What's That Pig Outdoors? (16 page)

Today's photojournalist, equipped with a motor-drive Nikon, zoom lens, and quick-change film backs, returns from an assignment with hundreds, even thousands of shots of his subject taken from different perspectives. At least one photograph is bound to be good enough to make it into print. In the early 1960s, however, our primitive hardware ordinarily gave us a handful of chances—sometimes only one—to get a publishable photograph, and we had to make the most of them.

I learned to watch carefully, trying to anticipate the best moment to place the viewfinder of the heavy Speed Graphic against my eye, yank out the film curtain, and press the shutter. To maximize my chances of getting a good shot, I learned to research a photo assignment before going out into the field. If a photographer knew what was likely to happen, he could wait for just the right moment: the visual heart of a news story, its most dramatic component.

I am still proud of one particular photograph I took with the Speed Graphic at a press conference in an Evanston hotel that summer of 1962. It captures the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., finger thrust gently at his audience but righteous fire in his eye. Sure, it was a lucky shot—but it was a shot whose likelihood I had increased in the Medill library, poring over news clippings and wire-service stories about Dr. King.

Of these practical journalism courses, the one that finally convinced me of David Botter's wisdom was Copyreading. I had thought newspaper copyreaders—or copy editors, as they're called today—sat quietly around a desk dotting “i”s, crossing “t”s, and writing simple headlines, that their job must be the easiest and most boring imaginable, while the reporters and photographers did all the glamorous work in the field. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

The copyreader, I was to learn, is a news story's last best hope before it is converted into type. Under deadline pressure, a reporter often can make mistakes, committing grammatical errors, misspelling names, and locating events at the wrong times and in the wrong places, even nonexistent ones. Sometimes salient facts are buried deep in a story instead of placed at or near the top, where they can be most quickly appreciated. City editors catch most of these bloopers, but they themselves work against the clock, and errors frequently sneak past. All these things are also true of wire-service copy, such as that from the Associated Press and United Press International, which is produced under the same pressure and is subject to the same errors.

Copyreaders, therefore, must be not only Mrs. Grundys of grammar and Dr. Johnsons of usage but also expert rewriters. They must also be walking, talking encyclopedias and gazetteers, born skeptics and fact hounds with curious, hard-to-please minds. They must also be quick at writing headlines, a tricky task that's a difficult literary form in itself. Just try rendering eight hundred words of news story into thirty characters of headline.

The buck stops at the copy desk; if an error should get through, the copyreader catches the most hell. A reporter may win a Pulitzer Prize for a story largely hammered into shape by a copyreader; the reporter gets the glory, the copyreader nothing. Good reporters are easy to find, but expert copyreaders are worth their weight in diamonds. That's why they're paid more than reporters.

Furthermore, copyreading (I would quickly discover) is a highly suitable career for a deaf person—provided, of course, that the many requirements for the job are met. Copyreaders rarely, if ever, use the telephone. They take orders orally, but the great bulk of their work is done in silent concentration. To the public, copyreading may not be a glamorous
occupation, but it has satisfactions of its own: done right, it's a highly intellectual, demanding job, and one can make a comfortable living at it on a big-city newspaper. Copyreading can also be a springboard to other, more specialized tasks in journalism, but I would learn this later.

As the summer ended, I became a full-time student and quickly fulfilled the undergraduate requirements. I opted for the magazine rather than the newspaper sequence of courses, for two reasons: the former would train me in the arts of writing long, detailed articles and I would avoid having to take one component of the latter: Advanced Reporting, a course that required much use of the telephone. Otherwise the sequences were largely similar; in fact, newspaper majors often went to work for magazines, magazine majors for newspapers. It didn't matter. I was hooked on journalism. Finally I had discovered what I was fit to do.

At this time I decided to do something about my speech, which I thought might be beginning to deteriorate. It seemed that people were asking me more often to repeat what I had said. Five years had passed since I last had any sort of speech therapy, and perhaps it was time for a refresher course.

Northwestern seemed the perfect place for it. The famous Institute of Language Disorders occupied a run-down war-surplus building just a hop and a skip up-campus from Fisk Hall, home of Medill. If I could get in a couple of sessions of speech therapy each week, I thought, perhaps the deterioration would halt and even could be reversed.

The institute of 1962 still subscribed to its academic philosophy of 1949: the psychology of the deaf was considered as important as the everyday tasks of auditory and speech pathology. Therefore, in order to take speech therapy, I would first have to submit to an all-day battery of tests designed to measure my intelligence and mental health, then hear the results in a “counseling session.”

At this I balked. It was my speech I wanted help for, I protested, not my psyche. The institute's reply was that the data “would be used to help other deaf people.” This, I suspected from my own studies of psychology at Trinity, ranked on the scale of veracity somewhere between “The check is in the mail” and “Your car will be ready by noon.” I knew full well that
the data would end up in a lonely file drawer, that the information was intended mainly to help an ambitious scholar earn a Ph.D. But I assented. It was the only way I could get help for my speech.

I had a chip on my shoulder the size of a shed roof. It had not been long since I had experienced an emotional crisis that was the direct result of my deafness, and I was still wary of those who might tell me that I could not do this or that because I was deaf. I had just discovered that my future lay in journalism, which educators of the deaf did not consider a promising field for the deaf because of their problems with language and communication. And I had just read a good deal of muckraking journalism about psychological testing abuses in the corporate world. It had outraged me. Clearly I was not the perfect subject for such testing. But the tester didn't know that.

Furthermore, at twenty-two I was still immature, both emotionally and intellectually. Possibly, but not necessarily, because I was deaf. It's said that the deaf tend to score lower on assessments of maturity than their hearing contemporaries, because difficulties in communication retard their social development. In my case heredity, that infamous Kisor slowness to mature, probably was as much to blame as environment for my callowness.

At the session's conclusion, the tester, an assistant professor of educational audiology I'll call Miss Jones, wanted my parents to hear the results. On the phone Mother declined to come in for a conference. “He is twenty-two years old,” she said. “He is an adult. Tell him yourself. As for us, we are convinced he is going to achieve his goals, no matter what you say.” Or words to that effect.

So I went in. Miss Jones told me what I expected she would. I needed speech therapy, and I also needed counseling over my future. Certainly I was intelligent and well educated, but I had to be more realistic about my goals—writing, editing, and teaching—and I had to learn to “accept my deafness.” I was, she said, “denying” it by refusing to associate with my fellow deaf. This was not healthy. I should join a local organization for the deaf and learn something about deafness.

I don't recall exactly what I replied, but it must have had something to do with grandmothers and egg sucking. After a few inconclusive weeks of speech therapy with Miss Jones, during which she resolutely and
repeatedly attempted to bring up the matter of counseling and I resolutely and repeatedly refused to listen, I simply stopped attending the sessions.

A few years later, using a common investigative ploy that every journalist would recognize but which I cannot reveal, I obtained a copy of the case history that Miss Jones had filed on me. Not long ago I dragged it out of dusty storage for a close examination. It is very revealing, both about me and about the educational establishment of the deaf of the times.

In many places I had a good laugh. Among the “indications” Miss Jones found were “homosexual tendencies” and a propensity for “adolescent sexual fantasy.” The sole evidence for the former seemed to be that my interests tended toward the feminine because I scored high on literary and artistic tests and low on mechanical ones. Today that notion seems appallingly sexist and even homophobic. But Miss Jones came from the dominant culture, one that considered a strong interest in the arts to be weak and effeminate, one that believed it was unmanly to write about nuances of feeling with grace and delicacy.

As for the dirty-mindedness, of course I thought about sex all the time when I was twenty-two years old. Doesn't any healthy young man of that age, especially one who happens at the moment to be between—ahem!— heterosexual relationships? Nobody had asked me about those—just the cut-and-dried survey questions on the battery of tests.

But one of Miss Jones's conclusions simply puzzles me. “His fluent expression of written language,” she wrote, “is interpreted by the tester as indicating that he finds trouble in relating to people.” Does good writing necessarily imply misanthropy? Maybe it does, and if so, I'd like to know how. So, presumably, would a host of journalists and novelists and poets.

At least once, Miss Jones leaped to an utterly wrong-headed conclusion. I had written that a picture of several figures suggested Mother attempting to shush my five-year-old sister, Debbie, and her friends while I studied downstairs and “tried to ignore the clatter of little hoofs above.” That last phrase indicated to Miss Jones that the subject might be “denying his acceptance of deafness and really wanting to hear.” It did not seem to have occurred to her that deaf people, too, feel the vibrations of and are annoyed by the racket small children make. Let alone that deaf writers, too, can essay aural metaphors as well as visual ones.

To be fair to her, I must admit that Miss Jones's conclusions were not entirely off base. Of course I was “hostile,” and it's a pity Miss Jones had stuck to the battery of laboratory questions instead of attempting to elicit some information about the recent events in my life. As had her colleague Helmer Myklebust more than a decade before, she believed six hours of testing could illuminate all corners of a complex situation. Had she made some effort to observe my life outside her office, she might have interpreted some of her data in a different manner, and we might have enjoyed a little rapport.

As for the perceived “dislike of authority,” Miss Jones was right, but she had no idea, I think, that this characteristic would be a help rather than a hindrance in my newly chosen profession. Of course, I didn't know it at the time either, but contempt for authority is considered a perfectly healthy, even desirable mind-set for a journalist.

I won't quibble, however, with Miss Jones's finding that I scored low on the social maturity scale, which measures an individual's ability to function among large numbers of people. Even more than a quarter of a century later I think I'd still bring up the caboose on such a test.

Nor can I take issue with Miss Jones's statement that I refused to associate with the deaf. To one of her questions I had written frankly that I stayed away from other deaf people because they behaved peculiarly, were too clannish, and depended too much on others for help. Associating with them, I feared, would diminish me in the eyes of hearing people. I did not think the limitations of the deaf in general applied to me, and I did not want the hearing to feel that they did, either. Miss Jones evidently believed that they did, or she would not be trying to dissuade me from my chosen career.

Did this mean, as Miss Jones thought, that I was “denying” my deafness? In a way she was right and in another she was wrong. It's true that I knew very little about other deaf people and indeed subscribed to the ordinary hearing person's stereotyped notions about them, simply because I was culturally a member of the hearing world.

Because I had always lived among the hearing, I had looked at deafness not as an existential condition to which I must submit—the view of most deaf people and professionals in the field—but as an adversary to defeat. Riding the tiger of deafness today seems just a vainglorious
notion, the striking of a noble but doomed pose, like those pigeon-splattered statues of Confederate cavalrymen in the courthouse squares of so many Southern towns. Yet it was for an ambitious young deaf man a useful, workable idea, one that could keep him forging ahead until he had grown old enough to recognize his limitations and accept them with equanimity. And in the summer of 1962 I was actively fighting battles with my old enemy, losing some skirmishes but winning others. The campaign was still undecided, but I had gained a tactical advantage with my discovery at Medill that my future lay in journalism.