- In a 1995 interview two years after he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, linguist Anthony J. Vitale was as optimistic as ever.
''You've got two choices, live or die,'' he said. ''Basically, I choose to survive as long as I can.''
His battle with the disease ended at his home on St. James Drive on Monday, nine years after he was diagnosed with an illness that usually carries a prognosis of three to five years. Besides being a remarkably friendly and hopeful man, Mr.
Vitale, 57, will be remembered for creating a voice synthesis tool to help the speech-impaired. His work on DECtalk, a text-to-speech synthesizer he developed while working for Digital Equipment Corp., began before his diagnosis, but he himself later used the machine.
''It seemed to us that his whole entire life's work and skills had led up to the development of that synthesizer, and then here it was at the end, where it was actually one of the most useful things he had ever done,'' Jeanine Vitale, Mr. Vitale's wife, said. ''It just seemed like the hand of the divine, for sure ... I think he was sort of aware of that, and it was a nice thing for humanity, and he could go after that.''
Mr. Vitale worked on the tool for as long as possible. He wanted to get the French version of the synthesizer working before his death but did not finish that or two other projects, a dictionary and a book, Mrs. Vitale said. Nonetheless, work was part of what kept him going, she said. Hope was the other part.
''It was extremely important to keep hoping, and it was the only thing that kept us going,'' she said.
Mrs. Vitale said she met her husband in Ithaca, N.Y., while he was finishing his doctorate in general linguistics at Cornell and she was finishing a music degree. A group of singers she belonged to was looking for a bass player, and someone suggested Mr. Vitale, who filled in with jazz ensembles from time to time. Mr. Vitale decided not to get involved with the group, but he later agreed to a date with his future wife when she asked him. At the time of his death, the two had been married for 27 years.
Mr. Vitale spoke six languages fluently, wrote two textbooks on Swahili and had traveled the world. He went to Kenya and Somalia with the Peace Corps, learned French in the former Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), German in Germany and Polish in Poland, where he lived under Soviet rule. He had two Fulbright-Hays teaching positions, one in Tanzania and the other in Poland. He also worked in Czechoslovakia at one point.
DECtalk allows people with speech impairments, including physicist Stephen A. Hawking, to communicate by reading aloud messages that the user enters into a computer. When Digital sold the technology to the tool, Oregon-based ZYGO Industries Inc. used DECtalk in its LightWRITER, a hand-held synthesizer and keyboard that could also play recorded messages. Mr. Vitale used his LightWRITER, his wife said, to do things such as write eyebrow-raising jokes -- even at church.
Those who knew him agreed that he was always upbeat. Mary M. Leeman, a health care service coordinator at the Muscular Dystrophy Association's Westboro office, said she met Mr. Vitale about nine years ago when he came in for a support group for people with Lou Gehrig's disease, formally known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
''He was an optimist. He was a very magnanimous person. If you met him, he would draw you to him, he would want to find out about you,'' Ms. Leeman said. ''You felt like after you left him, you had known him for a long time.''
The Muscular Dystrophy Association gave Mr. Vitale its National Personal Achievement Award in 1996.
A funeral Mass for Mr. Vitale is scheduled for 7 tonight at St. Rose of Lima Church.
Mrs. Vitale said that hope for a cure for the disease or a treatment to arrest its progress kept her and her husband going during his illness. She asked anyone inspired by her husband's life to consider making a donation to the Muscular Dystrophy Association, 33 Lyman St., Westboro, 01581, or to the ALS Association, 7 Lincoln St., Wakefield, 01880.