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Heather Whitestone moved to Birmingham at age sixteen, following her parents' divorce.
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Heather Whitestone attended the Alabama School of Fine Arts for a year and graduated from Berry High School in 1991.
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Heather Whitestone's passion was ballet, and she had spent most of her time developing her ballet skills, especially after hearing loss.
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Heather Whitestone then went on to study at Jacksonville State University.
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Heather Whitestone first participated in the Shelby County Junior Miss program.
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Heather Whitestone stood next to Miss Virginia in the finals of the Miss America 1995 pageant.
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Heather Whitestone served as an executive member on the President's Committee on Employment of People Disabilities.
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Since her Miss America win, Heather Whitestone has completed her studies at Jacksonville State University and continued to promote awareness of deaf issues.
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Heather Whitestone has spoken out in detail about her close relationship with God, one that she has had ever since she rediscovered church as a teenager.
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Heather Whitestone wrote about her life experiences in her third book, Let God Surprise You: Trust God with Your Dreams.
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In 2002, Heather Whitestone elected to have a cochlear implant operation in order to hear to an extent in her right ear, the hearing of which she had lost at 18 months.
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Heather Whitestone said the primary motivation for electing the surgery was an incident when she did not hear her son's cries for help.
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Heather Whitestone said that she had not regretted her decision, thanking her family for supporting her.
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Heather Whitestone is a motivational speaker and lives in Georgia with her husband, John McCallum, whom she met when he served as a Congressional aide to Speaker Newt Gingrich.
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Heather Whitestone was appointed by President Bush and confirmed by the US Senate to the National Council on Disability, but she resigned in 2010.
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Heather Whitestone was a board member of the Helen Keller Foundation for Research and Education from 1995 to 2002.
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Heather Whitestone was appointed to the Advisory Council for the National Institutes of Health on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, in 2002.
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Heather Whitestone has appeared on CNN, ABC's Good Morning America and The View.
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Heather Whitestone has been in print articles for USA Today and People Magazine.
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In 2003, Heather Whitestone filmed two public service announcements to bring awareness about "Dogs for the Deaf", which is a hearing-dog organization.
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Heather Whitestone became a spokesperson for the Starkey Hearing Aid Foundation and Cochlear America.
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Heather Whitestone has written four books called Listening with My Heart, Believing in the Promise, Let God Surprise You, and Heavenly Crowns.
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Heather Whitestone has spearheaded the nation's largest multimedia public service campaign to identify early hearing loss, which was created by the Miss America Organization and the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf.