What's That Pig Outdoors? (11 page)

Only in mathematics did I have real difficulty. I have never been either adept at or interested in the subject, and so was disinclined to spend many hours filling in the gaps by poring over the textbook—which, anyway, was no model of clarity. In those days, too, there were no additional resources for slower learners. I had to depend on my understanding of my algebra and physics teacher, a decent instructor and a nice fellow who unfortunately fell into that 10 percent of Americans impossible to lipread. Algebra requires highly abstract thought, a careful building of concepts upon one another. Failing to understand one component meant failure to understand the whole.

From the hindsight of decades I can see that I should have asked for another instructor, one easier to lipread. I don't know why I didn't. Perhaps I thought I couldn't because the school policy was not to allow students to switch instructors, and I assumed that deaf students were included in that policy. So algebra and physics turned out to be a struggle; I managed to earn C's only with a lot of hard work and help from Dad, who in his day had been a whiz in math.

I did better, however, in geometry, partly because its abstractions are easily shown visually and partly because the teacher was a gifted Barnum who made every class a three-ring circus. Mr. Cady, a retired naval officer who had turned to teaching, was a tall, burly man who could, in an instant, switch from relaxed geniality to a stern air of command. In his class nobody dared to be a smart-ass. When he was annoyed he would bellow like a boatswain and when he was angry he would transfix the offender with a steady, baleful gaze from under hooded eyelids. It was like being fried by laser beams. But we liked him immensely, for he clearly loved us all, even the dumbest.

I sat in the front row and had an assigned spot on the blackboard close to his desk. Early in each class, as we worked our proofs in chalk, he had only to reach out a long arm to tap me on the shoulder and correct my errant computation. But as the period warmed up he'd get up from his desk and stride around the perimeter of the room, barking commands as if it were the bridge of a destroyer and he was setting drifting helmsmen back on course.

Across the room he'd spot me in an error. “Kisor! Kisor!” he'd shout at my back. Before an adjoining student could touch my wrist to warn me
that the teacher wanted to speak to me, Mr. Cady would impatiently fire a blackboard eraser across the room to get my attention. He'd aim at a spot on the board two feet from my hand, but sometimes caught me on the back of the head instead. The whole class would crack up. So would he. And so would I. We were all laughing at him, not at me. I loved him for it.

I was not, however, blazing a trail through virgin forest. Another deaf student, three years older than I, had done brilliantly at Evanston High, ranking high in her class. (She went on to earn a doctorate and is now a research scientist and professor of counseling at Gallaudet University.) We did not know each other.

In the teenage pecking order of the times, seniors and freshmen rarely spoke to one another. I don't know whether she employed the same strategies I did, but her academic success may have led the school administration to assume that other deaf students could follow in her footsteps without special help, so long as they measured up to the standards set for hearing children. Certainly with me they seemed to maintain a hands-off, “don't fix it if it ain't broke” policy.

And so did Mr. Epler, my adviser, the specialist in deaf education. He was a quiet, comfortable, unflappable man who never condescended to his deaf students as if he believed them less capable than hearing ones. Many special education teachers believe the progress of their charges must conform to textbook precepts based on laboratory-revealed truth. Mr. Epler clearly didn't.

A good deal of his work lay in helping less accomplished deaf students with their academic courses, sometimes much of the day. But the only time I spent with him, other than occasional study-hall hours, was a weekly session in speech therapy, and when I entered my junior year, that ended. At the time I thought my communications skills were simply too advanced for him to improve and for that reason he assented to my taking conventional speech therapy with hearing students who lisped or spoke with foreign accents. That may have been true, but today I think there was more to it. His relaxed approach to me during those last two years of high school, I am convinced, was a studied one deliberately aimed at boosting my sometimes shaky self-reliance.

He would offer advice and counsel only when asked, and only if he thought it was necessary. When I confronted him with a problem, most
often he would suggest that I try to solve it myself. For instance, I might not have understood all of a teacher's instructions on an assignment. To save a little time (and a potentially uncomfortable confrontation—in my misdirected pride I loathed the idea that my teachers might know I could not lipread every last word they said), I might ask Mr. Epler to call the teacher and get the details. He would gently suggest that if determining such academic details was a hearing student's responsibility, why couldn't it be mine as well? He seemed to believe, like Mother, that in the end only I could discover my limits, and in his subtle way he encouraged me to expand them as much as I could. I owe him a great deal.

In no manner was I a brilliant student. Throughout my high school career I earned respectable grades, mostly B's but with the occasional A and a few C's, chiefly in algebra and physics. This was in the laid-back 1950s, remember, when a decent C-plus high school average could get you into a respectable college provided your Scholastic Aptitude Test scores were satisfactory. I was no slacker, but neither was I a humorless grind. There was just too much else to do. I was still active at the Y, and competitive swimming was a serious sport at Evanston High.

During my freshman year I was a starting freestyle sprinter and relay swimmer of decent speed, not a star but a dependable point earner. To my astonishment—and that of my teammates—I managed to win the eight-school Suburban League freshman 50-yard freestyle championship of 1954, in one of the slowest winning times ever recorded for that event. As a sophomore, I swam the third leg on the four-man varsity freestyle relay that finished third in the Illinois state meet, enabling Evanston High to win the team championship by a single point. That was the apex of my swimming career.

I had been a fast-developing physical specimen at thirteen and fourteen, but by fifteen my growth had topped out at a bit more than five feet six inches, and as we turned sixteen my taller and rangier teammates were taking the medals while I rode the bench as a second stringer. They deserved to win; they trained a good deal harder than I did. Though swimming had been good to me, I had neither ambitions for stardom nor the physical equipment required for it. For years the sport had allowed me to compete with hearing athletes as an equal. Now it was time for me to do something else.

And that something was journalism. In freshman and sophomore English I showed a talent for writing, thanks to all that reading I had done as a child, and perhaps to heredity as well. My father, who was a businessman, not a trained professional writer, nevertheless had a talent for writing clear and lively prose, and if such a thing can be handed down through the genes, he passed it on to me. My sophomore English teacher, who apparently had never heard that the verbal skills of deaf students are supposed to be deficient, suggested to the journalism teacher that I might make a good candidate for her course as a junior. Though I had no idea what journalism entailed—the notion brought to mind a vague mental picture of a grizzled newspaperman in a fedora, dribbling cigarette ashes on his typewriter while barking commands into a telephone—I accepted her invitation to take the course. It was the best decision I had made in my young life.

Journalism, I learned quickly, did not involve merely the gathering of news by talking to people in person and on the telephone. For a deaf reporter the former was possible, though not very easy, but the latter was clearly impossible. Journalism, however, also involved a good deal of desk work. As a rewrite editor I found I had a definite knack for the shape of a story, for reducing it to its “who-what-where-when-why-how” components and reassembling these facts in the most efficient and pleasing manner. Once the stories were done, the next task was to assemble them, together with photographs, on the page, and then write a headline for each. For these things I also had a flair, and I also got along well with my fellow editors-in-training. At the end of the year I was appointed managing editor, or second-in-command, of the school paper.

As I grew older, sooner or later I would learn that conventional lay attitudes about deafness could severely—and unfairly—limit my horizons. The first occasion arose when at the end of my junior year I sought a summer job as a swimming pool lifeguard, and the experience was shattering.

Traditionally, Evanston High swimmers worked as lifeguards at country clubs so that they could train in the pools during their off hours. At the Y, I had earned all the qualifications: the Red Cross lifesaving and water safety instructor certificates. As a junior leader and swimming
teacher I'd spent many hours sharing lifeguarding tasks around the Y pool. No one had ever suggested that deafness might be a hindrance to such a responsibility.

That spring, after the competition season, I asked Mr. Sugden, the Evanston High diving coach, for a guard's job the following summer at Sunset Ridge Country Club, where he ran the pool when school was out. “Sure thing,” he said. “I'll set it up and get back to you.” April arrived, then May, but I still did not hear from him. As June came closer I began to wonder why, and decided to seek out Mr. Sugden in his office to see if anything was wrong. Before I could do so, my parents, while attending a conference at the school, ran into the coach outside his office. “Henry's looking forward to his job with you this summer,” Dad said.

Mr. Sugden looked at the floor in embarrassment. “I've wanted to tell him this,” he said slowly, “but I can't figure out how to do it. You see, the club's board of directors won't let me hire him. They don't want a deaf lifeguard. They're worried about the lives of their children.”

When my parents broke the news to me that evening, I was devastated. Nothing in my young life had prepared me for the rejections that were bound to come—especially arbitrary ones made in boardrooms by people I had never met, people who had never seen my capabilities, people who knew nothing about the deaf.

The notion of a deaf lifeguard is not as farfetched as it might seem. Bathers in trouble rarely, if ever, cry for help. They can't. They're choking on water and can't get out a sound. They either thrash madly or disappear quietly under the surface. That's why lifeguards are trained to scan the surface with their eyes. They're not listening for cries of “Help!” but watching for abnormal behavior in the water. When actual rescues aren't being conducted, lifeguarding is almost entirely a visual task.

As a group, I would later learn, the deaf are measurably superior to the hearing in the discernment of visual cues and the speed of responses to them. There's nothing superhuman about this phenomenon. The loss of a sense forces the remaining ones to compensate, to stretch and exercise their capabilities beyond conventional thresholds. The average deaf person has the peripheral vision of a fish-eye lens, almost 180 degrees, and spots the tiniest movement within this range long before the average hearing person can do so.

In practical terms this superior visual acuity has led some automobile insurance companies in recent years to give sizable rate discounts to deaf drivers. Because the deaf are more visually alert behind the wheel than the hearing, we tend on the average to have fewer accidents, and thus are better insurance risks.

Many years later I laid this argument before an old childhood friend who had spent summers in college and afterward as chief of lifeguards at a string of beaches on Lake Michigan. He had known my capabilities at age sixteen, and he agreed with me, though he was careful to point out that a lifeguard's deafness could be a liability on a large lakefront beach during a complex rescue operation involving several lifeguards and a series of barked commands. That would, however, be irrelevant at a small swimming pool watched over by one or two lifeguards.

Of course, none of these arguments were available to me at the time, and even if they had been, nobody in a remote country-club boardroom was going to listen to the wild imaginings of a sixteen-year-old boy. Fortunately the staff at the Evanston Y had a different viewpoint, and the hurt soon healed.

For several years the staff at the Y had watched me grow. I'd spent all my summers at Camp Echo, first as a camper and then as a “counselor-in-training” and as a member of the kitchen crew. It was not difficult to perform those responsibilities, and as Sam Williamson and my other classmates applied for jobs as full counselors, so did I. It never occurred to me that my deafness might prove a problem.