What's That Pig Outdoors? Page 5

  My childhood was so stereotypically “normal” because my parents planned it that way: they wanted me to be just like any other American child of my time and place. This was “mainstreaming” before anyone had conceived the term.

  Chance and location also had a good deal to do with the success of my mainstreaming. The open-minded little community of Ho-Ho-Kus was partly a small town and partly a bedroom suburb of New York City, almost entirely middle-class and full of young war veterans beginning their families. We were all white, mostly Protestant but with a smattering of Jews and Catholics, and upwardly mobile. I think that to most of the good citizens of that community, a deaf child was simply a mildly interesting phenomenon, to be remarked upon approvingly but forgotten so long as the child’s welfare seemed in competent hands.

  Certainly there were differences among us children, but they were few and, to me, seemed perfectly ordinary. A couple of times a week, for example, my Catholic friends had catechism class after school. I had speech class. By 1947 Mother had taken me beyond the Mirrielees Method, which was designed for very young children. So long as one listened carefully, I was understandable, and so long as I “listened” with my eyes, so were the familiar people around me. But Mother and Dad believed my speech could be better: my enunciation more precise, my voice more pleasant.

  My speech, they thought, had reached a point where improvement was beyond their ability. They also wanted me to broaden my lipreading horizons beyond our circle of family and friends, to learn to lipread strangers. So they set out to find a specialist. They found one almost two hours from Ho-Ho-Kus via a drive to the George Washington Bridge, then the subway to Brooklyn. “You’d talk and a voice pattern would appear on a screen,” Mother recalls. “I don’t think you benefited much.” The “screen” probably was an early oscilloscope, on which the specialist attempted to quantify differences between my speech and that of a hearing child. Electronic technology would remain too crude to be of much benefit to me for more than thirty years to come.

  On one of those outings we stopped in Manhattan to visit the Lord & Taylor women’s apparel store on Fifth Avenue. In true small-boy fashion, I turned in one direction while Mother, engrossed in her shopping, went another way. After a time she looked down and discovered that I was not with her. Frantically she called and called, her heart in her mouth. Naturally I did not respond. What are the consequences when a deaf child disappears in a crowded, cavernous department store on a busy New York street? Exactly what happens when a hearing child gets lost. She found me a few aisles away, intently admiring a display of naked mannequins.

  In any event, the twice-a-week, two-hours-each-way journey became too wearying. Its sole benefit seems to have been that Mother learned to read lips while talking with me on the subway. The trains’ rattle and roar drowned my small voice, and she’d watch my lips carefully as I chattered on to her about the doings of the day. (Some of my best friends learned to read lips, too. Silently we’d gossip and giggle across the classroom, much to the puzzled annoyance of our teachers, who had no idea that lipreading was contagious.)

  Mother and Dad cast about for another private teacher. Luckily, they found Jean Swart in Tenafly, half an hour from Ho-Ho-Kus. She was a gifted oral teacher of deaf children and also taught lipreading to adults. For two years, twice a week after school, Mother would drive me to Tenafly for my hour-long lessons.

  I don’t remember them as being in the least bit onerous, for Mrs. Swart, a born ringmaster, knew how to win and keep a child’s attention. She’d ask me about my adventures since our last session. While I bubbled on about building forts and catching frogs, she’d listen carefully to my speech and observe how well I read her lips, making unobtrusive mental notes about sounds and words that needed work. All the while she’d ask intelligent questions—intelligent to a seven-year-old, that is—to keep me going.

  She’d notice, for instance, that my “p” sounds were much too explosive and often accompanied by a coarse spray. My “Peter Piper picked a peck of peppers” sounded like a machine gun in a monsoon. As a toddler I had learned to produce the sound in classic, exaggerated deaf-child fashion: building up air pressure behind tightly closed lips a few inches from a lighted candle, then releasing the air in a sudden and loud “pah!”

  Mrs. Swart used the same technique, but in reverse. “Can you say ‘pah!’ to the candle but not blow it out?” she asked. My first attempts failed, but soon I got the hang of reining in the air pressure. Little by little I learned to produce gentler, drier “p”s and other plosive consonants, such as “t” and “k.”

  We were all happy with Mrs. Swart, who thought my progress satisfactory in every way. She thought my potential such that she asked Mother and Dad whether they wanted me to speak with a New Jersey accent or a cosmopolitan one. They chose the latter, and to this day I believe that some of my pronunciations—such as “been” with a long “e,” in the Continental way, instead of the American “bin”—come from her influence.

  Mrs. Swart also advised Mother and Dad to let me stay in public school with my hearing contemporaries while having me take private lessons in speech and lipreading. Throughout my childhood, however, Mother believed in exploring every possible avenue for my development. Late in 1947 she took me to the famous Lexington School for the Deaf in New York City for testing. It was a residential oral school, but also had day pupils as well as an experimental course for parents who wanted to help in their children’s education.

  After we had visited a few times, one of the more astute Lexington teachers took my parents aside and told them privately that I did not belong there, that my speech was already so fluid and understandable that she was afraid it might slip if I was taught among other deaf children of less developed oral skills. Thanks to my interaction with hearing children, I was speaking with normal cadence and syntax, whereas the other deaf youngsters at Lexington still spoke woodenly, each word plodding after the one before in the same flat, dull tone. The teacher thought I’d be better off where I was, in a public school with hearing children. She was one of the few special education teachers I have ever encountered who willingly gave up a potential pupil, who frankly admitted that the child’s accomplishments were beyond her powers to improve.

  On one of those jaunts to New York City I acquired my first and only hearing aid. Because I was so responsive to visual cues too subtle for adults to perceive, Mother and Dad thought I might have some usable residual hearing. Possibly I did, but if so, it was difficult to measure. The crude auditory equipment of the day could pump out only raw volume at varying pitches. Low-frequency vibrations, when loud enough, set my eardrums to thrumming in response, and I could feel a tickling in my ears. Feeling the vibrations of high-powered auditory testing is not hearing. A seven-year-old child, however, doesn’t know the difference, and my “I can hear it! I can hear it!” gave everyone—including me—the wrong impression.

  As a result, I wore an experimental, specially built aid designed by technicians at the New York Hearing Society. It was a large black brick of Bakelite accompanied by a heavy rectangular dry cell battery, the whole contained in a brown canvas harness to be donned and buttoned like a vest. It was meant to be worn under a shirt, only the cord and large ear button being visible. In the beginning, however, I preferred to wear it outside my clothes. I thought I looked like a paratrooper with grenades clipped to his battle dress, and I wanted everyone to admire my quasimilitary equipage.

  At the very least, thought Mother and Dad, the aid would allow me to hear doorbells, automobile horns, and train whistles. For two years I wore the apparatus and willingly, even eagerly, suffered the consequences of the hearing aids of the time. They were not only heavy and clumsy but also had a tendency to emit horrible squeals of feedback whenever the ear mold worked loose—and it often did, because I was a physically active child even while sitting. Two or three times a day at school, my classmates would stiffen in their seats, turn to me, wave their hands, and shout, “Your hearing aid! You
r hearing aid!” There must have been a special corollary of Murphy’s Law that dealt with powerful hearing aids in school assemblies, churches, and other quiet public places. The adults may have been horrified and even pained, but we youngsters all considered the sudden squeals an amusing diversion.

  Nonetheless, as time went on my enthusiasm for the aid waned. I came to realize I really wasn’t hearing anything, and by age nine I asked Mother and Dad if I could stop wearing it. The episodes of feedback were no longer a novelty but had become a tiresome annoyance to me and to everyone else. Moreover, the harness had grown heavy and cumbersome. By then Mother and Dad had also realized its limitations. To them the aid’s only usefulness was as a visible signal to strangers that its wearer was deaf, and that was hardly sufficient reason to keep me wearing it. Quietly they assented to my request. The aid went into a dresser drawer and was eventually forgotten.

  The hearing aid was the centerpiece of one of the rare episodes of my childhood in which my handicap caused genuine pain at the hands of another child. I had gone to a drugstore with Mother, and while she picked up a prescription I lingered in front of the candy counter. A slightly older boy, one of the town bullies, walked up behind me and spoke to me. Of course, I did not hear him, and when I failed to answer he took a roundhouse swing with an open hand and struck me hard on the ear that held the hearing-aid button. The blow drove the ear mold into the ear, cutting the skin. The wound was superficial, but it was painful and bled heavily. The boy ran, and Mother took me home squalling. When my brother heard of the incident, he immediately wanted to go after the bully, but Mother stopped him. One of Buck’s friends, however, was equally furious and not so restrained. He sought out the boy and administered a thorough drubbing. Rough justice was done and the incident forgotten.

  There were so few such instances of cruelty that once the initial surprise and outrage wore off, they were easily dismissed. I was fairly big and strong for my age, as well as an athlete competent enough to be one of the first chosen for games, and that was sufficient deterrent to most contemporaries with a mean streak. Older bullies also knew that Buck and his friends could be hard-nosed enforcers. So the peace was kept.

  Of course children taunt one another, but in those early years my deafness never seemed to be a reason for my friends to do so. Mother and Dad waited for such a day, but it never came. One afternoon when I came home crying, Mother thought, with her heart sinking, “Now it’s happened. Somebody’s made fun of Hank because he’s deaf;” Indeed, I had been singled out for a physical peculiarity. But not the one Mother thought. The males in my family tend to be stocky and blocky physical types, even as children, and a playmate had teased me because of my “stubby fingers.”

  In Ho-Ho-Kus there was just one other untoward incident that related to my deafness, and I did not learn about it until decades later, when I interviewed Mother and Dad in preparation for this book. Our immediate neighbors were the local Episcopalian rector, his wife, and their daughter Claudia, who was my age. When we were about six, Claudia and I naturally became playmates. One day Claudia’s mother persuaded herself that my deafness was giving her daughter what she called a “quirk.” Just what that was none of us recall, but she announced to my mother that Claudia would no longer be allowed to play with me. Claudia’s father saw no harm in his daughter having a deaf child as a playmate, but his wife ruled the roost. I don’t recall ever being told explicitly not to play with the little girl; in any case, I had a million other friends, for, as Mother and Dad recall, I was “a happy, outgoing child with a great sense of humor.”

  Not long after my eighth birthday Dad’s employer, Montgomery Ward & Co., transferred him from the New York corporate offices to its headquarters in Chicago. On December 19, 1948, we drove up Lake Shore Drive, stormy gray Lake Michigan on the right and Chicago’s snaggletoothed skyline on the left, to our new home in Evanston, a suburb abutting the north side of the city. Moving to a new city is ordinarily a wrenching experience for a child, even a hearing one. Until they’re settled in with new friends in new surroundings, most children feel like displaced persons. To me the relocation was an adventure. The constant moving about of a Navy family was not long in our past, and I was still too young to have put down firm roots. The prospect of new playmates in a new town, far from being daunting, was exciting.

  Dad had bought our modest, though comfortable new house without Mother having seen it. It was the best one we could afford in the well-to-do area around Orrington School, the only elementary school in Evanston that had its own teacher for the deaf.

  Evanston was more than ten times the size of Ho-Ho-Kus. Its school district was composed of eight or nine separate elementary schools and two junior highs, and had a small but distinct special education program. The school officials and teachers of this sophisticated suburb did not possess the wholly open minds of those in the tiny Ho-Ho-Kus schoolhouse, but they displayed a certain flexibility. So long as a pupil performed well academically and socialized acceptably with his peers, they would not interfere with his parents’ wishes.

  And they weren’t above concocting an amiable bureaucratic fiction when it suited the situation. A few years later, when confronted by my parents’ request that I go to the same North Side junior high school as my hearing neighbors—the junior high that had the program for the deaf lay far in the southern part of the suburb—the officials would reclassify me as “hard-of-hearing,” although I was obviously deaf as a post. The northern school had a teacher who specialized in the hard-of-hearing, so why not essay a small experiment?

  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, howe
ver, 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.