Love knows not distance; it hath no continent; its eyes are for the stars.
Gilbert Parker
In 1954, as I neared the age of five, Jonathan approached sixteen, the age limit for the Central Institute for the Deaf. The CID faculty felt that because he was not an excellent lipreader, he would suffer educationally and socially by going to a regular hearing school. For his part, Jonathan was fed up with the oral instruction at CID. He had become frustrated with the speech drills and lipreading lessons and felt strongly that he was not learning anything of value.
While my parents corresponded with the people at CID about Jonathan’s future, Jonathan insisted that the place for him was the Arkansas School for the Deaf in Little Rock. The school was a long distance from Pea Ridge, but Jonathan’s eagerness to go there helped ease my parents’ conscience about sending him so far away from home again.
At this same time, it was agreed that I would benefit from attending CID. The people at CID were so impressed with my progress in home instruction that they offered a scholarship to offset part of the tuition, as they had for Jonathan. My education would emphasize speech, lipreading, and auditory training for my first four years and then expand in subsequent years to include traditional academic study. My parents thought it would be wonderful if both Jonathan and I were at CID at the same time, for him to help me adjust to school life, but it wasn’t to be. I started at CID in September 1954, just a few months after Jonathan ended his eleven years of study there.
My parents drove me from Arkansas. I vividly remember sitting in the backseat of the Chevrolet after we reached St. Louis, looking for my black cowboy boots with red spots on them.
“Where my boots?” I asked my mother. This was an important day and I had to look my best. I was proud of those boots. I sensed tension and apprehension in the car, more between my parents than with me. This trip felt different than all the others we’d made in my short life. We looked the city over from the Chevrolet as we drove down Kingshighway Boulevard.
Suddenly, in front of us was the school, a huge, four-story brick building taking up nearly a whole block. It took my mother and father two or three trips to unload and carry my suitcases and footlocker up to the second floor of the school. I looked around, not knowing exactly what to expect. I did know I was going to school there, but I didn’t understand that I was going to be left there, alone. I was so excited about this new adventure that I just assumed my family would be staying too. We walked up the stairway to the spacious room that was to be my dormitory. There were ten beds in the room, five on one side and five on the other. At the foot of each bed was a metal locker, two feet by two feet by three feet. The third side of the room was lined with ten wardrobe closets.
I looked up and saw a small, round lady. I was introduced to Mrs. Morton. “Paul,” she said, “welcome,” and she hugged me. I could lipread her easily. She was to be the housemother for the ten boys in my room, ages three through six. I remember the smell of Mrs. Morton, a distinctive combination of body odor and cigarettes. She wore dark, round glasses. She acted as if she had known me for a long time, probably because she had known Jonathan. As Mrs. Morton showed us around the room, the other nine boys followed and watched with curiosity. I was shown my bed, my metal locker, and my wall closet. My mother put some things in the locker and hung clothes in the wall closet. I was beginning to get the idea. The housemother showed us to the large, boys’ bathroom, where nine towels hung on hooks. Someone had written a boy’s name above each hook.
After we moved my things in, my parents and I went out for supper. At the restaurant, my parents explained that they would see me at Christmas. “Time will go fast,” my mother said. “Many sleeps will go fast. We will all be together again at Christmas. In December you will come home!”
I was not really paying attention to the conversation, nor had I fully absorbed the reality of separation from my family. I was excited by the dormitory and what seemed like a new adventure. The gravity of the situation would visit me later. That evening my parents and I went back to the dorm room again. They hugged me. “Goodbye! Goodbye!” they said. I remember how tense they seemed. I know now they were holding back their tears. “Goodbye!” I said, waving with excitement. They were gone.
The other boys in the dormitory were curious about me. We got acquainted. To the hearing, the communication of that group of deaf children must have been a comic opera indeed. We all began gesturing and moving our lips in exaggerated emphasis of the words, pointing to our lips and pantomiming everything we said. It struck me at that time that the way these boys talked was different from the way my family moved their lips. My family’s speech was smoother and more natural.
Soon, it was time to prepare for bed. The boys knew what they were supposed to do and I fell in line, following them to the bathroom where we cleaned up and brushed our teeth. We then went to bed. I wasn’t homesick or even upset that my parents had left me. Everything was new and different from what I normally experienced, and I was thoroughly infected with the spirit of adventure.
The next morning I sensed a lot of excitement. We washed up, put on our school clothes, formed a straight line, and followed Mrs. Morton down the stairway to breakfast. To my amazement, there were a hundred people in the dining room—boys, girls, adults, and black women serving meals (the term “African American” was still many years away). I learned later there were five levels of students at the school, ranging from age five to age sixteen. Altogether, eighty pupils lived in the dormitories. Another eighty to ninety children lived at home and attended CID during the day. During my years at CID the population was roughly 160 to 170 pupils at any given time.
In the large dining room at that first breakfast, I followed Mrs. Morton with the other boys from my dormitory to the first table at the end of the long row. The tables were set according to dormitory levels. I was fascinated with the mystery of being in a new atmosphere. I could see right away that it was special to be seated at the last table at the other side of the dining room. Once you arrived there, you were the oldest and most mature. The instant I saw those teenage children, I looked up to them.
After the newness wore off, though, the first few weeks in that dining room were an awful experience for me. No longer was I the focus of attention. I had entered my first dictatorship. I was about to experience the world as it really was.
From time to time we had hot oatmeal and Mrs. Morton expected all her boys to like their oatmeal the same way. That included lots of white sugar. I had never put sugar on cereal before and hated it from the first. At home, we had always had butter and milk on our cereal. I refused the sugar: “No, no, no sugar.” My frustration grew as I realized that Mrs. Morton was not listening to my protests.
“Paul, eat your cereal,” Mrs. Morton said. I had to eat my cereal or whatever we had for breakfast and do whatever she bid. I tried to verbalize my family’s home customs, but I felt a wall go up between us. I was used to being in a household where communication was total, but here at the table I was faced with a person who, after working for years with deaf children, no longer made any attempt to understand preferences.
After breakfast on that first day we lined up to walk back to our dormitory and to the bathroom to brush our teeth. At eight o’clock, Mrs. Morton led each of us to our different classrooms. Mine was only a few yards from the dormitory. It was the first one in the hall and was for first- and second-year students. Mrs. Morton led me by the hand to my new teacher, Mrs. Olmstead, who gave me a warm smile and big hug. My brother had been in Mrs. Olmstead’s class eleven years earlier, though I didn’t learn this until a few years later. I sensed right away that she was wonderful—warm, patient, loving, and kind.
There were four other kids in the classroom. Two, Rusty Hooten and Rochelle Berlin, remained with me throughout my years at CID. I have no recollection of the other two, for they dropped out of school within a few years. We sat in our little chairs in what seemed to me to be a huge room. When I returned to visit the same classroom fifteen years later, I was shocked, of course, to see how small it really was. But on that first day I was small too.
So my classroom education began. On our first day and for many days to come we formed a semicircle and faced the teacher, who sat with a large blackboard behind her. Mrs. Olmstead was generous with hugs and affection, and I always felt positive feelings toward her. She was also easy to lipread and enunciated slowly so that the words formed on her lips were clear to me.
The basic philosophy was that only oral communication took place in the classroom. For emphasis, Mrs. Olmstead pointed to her chin with her index finger to remind us to keep our attention on her lips. The gesture meant “Listen to this. You must hear this.”
Mrs. Olmstead carried a long stick, which she used to tap our laps to get our attention. When we looked up, she’d say, “Would you say or do...?” and then give us a specific command. These simple commands enabled us to flex our energetic muscles while also exercising our lipreading skills and pouring new words into our vocabulary. They might go on for a few minutes: “Turn around. Catch the ball. Throw the ball. Give me the blue car. Jump up and down. Say ‘mumumumum.’ Say ‘la la la la.’ Clap your hands.”
Since oral education was the school’s philosophy, we had speech and lipreading lessons every day. To me, these “games” were great fun, for I was already a good lipreader and I could follow everything Mrs. Olmstead said. There was a great deal of interaction between teacher and students. Mrs. Olmstead always gave the impression that she could be reached easily, unlike Mrs. Morton, who seemed not to care to communicate with us.
Mrs. Olmstead was a scientific educator. She knew how to get and keep our attention. How? She bribed us. On her desk was a fishbowl full of M&Ms. If we did our speech lesson particularly well, Mrs. Olmstead gave us one of those bright little candies. I remember vividly that bowl of M&Ms, as well as my fantasy of running up and grabbing a handful of the sweet treats. Usually, we earned only one M&M at a time and could go up before the class and pick the color of our choice. With the rest of the class watching with envy, we’d pop it in our mouths and savor it, trying to make that moment and the M&M last as long as possible. It was a rare achievement to get more than five in a day.
We remained with the same teacher all day long in the same classroom for a year. We focused on the basic communication skills of speech, lipreading, and listening. The longer we worked with Mrs. Olmstead, the better we understood her and the more naturally she spoke to us, which meant less enunciation and more speed. At first, we did all exercises orally, but later in the year Mrs. Olmstead showed us large cards on which were printed the word and sentence commands. We repeated the words after her and followed the commands if she asked us to do so.
My interaction with other deaf children was also a big part of my new life. Some of those I met at CID that first year became lifelong friends. One was Rusty. We communicated orally—that is, we lipread and talked, which is what CID and our prior training at home encouraged us to do. We also gestured along with our speech, but hard as it is for some to believe, we did not use sign language at all. Hearing people with no exposure to deaf speech would probably not have understood much of what we said. Our speech was not perfect. However, we were more conscious than hearing children of the way we made ourselves understood by enunciation and lip movement.
When it came to hearing people, we talked a bit differently, focusing on making our speech as intelligible as possible. Therefore, we learned two distinct ways of talking, and the distinction is with me to this day. When I am with deaf people, I don’t try as hard to make myself easy to lipread and nor do I speak as clearly. When I am with hearing people, my shift is in speech quality. For this reason, I usually find it difficult to talk to hearing and deaf people at the same time.
Although CID discouraged sign language, we used gestures often. I remember several gestures well. If we didn’t like someone, for instance, we flicked the middle finger off our thumb outward toward the disliked person (that may sound familiar to people who sign). If we liked someone, we made a petting motion up and down with a flat palm. If we were playing in a group and someone displeased us, we’d look at that person and flick out our fingers at him. The other kids, if they agreed, would start flicking too. On other days, we’d like that person again and would use the petting motion to show approval. I’ve thought of that gesture as like smoking a peace pipe, whereas the negative gesture sometimes got us into arguments or fights.
The younger kids were, of course, the least verbal. They frequently resorted to pushing and shoving each other in frustration. We became less physical and more verbal in our conflicts as we got older. Hearing children are much the same, but children who are deaf are often slower to learn proper, diplomatic ways to vent anger through verbal expression if they did not pick up good communication skills at home at an early age. Research shows that even babies can sign, some as early as six months old.
One of my strongest impressions of my first year at CID, besides the M&Ms, was of a magnificent calendar on the classroom wall. At the beginning of each day, we stood in a semicircle in front of the calendar. It featured colorful stickers on different days of the month, such as holidays or special days for us to remember. Standing there at the calendar, we recited such things as: “Today is Monday. Tomorrow will be Tuesday. Yesterday was Sunday. In one week, we will go to the movies. Yesterday, Rusty and I had some ice cream.” These exercises were designed to help us with time concepts as well as proper grammar.
The most important part of the calendar work was figuring out how much longer it would be before we would see our families again. Instead of “days” we used the same term my mother used, “sleeps,” to measure how often we’d have to sleep through the night before a given day would arrive. While pointing with our index fingers to the calendar days, we’d say, “Sleep, sleep, sleep,” eagerly counting down the time before we would be off for the holidays.
My first flight, on a two-propeller plane, took place when I left St. Louis to go home for Christmas that year. I was so excited about the prospect of seeing my family again that I didn’t pay much attention to the flying experience itself. It was wonderful to be back in that warm and nurturing environment. I remember waking up on my first morning back, running into my parents’ bedroom, and jumping into bed with them. I also remember lots of hugs, roughhousing with my three brothers, and savoring home-cooked meals, including bacon for breakfast, a particular favorite of mine.
The end of that holiday was an altogether different situation. A couple of days before I was scheduled to leave, I began to cry and said I didn’t want to go back to school. Mother explained that I had to go. We looked at the calendar and counted the number of sleeps until I could come home again. I said I understood and stopped crying. But the next morning, I began crying all over again.
In the middle of the night before my departure, I woke up, went into my parents’ bedroom, and cried some more. When morning came, I tried hard to convince my parents to let me stay. They of course said it was best for me to go.
At the airport, I hugged my three brothers and both of my parents. I cried, my mother cried, and she and I hugged and cried together. My brothers tried to make jokes and did crazy things to get me to laugh. It didn’t work. My father asked, “Do you have your ticket?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Go on, then,” he said.
I couldn’t hold back the moment any longer. I walked from the gate to the ramp. I wore a sign on a string around my neck with my name and destination on it. On the plane, a stewardess (they weren’t called flight attendants back then) said, “Oh, what a cute little boy you are. But why are you crying?”—as if the mere question would make me stop, think, and change my mind about the tears. She led me to a seat by the window, which I pressed my face against. I continued to cry as I watched my family wave at me.
I felt the vibrations of the baggage handlers shifting suitcases, the shuffling of the passengers, and the running of the stewardesses as they helped people find their seats. I felt the door close and the cabin pressure change. I watched the handlers pull the ramp away from the plane. I felt the engines warming up. I waved almost hysterically at my family, crying even harder, trying to prolong the moment as long as possible. The plane shuddered slightly and then began to move toward the runway. I felt the wheels travel over bumps on the concrete—thump, thump, thump.
By the time we reached the end of the runway, I was so tired from crying that I was almost dizzy. I felt the engines come up to speed. Now it’s too late to get off the plane, I thought. I’m stuck! I have to go on.
The plane moved forward, faster and faster. I felt it lift off the ground. I looked back at the airport where my family stood. It grew smaller and smaller. Soon we entered the clouds. When we leveled off, I knew I was irrevocably on my way away from family and toward school. The trauma of leaving was over. I was so tired that I fell asleep.
Before every trip back to school for the next ten years, the pattern was largely the same. The planes changed, from two propellers to four, and then to jets. But the emotional upheaval remained the same. It wasn’t that I hated school. I just missed my family. What made it all bearable was the knowledge that after a few more sleeps, I would again have the chance to be with the people who loved me so deeply.