Pleasures are transient; honors are immortal.
Greek proverb
During our years in the Advanced Section, we never heard anyone tell us that being deaf would limit us. In fact, the teachers rarely spoke of deafness and what it meant to be deaf. They focused on making us feel good about ourselves and on showing us our potential. We never heard anyone say, “You can’t do it because you’re deaf.” That was a relief, because by then it was time for us to start thinking about our future.
At first I dreamed of becoming a mathematician. This changed to thoughts of being a veterinarian. I remember Joan, a student teacher, telling me that this was a great idea. She introduced me to her future husband, Paul Sher, who was then in a medical school. The idea that he was studying to be a doctor struck me as wonderful. They both made me proud of my choice to study animal medicine. Other classmates picked extraordinary careers such as business, education, sports, agriculture, engineering, and the like. One student was serious about becoming a professional bowler and golfer because he was very good in those two sports. He almost made it.
The more I thought about veterinary medicine, the more I realized how much science I would have to take. I also worried about operating on an animal without being able to listen to its heartbeat. So I switched back to mathematics, where I could pursue my interest in the physical sciences and do research in theoretical mathematics.
I’m grateful to our teachers for their support of our aspirations and dreams. Mrs. Daniels, for one, always said, “Go as far as you can in life!” I took her encouragement literally. Not until we found ourselves in our prospective hearing high schools did we have to face the true meaning of deafness and grapple with its reality and its obstruction to our chosen goals.
CID graduation.
In spring 1964, the night before our graduation from CID, students and their parents celebrated with a meal at Stan Musial’s restaurant. The parents ate together and the graduates ate at a separate table. My whole family had come to St. Louis for the graduation. Dunbar flew in from California, Jonathan and Dorothy came by train, and my parents drove from home, now Charleston, West Virginia. I was more thrilled with their presence than with graduation itself. I was a bit conceited in my belief that I had the best, most loving, and most understanding family present.
Steve, one of my classmates, would be going to an exclusive prep school for boys near his hometown. All the rest of the class was headed for public schools. I was envious of Steve because of my family’s emphasis on education. Steve’s parents asked me why I didn’t consider going to the prep school with Steve. I liked the idea and brought it up with my parents in the middle of all the excitement. At dinner, Steve’s parents also tried to influence my parents. My father was firm in his decision that I should go to a regular public school at home. He was not open to the idea of the prep school at all.
It wasn’t until after dinner, when we were back at my family’s motel, that my parents explained how eagerly they had awaited the day I could live at home. We would see each other every day! They could participate in my schoolwork and my free time. I realized then that they had missed me very much. They had given two of their children to CID for twenty-one years, and now they were looking forward to me living with them full time. Suddenly I saw how wonderful it would be—no more traumatic parting, no more housemothers, no more living in a closed society. Instantly, I dropped the idea of a prep school and let myself revel in the idea of living with my family after ten years of boarding school.
The next day, after all the songs had been sung, the speeches made, and the diplomas passed out, I still had one more episode to live out with my housemother, Miss Lacy. It had to do with a trip to the basement to pick up a piece of history.
CID was on a street called Kingshighway Boulevard. It had been built over an old road dating back to the late 1700s or early 1800s, when French colonists were in the St. Louis area. The French road was built using red granite blocks. I was fascinated with the history of the street, so when it was torn up for expansion I managed to spirit away two granite blocks for safekeeping. I wanted to take them home. Several weeks before graduation, I put the blocks in my school locker. When Miss Lacy saw them, she ordered me to “throw those filthy blocks out.”
I refused, saying, “They are a piece of history. I must keep them. I want to take them home.”
Miss Lacy persisted and reported it to the principal, Dr. Lane, who then called me into her office for the “last” time. She reminded me for the umpteenth time that I had to respect and obey Miss Lacy. We discussed it for long and heated moments and she finally agreed to let me keep the blocks if I put them somewhere in a dark corner of the basement. I was ecstatic. As I took them to the basement, I did so with the knowledge that I had finally won a long overdue victory over Miss Lacy. When I retrieved them on graduation day, it was like receiving a different kind of diploma.
As I had anticipated, my family was thrilled with the blocks and the history behind them. It was so typical of the kinds of things we did. We put the blocks in the family car and they went all the way to California on our vacation before we took them home. Those blocks are still on my bookshelf in my study; they are among my favorite treasures. To me, they are more than just a bit of St. Louis history. They represent my years of toil at CID, for learning the English language without hearing is no less difficult than mining granite from a quarry. My triumph that graduation day was to be able to carry my new, hard-earned language skills and my ancient blocks away with me into the mainstream world.