What's That Pig Outdoors? (8 page)

But that lay in the future, and the present would lead to some disappointment. After we celebrated Christmas in our new home, I was taken to Orrington and immediately placed in the mainstream. I studied all subjects except one with my hearing classmates. Each day, while the rest went to music class, I'd go to speech and lipreading with the teacher for the hard-of-hearing.

It was not long, however, before I came home with a sheet of paper the teacher had given me. On one side was a list of hobbies for the hearing and on the other a list of hobbies for the deaf. I don't recall what the hobbies were—in fact, I don't remember the episode at all. But Mother and Dad went through the roof. They would have no truck with the assumption that deaf children automatically cannot do certain things. Only when I had tried them and failed could they be set aside as impossibilities. Mother and Dad insisted that I be removed from the hard-of-hearing class while they sought private speech and lipreading lessons elsewhere.

At the same time, the regular third-grade teacher informed Mother and Dad that, despite my prowess in reading—I tested two years ahead of my age group—she was going to put me back at grade level with the
rest of my classmates, reading the same books they did. At some point in my education, she told them, I would have to read at grade level, and it might as well begin in third grade. Forty years later, in an age in which teachers strive to identify and nurture special gifts and talents among their charges, such an action seems astonishingly shortsighted. In the 1940s, however, less adventurous teachers often attempted to reduce their pupils to the lowest common denominator. It was easier to teach that way. So much for the vaunted Orrington School.

All the same, I don't think that teacher's benightedness harmed my reading development. Though I read more difficult schoolbooks than most of my classmates, I was not a frail genius whose intellectual flowering had to be gently tended, but just a moderately bright kid who had had an early leg up. By age nine, anyway, I had begun reading a great deal outside school, and continued to do so. I found my intellectual treasure trove was not in the adult classics (as so many celebrated novelists seem to have done at very young ages) but in newspapers and magazines. Each evening Dad brought home the Chicago
Daily News
, and after the funnies and the Cubs (in those days, as it is today, it was difficult to distinguish between them), I'd read the front-page stories. The Washington and foreign news, I am sure, was well above my level of understanding. The crime stories, however, entranced me, much to Mother's disgust. I had had no idea that people could kill each other in such colorful ways and for such strange reasons.

Mother was too wise to forbid me to read anything, but she must have had her doubts when she walked into the living room to find me on the sofa engrossed in
The Ladies' Home Journal.
I had no interest in the service articles about clothes and food, but I loved the “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” column. The vagaries of human behavior toward the opposite sex were wonderful entertainment, although I doubt I understood the bedroom problems that the column explored with great delicacy and euphemism. At age nine I still didn't know a thing about the sexual act, nor would I have believed it had I been told.

At this time I also began reading
Time, Life
, and especially
The Saturday Evening Post
, whose pages I would devour as soon as the mailman arrived with it. I fell in love with William Hazlett Upson's droll stories about the adventures of a salesman named Botts and his Earthworm Tractor Company. This was not literature but slick sentimental entertainment.
Of course, I didn't and couldn't make the distinction; to me, a story was a story, whether fiction or nonfiction, and the joy was in the telling. At that time, perhaps, the seed of the future journalist was planted.

If that school year of 1948–49 was a wasted one, as Mother and Dad still believe, I did make some good friends during it. I still had that sunny good humor which helped wary hearing children to accept my deafness despite my odd, breathy speech and the necessity of facing me when they spoke to me. One of them was in a similar situation. Sam Williamson was not another deaf child but a fellow newcomer to Evanston, having arrived from New Haven the month before when his father, a professor of economics, moved from Yale to Northwestern University. New kids tend to gravitate toward one another for mutual protection, and we became fast friends for life. Sam is now a professor of economics at Miami University in Ohio, and his older brother Bill, who became a chum of Buck, is also an economist, at the University of Illinois. (Economics seems to be a hereditary disease in that family.) Sam was the first “best friend” I ever had, and his mother, Arline, a gentle and loving surrogate mama. The Williamsons' house was close to Orrington School, and twice a week Arline made lunch for Sam and me while Mother was off at Great Lakes Naval Hospital being a Gray Lady, a kind of grown-up candy striper.

Meanwhile, Mother and Dad had found private speech lessons for me at the Institute for Language Disorders at Northwestern University, a few blocks from our home. For several months I had lessons with an elderly couple famous for their work with deaf babies in England. The Ewings—later Sir Alexander and Lady Irene—and I got along very well, and they improved my speech markedly. They even, quite inadvertently, gave me my first instruction in the difference between British and American English.

While testing my vocabulary by showing me pictures of objects and asking me to name them, the Ewings displayed a drawing of a familiar item of feminine appurtenance. “Pocketbook,” I said confidently. “No, Hank, that's a
purse,”
they replied. “Pocketbook,” I insisted. To me and my friends, a purse was a small bag with a clasp for holding coins. It could be carried inside a women's pocketbook. “Purse,” they countered. What strange ideas these British people had! Meanwhile, the Ewings shook their heads and smiled as they wrote in their notebooks. Doubtless the
deaf American child had confused a purse with a paperbound novel and did not want to admit his error.

Darn right I didn't. I knew they didn't believe me, and I seethed. When they brought me out to Mother after the session, I immediately grabbed her pocketbook. “What's this?” I demanded. “It's a pocketbook, isn't it?” “Yes, honey,” she replied indulgently. I was triumphant. I doubt that the Ewings heard the exchange, for they neither apologized to me nor acknowledged Mother's confirmation. To me this was not a trivial matter, a simple bruising of a child's pride. Inconsequential and even irrelevant as it may seem, it was the first of many disagreements I would have with authorities in the field of deaf education. (Not that I was always right, as I was in this case!)

My experience with the Ewings led to an episode in which one matter was settled and another raised. Mother recalls that our immediate neighbors insisted, as did many people, that I must have retained some hearing because I seemed, in their words, “so normal and responsive.” So did the Ewings, who mistook my skill at anticipating and guessing their statements for evidence that I must have a great deal of residual hearing. They decided that my hearing should be extensively tested.

And so it was, by the head of the institute at Northwestern himself. Helmer Myklebust was a renowned authority in the field of deaf education. For six solid hours one spring day, he subjected me to a battery of auditory tests, carefully designed to ensure that there would be no visual cues. A few years before, I had mistaken sympathetic vibrations of the eardrum for genuine hearing. I had also inadvertently fooled testers when they turned up the dials and asked, seemingly out of my line of sight, if I could hear the tone and I replied, “No.” I simply had (and still have) excellent peripheral vision, and had guessed correctly when I saw the movements of the tester's lips far to my left. What else would they say but “Do you hear anything?” I had no intention of deceiving anybody—I just thought I was being a nice, cooperative little boy.

Finally, late in the afternoon, as ants of impatience gnawed away at me, Myklebust admitted the truth. I had no measurable hearing. I was deaf. Totally and completely. Not slightly, partially, or profoundly, or hard-ofhearing, or any of the other degrees of and euphemisms for hearing loss. At last the matter was settled.

But Myklebust, who had made his name as a psychologist of the deaf, also declared that I was “tense” and “hostile,” and needed some psychological therapy. Dad, who had taken me to Northwestern and had stayed there for the entire six-hour session, lost his temper. “Of course the kid is tense!” he said. “Any normal child would be tense if he'd been asked all day to do something he can't do!” And with that he swept me out of the building. I would not return to it for more than a decade.

On separate levels both Dad and Myklebust probably were right. A sixhour battery of tests is bound to try a child's patience and affect the results. Dad knew that outside the psychologist's laboratory I functioned well, in all ways a happy nine-year-old child growing up in a limitless world. Had Myklebust been out in the field for weeks, observing my normal everyday interactions with hearing adults and children, perhaps he would have come to different conclusions, ones that acknowledged that I perhaps displayed a larger potential for success in the hearing world than most deaf children. It's not always easy for social scientists to recognize exceptions to the rules they formulate, especially if the data for those rules come entirely from testing in the laboratory. In those situations, “counseling” might do more harm than good. In 1949, I am certain, it might have proven more a hindrance than a help. A few years later, perhaps not. For a seed of truth was buried in Myklebust's findings, a seed that eventually would sprout and take root.

In any event, Mother and Dad by this time had no doubt that they had chosen the right path for me. I was doing well at Orrington School, keeping abreast of, if not a little ahead of, most of my classmates in all subjects— even, of all things, drama—and had built up a large new circle of friends. An emblematic memory of the time comes from an October day in 1951 when I walked out of school to see a knot of boys gabbling excitedly around a classmate with a portable radio. One of my friends peeled away from the group and dashed over to me. He joyfully punched my shoulder. “The Giants won the pennant!” he cried. “Bobby Thomson hit a homer in the last of the ninth!” I have never been certain whether Steve wanted to be sure his deaf friend knew what had happened or whether he simply was sharing momentous news with the nearest warm body. I like to think it was the latter: that I was just another kid in the schoolyard.

Certainly I was doing everything the other youngsters were, even taking lessons on musical instruments. My parents thought musical instruction might benefit my speech, even if they weren't quite certain exactly how. They didn't force me into it, as so many reluctant hearing children are; they simply asked if I was interested, and I eagerly said yes, because I had the normal eleven-year-old's enthusiasm for new experiences.

Mother and Dad paid the small fee for private after-school lessons with the school's instrumental teacher, who manfully tried to guide me in what must have been several extraordinarily painful—for him—sessions with the trumpet. I understood the broad notion of a musical note: it was a certain frequency of vibration. I had no idea, however, how to produce it, let alone when. I never could synchronize the vibrations of my lips on the mouthpiece with the fingering of the valves. Occasionally, quite by accident, I'd hit upon some semblance of a note, and the teacher would praise me for doing so. But I never could repeat the note.

Stubbornly I kept on, session after session, the teacher sitting beside me sweating as profusely as I was, marking the proper valve fingering on the sheet music before me and gritting his teeth over the sounds I produced. To call those sounds off-key was probably to flatter them. Finally I admitted defeat. “Do you think I should keep on doing this?” I asked the teacher in frustration. “I don't want to.” Immediately he smiled, sighed with relief, and gently took the trumpet from my hands. For weeks he must have been waiting for me to say those words.

At the time I didn't think my lack of success all that unusual. Some of my friends had also tried, and failed, with musical instruments. Big deal. So we weren't cut out for that sort of thing. Musical illiteracy was simply another characteristic we shared. They were
tone
deaf, and I was
deaf
deaf. If there was a difference, the consequences were the same.

In other ways we shared success. Most of the boys in my fifth-grade class joined the Evanston YMCA, which had an excellent afternoon program for boys as well as a summer camp in Michigan. The Y staff was as open-minded as anyone could be about deaf children in their programs, and they were also willing, at Mother and Dad's behest, to allow me to seek my own level. Two or three times a week, we fifth-graders would take a bus downtown after school for swimming lessons.