What's That Pig Outdoors? (4 page)

After they married, Mother and Dad set up housekeeping in Flushing, New York, where my brother, Manown Jr., nicknamed Buck, was born in 1936. Later the family moved to New Jersey, first to Wortendyke and then to Midland Park, where they were living when I arrived on August 17, 1940, at a maternity home in nearby Ridgewood. It was a perfectly normal birth and I a perfectly normal infant, with all my senses as well
as fingers and toes. When I was a year old we moved to Ho-Ho-Kus, a tiny town just down the pike from Ridgewood.

From the first, it seems, I was linguistically precocious. When I was two years old and Dad had entered the wartime Navy as a Supply Corps lieutenant stationed first in Jacksonville, then at Fort Lauderdale, Mother drove us down to Florida. All the way, she recalls, I sang “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You”—every single word. I also had an extensive vocabulary and spoke clearly and fluently, without baby talk. Mother and Dad thought I had some musical talent as well. But now, as that awful winter of 1943-44 waned into spring, the first question to emerge was: How much hearing loss did I have and how best to deal with it? The second: I already could speak, and speak well; how best to train me to retain my speech?

My maternal grandparents, who happened to be wintering in Florida when disaster struck, took Buck under their wing so that Mother and Dad could devote their time to me. When I returned home from the hospital, my grandparents and two elderly cousins, both schoolteachers in New Rochelle, New York, immediately urged that Mother and Dad show me pictures in magazines, sounding out the names of the objects so that I would not lose my concept of language. That was futile; the hearing loss was too great.

A more immediate problem was teaching me to walk again. Not only did the pseudoparalysis linger but the disease had also burned out another function of my inner ears—I had lost my sense of balance. Dad took over this job, pulling me up from a sitting to a standing position.

I learned to walk again just as a baby does: a few tentative steps, then a frantic series of lurches, punctuated by tumbles and pratfalls. So awkward was my slowly recovering left side that I adopted a marked lean to port, like a drunken sailor. Within a year, however, I had straightened up and ambulated along normally. So long as I had a horizon to fix my eyes upon, I could keep my balance. My eyes were beginning to compensate for my lost ears.

And during those first months of regaining my toddling skills, I began to pick up the art of reading lips, in crude monkey-see, monkey-do fashion. For some time, however, my prowess was only rudimentary. Except for reading on my parents' lips the names of concrete objects that could be shown to me, such as “apple” and “milk,” I could understand very little.
Abstractions were quite beyond me, and when I could not understand them my frustration would spill over into tantrums, often with a lot of head banging. “When you wanted chewing gum,” Mother remembers, “I couldn't explain that there wasn't any because the air station commissary store had run out. I had to drive you out to the air station to show you the empty shelves.”

Worse, I began to stop talking. At first my voice departed; I'd move my lips normally, but no sound came from them. Then I stopped doing even that and withdrew into utter silence.

Growing ever more concerned, Mother and Dad took me to specialists in New York and Philadelphia. Most thought I had some residual hearing, because I often seemed responsive to hearing tests. What I actually did was anticipate their cues with a little elementary lipreading and a lot of guesswork. “You were so bright and alert that you fooled people,” Mother recalls.

All the experts, however, declared that there was little or no hope that I could ever regain my hearing. They recommended that my parents look for teachers of the deaf and begin planning for my education. One specialist in Philadelphia curtly suggested that Mother and Dad “accept the fact” that I was deaf and send me away to school. My parents—bless them for it!—refused to entertain the notion. They began to look around for alternatives.

The family faced other concerns, for Dad had volunteered for sea duty. The Navy ordered him from Fort Lauderdale to Hampton Roads, Virginia, to join the aircraft carrier
Randolph
, nearing completion in the shipyards. There was a severe housing shortage in and around that bustling Navy base, and the family home in Ho-Ho-Kus had already been rented.

So, as did many service families during World War II, we threw ourselves on the mercy of relatives. With our two parakeets, we bundled into the car and drove to Dad's parents' home in Monessen, Pennsylvania, and then to Dad's elder sister's house in Milton, Pennsylvania.

There we stayed for six weeks while Buck remained home with the mumps and I attended a neighborhood preschool. (Interestingly, Mother remembers that I “got along well” with the other three-and four-year-olds in that group, though I didn't speak much, if at all. I was rapidly expanding my lipreading horizons, she recalls, and probably could understand
much of my playmates' simple speech.) After we wore out our welcome in Milton, we drove to Mother's family's farm in Hallstead, Pennsylvania.

In July, Dad at last found housing in Portsmouth, Virginia, and the family moved there to be with him. A bit later, while visiting her parents in Washington, D.C., Mother stopped at the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf, a national service organization for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. There she picked up a copy of the
Volta Review
, the organization's monthly magazine, and came across this advertisement:

Deaf Children Trained only by

Parents with Help of the

PARENT-CHILD TRAINING INSTITUTE

during its few years of operation are now

working successfully in their home town

public hearing schools, 2nd, 3rd and

6th grades.

YOUR CHILD IS JUST AS CAPABLE

This Institute makes no profit.

Constant advertising is not possible.

Save This Address

3 Charles, Montgomery 7, Ala. Tel. 3-6130

Spotting this ad was a great stroke of luck for Mother and Dad, for it introduced them to a “miracle worker” we'll forever remember as “Miss Mirrielees.”

3

Those who sheltered under her wing still call her Miss Mirrielees, with the same respectful emphasis on “Miss” that an Englishman might apply to “Sir” when addressing a brigadier knighted for heroic service to his country. Like Johnny Appleseed, Doris Irene Mirrielees was an eccentric original—an itinerant bearer of hope whose passion and devotion deeply touched every child and parent she encountered. Her unconventional ideas and techniques affected my life profoundly.

When she answered Mother's letter of inquiry that day in 1944, Miss Mirrielees had been a private live-in tutor for perhaps half a dozen families with deaf children. She had developed and refined what was then and in some ways still is a revolutionary philosophy. Mother and Dad responded to it immediately, for it addressed their concerns about me as did no other method they had yet encountered.

Miss Mirrielees believed that the educational establishment had failed the deaf. Inefficient, uncaring teaching methods had produced large numbers of semiliterate adults fit only for menial tasks. The underlying cause, she felt, was that most educators, especially those in the ubiquitous residential schools for the deaf, equated deafness with retardation. Of their charges they expected little and received less. Residential schools, therefore, seemed to Miss Mirrielees nothing more than holding tanks for the hopeless. In her view they taught deaf youngsters, not the difficult arts of coping with a hearing world on its own terms, but only the primitive skills necessary for a sheltered, low-income existence.

Miss Mirrielees was passionately certain that all deaf children could enjoy lives as full and productive as those of their hearing peers, if only they could acquire the gift of language—the
whole
gift, not a small part of it—as soon as possible. To do so, she argued, very young deaf children,
like their hearing brothers and sisters, needed the security and love of life at home. Only in such a “normal” environment, she believed, could a deaf child's intellect blossom under her theories of teaching.

An old idea was the kernel of her new method. In a memoir privately published in 1952, Miss Mirrielees told how, as an undergraduate at Chicago Normal School at the turn of the century, she had learned a technique called “Plan Work.” In it, older, more advanced deaf pupils used a common experience as a base for learning new language. From the simple idea of a milkman arriving at a house with bottles of milk, for instance, the pupils would learn—as the teacher acted out the roles in a heavy pantomime— how milk helped them to grow, how refrigerators cooled the milk, and so on. New ideas about milk would be added to their general knowledge. To show how things are related was the aim of this method; it taught how language worked to express abstractions.

At that time most schools for the deaf taught only rudimentary English— simple nouns and verbs of the “Apple is food. I eat apple” variety. A deaf child did well to learn fifty-two single words—one a week—by the end of his first year. This, Miss Mirrielees argued, was absurd. Teaching single words, or two words at a time, was teaching deaf children not language but simple actions and responses, just as a dog learns to fetch a thrown stick and earn a pat on the head. Rather, deaf children ought to learn that words stood for abstractions as well as objects and actions. They should learn not only that a thing is called a “rose,” she wrote, but also that it “is a flower, that it smells sweet, that it is beautiful in color and form, that it grows from a tiny bud, helped by the sunshine and rain, that it should be treasured and cultivated because it brings happiness and pleasure to everyone who sees it.”

Miss Mirrielees tirelessly argued that deaf children could catch up to, and keep up with, their hearing peers in language development—if they were given the right means. But how? The process of language learning begins before birth; the normal fetus hears and responds to sounds from outside. Conversely, it's well past birth when most parents of deaf babies learn the devastating truth, and by then their children are not just one but several steps behind their peers, who have been exposed to the stimuli of sound ever since and perhaps before emerging into the world.

The catching-up process should begin immediately, Miss Mirrielees
maintained, with parents placing their faces in the baby's line of vision, so that the child could associate the movements of their lips with objects and actions and begin learning the rudiments of lipreading. But Miss Mirrielees knew that lipreading was too exhausting a method of taking in large amounts of information over long periods of time. The answer, instead, lay in the printed symbol of the spoken word.

In short, she believed in teaching deaf children to read almost as soon as they could focus their eyes. And not just in single words but in entire phrases and sentences with the full rhythm and content of spoken English, in the same way hearing children learned language. The difference was that deaf children would “hear” with their eyes, not their ears—and would do so
before
they learned to speak.

Miss Mirrielees believed that deaf children could become familiar with words, and their proper order, by actually handling them—by choosing them from among other words and placing them in sentence form. When she was a child, Miss Mirrielees recalled in her memoir, her teachers “had passed out small cardboard boxes to the ‘good' children of the class as a special treat when they were excused from Friday afternoon lessons. In such boxes one would find a paragraph of print pasted to a piece of cardboard, and the individual words of the paragraph pasted singly on cardboard slips. It was considered a reward for her goodness that she was allowed to put the words of the paragraph together, using the paragraph pasted on the large cardboard as her model.”