Progress always involves risks. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.
Frederick B. Wilcox
In 1961 I joined the Boy Scouts. The Scouts was like a breath of fresh air in our lives. There were no families, dorm mothers, or school administrators to contend with, only deliriously happy kids and fun-loving Scout leaders. Some of the Scoutmasters, including Bill Sheldon, Bill Blank, and Rich Meyer, were even deaf! The whole experience couldn’t have differed more from life at CID.
Camping trips were the highlight of Scouting life. Two or three times a year we filled our backpacks and assembled in front of the main school building. All the non-Scout children were envious. I remember, in my early years, watching the Scouts and wishing I was old enough to join them. I dreamed of the fun they would have on those wondrous weekends.
When I finally became a Scout and went on camping trips myself, the fun part turned out to be very different from what I’d imagined. It wasn’t the great outdoors or cookouts or sleeping in tents that I treasured but getting together in one of the tents to have serious discussions—about sex!
At night, one could walk around among the tents and instantly tell which contained deaf Scouts and which contained hearing Scouts. From the tents of the former group came the glow of flashlights, while the other tents were dark. Our flashlights were bright and powerful—we kept them working well because we depended so much on them to talk at night about our favorite subject. From outside the deaf tents you could see the flashlights moving around the tent as each talker held one under his chin so that others could lipread him. An obvious advantage for us was that anyone walking by heard no words to give away the subject, whereas if you listened at the hearing tents you would soon collect incriminating evidence.
On camping trips, we got the opportunity to visit and communicate out of reach of CID authorities. Those of us from the dorms were fascinated with the lives of the few Scouts who were day students at CID. They lived at home and had more freedom to explore some aspects of life. They would bring pictures of women, dirty jokes in print, and—most treasured of all—stories of what was happening in their homes. Day students sometimes related to us their parents’ marital problems. They went into detail recounting parents’ fights, arguments, affairs—all juicy stuff we were dying to know. We looked forward to each camping trip for the “next chapter” of the story. These were as gripping as any soap opera to us—and some went on for several seasons before being “canceled” by a divorce or the family moving away. I am sure these parents would’ve died if they’d realized how much we knew about their sex lives and marital problems!
The day students had more access to normal family life than the rest of us did. After all, we went home only during holidays, when our families put on their best behavior for us. The day students had more real knowledge about their families than most of the residential boys did about theirs. One boy mentioned his parents’ recent fight. He was warmly invited to our next nightly talk, where we interrogated him about every detail of his family life. He told us that his parents drank at a party and started arguing. The mother began flirting with another man and the father picked a fight with him. The father then locked his wife in the bedroom and later threw her bodily out of the house. It was definitely a soap opera.
We discussed the matter seriously, asking hypothetical questions such as, “What if there had been no drinking? What if the parents had been more loyal to each other?” It was incredible how much we learned about sex and social intercourse during those Scouting nights. Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouts, may not have approved, but what more wholesome place to learn such things than with the Boy Scouts!
When we first started these discussions, we were young and immature, but as the years went by we became more sophisticated in our topics. To keep the tradition alive, we passed our hard-learned information on to younger Scouts we approved of as “intellectual” peers.
My Scouting experience had more conventional aspects to it as well. Every spring, CID’s Boy Scout Troop 132 participated in a contest with the nineteen other troops in the St. Louis district. On a Saturday, we all gathered to compete in outdoor skills—building fires, compass reading, and message sending by flags. We competed on equal footing with hearing patrol groups of the other troops. Our troop had four patrol groups, all headed by deaf patrol leaders.
A boy named Bernard was the leader of my patrol group. He told us how badly he had been beaten the year before in a similar contest and resolved not to let it happen again. I knew what he meant: during my first two years of Scouting, the deaf patrols scored a humiliating one hundred fifty out of a possible one thousand. I think many of the boys in my patrol were bright, but we were not exactly the ideal Scout as portrayed in fables or pictured on the Scouting manual. We were not really outdoor people. We liked to talk, not sweat. We liked good food. We liked to pad our sleeping bags with leaves to sleep in comfort. So, with Bernard, we spent Friday night thinking about how we could win a little respect from the other troops.
For the fire-building contest, we put a few pieces of wood in a can of kerosene and left them overnight. In the morning, we dried them in the sun. We were confident when the time came for us to demonstrate how fast we could build a fire, which then had to burn through a string held two feet above the ground. The judge used a stopwatch to time how long it took us to build a fire. He was stunned when we did ours in something like two minutes. The second-best mark was three and a half minutes. Everyone admired our performance. Thank goodness no one smelled the flames.
Another difficult part of the contest was sending Morse code messages with flags. My patrol group hadn’t studied the Morse Code very well, choosing instead to play cards, so we had to enlist help again. The judges put half of us at the far end of the field, about fifty yards away, and gave us a few sentences to transmit to the other half of our troop with our flags. Someone thought to bring a pair of binoculars, which seemed an innocent enough item to the judges. But instead of reading the flag signals, we used the binoculars to lipread the person using the flag. As the flagger enunciated the messages clearly for us, we just wrote down the sentences. The judges were impressed with the accuracy of the message, and again we scored high.
We had no trouble with the compass and first aid tests; we scored well without having to cheat. But then we had to measure some trees by using logic. One of us pretended not to understand what was expected and began a conversation with the judge, knowing he would need to concentrate to understand the deaf speech. While the talking was going on, some of us crowded around the judge and snuck a peek at the answers on his paper. Then we pretended to measure with our hands and figure the heights. When we turned in our scores, we made sure that they were not 100 percent accurate but close enough. The judge was thrilled with our answers.
The most difficult competition was running a distance as a group within a timed period. We bombed on that one. We had no way to outsmart their stopwatches. At the end of the day, when the final scores were announced, we felt guilty. We were relieved we hadn’t come out at the top of all the patrols but instead won top honors within Troop 132. In the end, we didn’t feel too proud about our success, but no one ever discovered our dishonesty. It did teach some of us the price of cheating—self-disgust.
The next year, when I was thirteen years old, I was chosen to be a patrol leader. I decided to direct the patrol toward more laudable achievements and we cleaned up our tarnished image, taking an approach very different from that of Bernard the year before.
During my last year at CID, 1963–64, I was elected senior patrol leader of Troop 132. I had the opportunity, for the first time, to speak in front of groups of people. This was a novel experience and it gave me so much confidence that some of my classmates accused me of being conceited. I definitely was becoming more outgoing and self-assured, but then I was also becoming a teenager.
At the same time as my election to senior patrol leader, I attended another prestigious induction. The Order of the Arrow was an exclusive organization—a secret “Indian” brotherhood for special Scouts. The year before, and for the first time in the history of CID’s Boy Scout Troop 132, one of our deaf Scouts was chosen to join the Order of the Arrow. This was my close friend Erik, who had served as senior patrol leader before I was elected. My troop chose me to be the second troop member to join the Order of the Arrow.
Before I could be inducted, I had to survive a series of grueling trials devised to test the nominee’s worthiness. The scene of the ordeal was a camp outside St. Louis for all the Order of the Arrow members in the district. The trials were intense. To pass I had to sweat, starve, sleep alone in the woods, and perform other tasks.
For the first time in my years of Scouting, I honestly had to work. During the proceedings, we were allowed almost no food and were not supposed to talk for twenty-four hours. The no talking proved to be the most difficult part for me, a natural talker. I practically had to cement my mouth shut. It was a frustrating experience.
All the leaders of the Order of the Arrow dressed like Indians and went through rituals supposedly typical of those performed by early Native Americans. I didn’t understand or follow any of these. I was the only deaf person there and almost no one knew I was deaf.
At the end of the ritual, we were taken by “American Indians” (Scout leaders dressed as Native Americans) to different parts of the woods to spend the night alone. Each prospective inductee brought a sleeping bag. We were not allowed to bring anything else—no compass, flashlight, tent, or other luxuries. The “Indians,” carrying fire torches, took us on a long walk through the woods to make sure we didn’t know where we were. The task was for each of us to find our way back the next morning.
I was excited about the challenge but more than a little apprehensive about having no padding for my sleeping bag. One by one the Indians showed us where we were to spend the night. When my turn came, I thought I’d be somewhere near the other Scouts. I was wrong—no one was anywhere in sight. I watched the torches of the Indians slowly disappear into the forest as they left me to the darkness. I prayed no snakes or wild animals would pay me a call during the night. I got a stick and scraped away the rocks, dirt clods, and twigs from an area where I could sleep. I was almost successful.
I had no idea what time it was. I finally became resigned to being alone and began to look at my surroundings. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the stars. I had never seen so many of them before. I realized it had been a long time since I had been that far from the city and away from the bright lights. I finally understood what people meant when they said that one could not really see the stars unless they were away from civilization. That night I was sorry I had never bothered to learn astronomy. I spent a lot of time admiring the stars, then drifted off and alternated between sleep and wakefulness for the rest of the night. Every time I woke up I noticed how the stars had moved. Soon I became aware that they were traveling in a pattern, a big wheel circling around a central star. This was a stunning discovery for me. I had stumbled upon a major element of astronomy all by myself. I no longer felt that the Earth was the center of the universe but that our little globe was just a small part of a magnificent plan.
When morning came, I was surprised to see how deep into the woods I was. I figured out from the sun’s position where the headquarters was and walked back, thus proving that I was a worthy survivor of the weekend. That night they held another ritual inducting those who had succeeded into the Order of the Arrow. Although I didn’t understand all the words the Indians said, I was proud to be a part of the ceremony and to have succeeded in joining the elite fraternity. I had participated in the hearing world and been acknowledged by it. This was a milestone in my life, but I still had a long way to go before I would gain complete acceptance in that world.