What's That Pig Outdoors? (15 page)

For two years I had given little thought to my deafness, to the idea that it could have consequences that would affect my life adversely. Now, thanks to being dumped by the woman I loved, it was back under my skin, gnawing away at my confidence. I became ever more conscious, ever more ashamed of my deaf speech. One night, at a formal fraternity meeting, it was my task as corresponding secretary to read the lengthy text of a letter from a college official to the forty or so assembled brothers. It was the first time since I had been pledged two years earlier that I had to speak before a group. There was no honorable way to avoid the awful duty.

My mouth dried. My pulse hammered. My armpits dampened. My throat tensed. As I read, my voice turned thin and reedy. I panted as I continued, stopping to take a breath after almost every phrase. I must have been wholly unintelligible. I looked up. The brothers stared at me in amazement. I pressed on. They began to laugh—not so much in merriment, perhaps, but nervously, uncomprehendingly. I struggled through to the end, my face hot with shame, the seat of my trousers sticking sweatily to the chair.

Quietly, as I gazed down at the table, the fraternity's president continued the business of the meeting. A few moments later, when he paused, I raised my hand. “Point of personal privilege,” I said, the
Robert's Rules of Order
euphemism for absenting oneself to answer a call of nature. I left the house and walked back to my dormitory.

Abandoning a formal fraternity meeting in such a manner was a severe breach of ritual, an offense for which the president was empowered to levy a cash fine or even a suspension.
“Point of personal privilege
, Hank?” he said with heavy sarcasm later that night, after he had tracked me down in my room. “Come
on!”
But he added, more gently, “Look, I know what's going through your mind. Come back to the house tomorrow and let's forget it.”

I couldn't. Ten days later I wrote a formal letter to the president announcing that I was “going inactive,” relinquishing my membership. I had persuaded myself that I was doing so because the whole notion of college fraternities was based on a shallow and immature camaraderie, that it was undemocratic and perpetuated the worst form of social exclusion. The real reason was that I had lost my nerve. I had given in to my seething frustration over my speech.

To make matters worse, that spring brought the corporate recruitment season for graduating seniors. I joined everyone else in the interviews, although I had no idea what I was qualified for. I did not know what questions to ask, how to comport myself. Always ill at ease, I sweated and stammered through dozens of interviews. I behaved like a nervous high schooler rather than a self-assured college senior about to graduate. And out of perhaps thirty interviews came one follow-up invitation to visit the home office. One out of thirty! My friends, meanwhile, were being wined and dined by nearly every company they talked to, some of them being offered positions in training programs on the spot.

The sole company to ask me back was the Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company. I flew down to Philadelphia, talked inconclusively with a few executives, and scored abominably on the mathematics aptitude test. In the end the personnel director said, “You don't really want to be an insurance man, do you?” He had thought they might make an actuary out of me. “No, I guess not,” I said, feeling thoroughly sorry for myself as I gazed out the window at ships lining the quays of the port of Philadelphia. “I'm going to go to sea.”

A week or so later the dean called me into his office. “I understand you're planning to go to sea, Henry,” he began. I stood puzzled for a moment, then remembered, and blushed. Those guys at Penn Mutual had ratted on me! “No, Dean,” I said, chuckling weakly, and explained it all. “I just said the first dumb thing that came to mind.”

To the dean I was not the first Trinity senior to suffer a
crise de confiance
on the eve of graduation, when we at last fled—or were pushed from— the nest.
“You
may be worried, Henry,” he said, “but
I
have confidence in you. You'll be all right. I think you'll soon hear some good news that'll surprise you. Now let me ask you: What else have you considered?”

There wasn't much. My English adviser had suggested library school,
but I wasn't interested in a dry and musty career in lonely book stacks. The University of Edinburgh had accepted me for graduate study, but I hadn't the wherewithal to get to Scotland, let alone any idea what I might do with a graduate diploma in literature. And there was the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, which had offered me an assistantship—one that I had turned down. I wasn't cut out for journalism, I thought.

Thankfully someone else held the opposite view. For years an old family friend, David Botter, had watched me grow up. A onetime senior editor at
Look
magazine and a professor of journalism at Medill, he had often thought that I might make a good newsman, thanks in part to my having been the managing editor of the Evanston High School paper. He did not believe that deafness was necessarily a hindrance in certain aspects of the profession.

Though journalism no longer held any interest for me, during Christmas vacation that senior year I spoke with him and, at my parents' urging, filled out an application for the graduate program. But when the letter of acceptance arrived in the spring, together with a note saying that I'd been awarded an assistantship that would pay most of the tuition, I wasn't interested. Almost all my friends at Trinity were going into banking or insurance, and I thought that was where I had to go, too. I wrote back to Medill declining with thanks.

I strongly suspect that Botter and the Trinity dean conspired to persuade Medill to hold open both the place in the graduate class and the assistantship until my good sense got the better of me. Almost on the day before graduation, it did. With nothing else in sight on the employment horizon, I wrote back to Botter asking if my application could be reinstated. Not only was the place still open, he replied, but why not begin with a couple of summer courses at Medill and see how I fared?

I was stunned at my good fortune.
Somebody
still believed in me.

But that was not the good news the dean had alluded to when he had summoned me to his office. The day before commencement, I learned that I was graduating with honors in English, thanks to a senior thesis I had written on Faulkner's Snopes trilogy the previous semester. (“Absolutely brilliant,” a drunken English professor had said at a party some
months before. “Never saw anything like it. Brilliant.” Then, with a lurch and a hiccup: “For an undergraduate, of course.”)

There would be no Phi Beta Kappa key; that 64 in calculus all those semesters ago had ensured that my four-year academic average would fall short of the required 88.

But in at least one way I had lived up to the example my brother had set: I had graduated with honors.

7

And so at the end of June 1962 I found myself behind the counter of the men's locker room at the Evanston Y, at the beck and call of any man or boy with a dime for a towel. It paid about 75 cents an hour, and it was the only part-time job I could find. Hardly an auspicious start for the career of a young man with a brand-new Bachelor of Arts degree.

But my shame soon faded. Evanston is a college town, and its Y employed graduate students in all sorts of jobs, from janitors to gym instructors, and the locker-room clientele knew it. A few ignorant souls might assume I was a towel boy because I could do nothing else, but the handball players who stopped by my counter included professors, lawyers, and businessmen, and they noticed and commented on the books I was reading during slow periods. Several even gave me genuine insights into them.

And, much to my surprise, I liked my summer studies at the Medill School of Journalism. In the 1950s and 1960s, along with Columbia University and the University of Missouri, Medill was a member of the highest triumvirate of the nation's journalism schools. Unlike most other J-schools, which viewed themselves as scholarly institutions and emphasized research and theory, Medill was not at all academically pretentious. Its graduate program was in many ways as intellectually rigorous as any other academic department, but deep down Medill thought of itself as a trade school that produced journalistic craftsmen the way vocational schools turned out union-certified plumbers. Its aim was to teach students how to use pencil and typewriter the way carpenters wield hammer and saw: with care and precision and without a wasted movement. It succeeded so well that major metropolitan newspapers everywhere regarded its graduates as instantly employable, often hiring them right
out of school instead of waiting for them to acquire a few years' seasoning on small-town dailies.

Some of Medill's professors were tenured, distinguished holders of doctorates who had earned their spurs in the field, but more were working journalists who labored full-time for Chicago newspapers and magazines. They taught part-time at Medill for two reasons: to earn a few freelance dollars and because deep down in every good journalist a schoolmaster struggles to emerge. Many develop highly individualistic ways of working that they think worth passing on to a new generation.

Richard T. Stout was my first teacher at Medill. He later went on to national fame as a Washington correspondent and pundit, but in the early 1960s he was a general-assignment reporter for the Chicago
Daily News.
At Medill that summer, he taught a section of Beginning Reporting. It was one of the several undergraduate courses I had to take to fulfill the requirements for the master's degree program; Trinity had offered no journalism courses.

Tall, beetle-browed, blunt-spoken, and easy to lipread, Stout devoted part of every two-hour session to war stories of Chicago journalism— stories that had a sharp point. He'd use them, for example, to show how an enterprising reporter could score a beat (“scoop” was a 1920s cliché nobody used anymore) on a competitor. More important, he showed us how to assemble the facts of a story with precise and colorful thews and sinews. A news story, he pointed out, could be either informative and dull or informative and readable. A newspaper that had more of the latter than the former would also have more readers than its gray competitors. Here was no pale-palmed oracle from the ivory tower, but a battle-scarred veteran from the trenches. His course was a paradigm of applied intelligence.

Dick Stout corrected his students' stories in the same endearing way. They'd come back to us hen-tracked in red ink, our many errors highlighted with a scrawled “Oh, Jesus!” or “You gotta be kidding!” He was quick to praise, too; a shapely phrase brought a simple but bold “Good!” or “Nice!” If we offered a controversial idea, he'd either agree or disagree in a lengthy mini-essay, scrawled on the back of the page.

Once I quoted a remark from Michael Harrington's
The Other America
, a book on poverty that had recently been published and was destined to become a classic. Stout had just read it, too, and was so moved that on the
back of my story he delivered himself of a long opinion that I still consider to be as perfect a book review as can be written in five hundred words.

There was also Beginning Photography, a simple technical course that taught me how to look at the things I was learning to write about. The Nikon single-lens reflex cameras so common in photojournalism today had just begun to appear on the American market, and we were still using two kinds of antiques. One was the classic old newspaper lensman's camera, the bulky Speed Graphic. It was loaded with four-by-five-inch cut film in clumsy holders that had to be slipped in and out of the camera for every picture, and ate expensive flashbulbs by the dozen. The other was the Rolleicord, a smaller camera that produced two-and-a-quarter-inch square negatives on roll film. The Rollei was a twin-lens reflex the user had to hold at waist level while he peered down into its viewfinder. It was as slow and unwieldy as the Speed Graphic. Used skillfully, however, both cameras produced negatives far superior in sharpness and clarity to today's best 35 millimeter work.