Every survival kit should include a sense of humor.
Author unknown
My fourth year at CID, 1957–58, was a contrast to the Year of Terror. Rusty and I moved on to a wonderful new teacher, and Don and Keith moved on to terrorize another classroom. We still had Mrs. Hilton, but she was only one out of three former problems.
Miss Pearl Thomas was a kind, patient, loving, and above all, sane teacher. She never put bags on our heads or boxing gloves on our hands and she didn’t believe that shaking a child would get the answer out of him. We talked actively again in Miss Thomas’s class and went back to using natural gestures that could not have been against CID’s oralism policy anyway. I don’t recall ever being punished for talking with my hands in Miss Thomas’s classroom. What a difference from Mrs. Lunde!
That year, like second graders everywhere, we worked to improve our handwriting, waded through language lessons, computed long columns of numbers, and sharpened lots of pencils. The emphasis at this time was more on writing than on speech. I have Miss Thomas to thank for strengthening my English skills and fostering an interest in writing, which I still have today. Her classroom had a pleasant atmosphere with many items displayed on the walls, which is important for deaf students because they depend on visual stimuli. Some items, though, we simply couldn’t understand. For instance, Miss Thomas put up poetry that she cherished but that was lost on our childish minds. It probably dealt with passion or compassion, two subjects we had yet to explore.
Miss Thomas did have one passion that we could relate to—she was an ardent baseball fan. She especially liked it when our class played. We often competed in spirited games between two teams made up from all the classes—the Cardinals and the Blue Jays. When we returned to class, Miss Thomas wrote down the scores on beautifully drawn scoreboards. Pictures of the Cardinals and Blue Jays were posted everywhere. Miss Thomas was a bird lover as well.
Parents and relatives came to visit our room often, which showed how welcome they felt in Miss Thomas’s class. When my parents visited, my friends particularly appreciated my father, who liked being the center of attention and accomplished it by creating fun for everyone around him. He invented games for all of us to play in the dormitory. Many other parents remained aloof. Many had not fully accepted their own children’s deafness, and the reminder triggered by all the students seemed to make them uncomfortable. With my parents, it was different. They had lived with Jonathan’s deafness for so long that they were completely at ease with other deaf children.
Once, my father was in St. Louis for a conference and stayed at a hotel near CID. He came every evening of his stay to play with us in the dormitory. He drew funny pictures, told funny stories, and led us in games. In one game, we had to show our daring and exercise implicit trust in each other. We lined up in two lines, holding our hands across the lines like a human net. Then one boy stood on a chair and fell backward into the net of hands. Every boy wanted a turn at being the “fall guy” to prove his courage. It was a bold game. Mrs. Hilton kept peeking out of her room, wringing her hands and probably hoping my father would leave so she could regain control.
One other game he played was a one-time-only trick. He asked, “How many of you would like to know if you are really smart?” All of us were intrigued by this question and eagerly cooperated. He had us line up and kneel on one knee. He looked at us with a smile, then walked to the end of the line of boys and pushed the first one. Each of us fell, one by one, like dominoes. He laughed and said, “Are you really as smart as you all thought you were?”
We were a bit embarrassed, but we had a good laugh at ourselves. The laughter was what mattered; many of my school friends missed out on the lighter side of social life because their hearing family or friends didn’t know how to communicate with them. My father knew how to play with us so that we caught on to the games and jokes with no problem. He brought his long experiences with deafness not only into the dormitory but also, with Miss Thomas’s enthusiastic permission, into the classroom. On one trip, my parents brought Happy, our family dog, with them. Miss Thomas invited Happy to visit us in the class. It turned out to be the most exciting event we’d had in a long time. A dog in a class! How marvelously unconventional!
Miss Thomas had a gift for spontaneity in addition to her great talent for teaching. She also knew we needed guidance on how to live in the world outside, so she impressed on us again and again the importance of social etiquettes and moralities. But not even the best of teachers can prepare her children for all the complexities and disappointments of real life, and being deaf made things just that much harsher. One of my first disappointments in the outside world came at a little store near CID where students went to buy candy, ice cream, and other treats. One day my parents sent me a five-dollar bill. I was excited and I knew I would go far with such a princely sum.
First, of course, I went to the store and picked out something worth about fifty cents. I handed the store owner my five-dollar bill. He must have been nervous around deaf children; he probably didn’t feel comfortable communicating with us. As change, he gave me three $1 bills, a $10 bill, and some loose change. I was excited at the opportunity to be honest and to return his money to him. But the more I tried to get his attention, the more uncomfortable he became. “Go away, go away!” he said.
Finally, I spoke as loudly and clearly as my awkward voice could manage: “Look, look. You gave me this for five dollars.” Despite himself, he saw his mistake, took the $10 bill back, and gave me a $1 bill in return. But instead of praising me for my honesty, he waved his hands as if to brush me away. I was so disappointed. I had hoped for some kind reward for being honest, but he didn’t even say thank you. He didn’t appear grateful at all. Rather, he seemed annoyed by what had happened. It was yet another difficult lesson in my young life.
September 1958 found me on an overnight train back to St. Louis to begin my fifth year at CID. I rode with Barney, a classmate whose grandfather was a train conductor. We had special passes to ride the train. The trip was an exciting adventure for me, so special that I even dispensed with my beginning-of-term crying ritual when I parted from my parents at the train station. Barney and I arrived on the morning of the first day of class. I was taken to my classroom, where I met a new teacher, Miss Sara Hugh Smith.
A basic key to developing good communication skills is the quality of instruction. Most of the teachers at CID were well trained and highly qualified to teach speech, but their effectiveness depended on our ability to lipread them. By age nine or ten, the students at CID knew most of the sounds needed for speech. At that point the teacher’s responsibility was to help us refine those sounds into speech that could be understood by hearing people. She needed to assist us in speaking more clearly and using the sounds in different combinations with other vowels and consonants to create spontaneous speech.
Try as I might, I could not lipread our new teacher. Some of the other students had no trouble following her, but every time she spoke I had to look around the room for clues from the other students as to what she said. Whenever it was my turn for a speech lesson, I was stuck because I couldn’t understand her instructions. What was worse, I couldn’t speechread her corrections of what I said.
I thought at first that something was wrong with my eyes or maybe even my brain. Miss Smith didn’t seem to speak like anyone I had ever met. It was a long, frustrating, self-effacing struggle before I finally learned that she was from England and spoke a different English than I was used to. To this day I believe it was a mistake to have hired a teacher who spoke with an accent and whose ear was tuned to British, not American, English. Miss Smith was not in touch with the subtleties of American idioms and slang. My sudden uncertainty in reading Miss Smith’s speech sent me into a panic. I thought I had forgotten over the summer everything I had struggled for years to learn.
Somehow, I survived the class and even learned to understand and communicate well with Miss Smith. As with any adversity, it strengthened me. It helped me adapt later in life when I ran into all kinds of accents. Can you imagine lipreading someone from Alabama if you’re from New England or someone from Boston if you’re from the Deep South?
As time went on, my classmates and I grew to like Miss Smith. I especially remember her storytelling and the writing assignments she gave us. The school had a small library, but Miss Smith decided we needed to be exposed to the local public library system. She was finally able to convince our housemothers to take us there one afternoon after school. This was a great event for me. I was happily overwhelmed by the huge number of books available in the library. The librarians had been forewarned of our visit by Miss Smith, and the individual attention they gave us reinforced my delight in the library. From that time on, I looked forward to going to the local library every two or three weeks to drop off books and pick up new ones. One of the first books I checked out was How to Be Popular, which taught that listening to others was critical and could make or break any relationship.
During storytelling and story writing that year, we let our creative juices flow. I sent some of my stories to Dunbar, who was doing graduate work in Germany then. He wrote back several encouraging letters, which fueled my enthusiasm for writing, so I wrote more stories.
We not only wrote stories but also told stories nonstop to each other. I was talkative, which often got me in trouble with Miss Smith, especially when it was during class on subjects not pertaining to our classwork. All of us loved to tell humorous stories, hamming them up with wild facial expressions and gestures. The laughter these inspired disrupted Miss Smith often and also must have annoyed her, because she couldn’t follow our line of humor. What was comical to us was not what we had said but how we said it and the gestures and facial expressions we used to enhance our stories.
Since we were not able to detect humor in voices, we relied heavily on faces and body language. We invented many funny gestures and body characteristics to describe other people, classmates, and teachers. We were terrific mimics and could capture people’s personalities. Sometimes we needed only one or two gestures to identify a person. Everyone knew who we meant—everyone but poor Miss Smith, that is. She always had trouble figuring out what was so hilarious!
During that 1958–59 school year, I had a new housemother, Mrs. Hampley. She had a problem. Although she tried hard to be loving and kind and set up an affectionate bond with her dorm children, no one wanted to hug her or return her physical affection. Mrs. Hampley was plagued with overpowering body odor. I could never figure out why no one ever conveyed to her the need to bathe and utilize perfume. Of course I never had the nerve myself. We often joked about having her fumigated.
Although we all had our difficulties with Mrs. Hampley, our big problem was Keith, the resident bully. He was strong and getting stronger every day. The threat of violence was with us constantly. He inspired fear in many of us. I for one was certainly under his power.
Keith was fascinated with drawing pictures of nude women. When he was thus employed, the rest of us huddled around, watching with interest and giving him advice. We all had wild ideas of how a woman looked. We thought, for example, that her breasts grew out from just below her underarm and that a bra was used to draw them forward and keep them in place on her chest. We took great care, of course, to see that the drawings were destroyed or well-hidden from the housemother’s prying eyes.
But one day on returning from class I found Mrs. Hampley waiting anxiously for me. She asked me to come to her room, which was right off the dormitory. There she showed me one of the drawings I recognized to be Keith’s. “Why did you draw this?” she demanded. “Why did you hide it?”
“I didn’t draw it,” I protested. “I didn’t hide it!”
She refused to believe me. She dragged me to my locker to show where she’d found it. I happened to have there a picture of Jesus Christ pasted on a slab of wood. I picked it up and shouted at her, “I am telling the truth! I didn’t draw it! I didn’t put it in my locker!” I held out the picture of Christ at her as if I were warding off Dracula with a cross.
This made her even angrier. She raced to her room for a wooden paddle, which was not, I might add, intended to be used with a canoe. When she returned, she demonstrated its intended use on various parts of my body. Throughout the demonstration, I held out the picture of Jesus, trying to keep this heathen monster off me. She only paddled harder for it. Soon her paddle broke, but she continued, now whacking me on the outside of the forearm with its broken end. Only the sight of my blood stopped her. She didn’t take me to the infirmary, I suppose out of fear that I would reveal the beating. I had to wash and nurse my own arm.
I’m sure Keith was the culprit. Why did he put the picture in my locker? Was it revenge for something I’d done to displease him or was it purely for the joy of seeing me get into trouble? Whichever was true, he got what he wanted, and I had a secret and a scar to carry for a long, long time.