. . . he shall send his angel . . .
—Genesis 24:7
ÜLLE LEWES RECOGNIZED MY struggle because she has survived a lifetime of her own struggles. I’ve never been to Estonia, but in my eyes Ülle Erika Lewes is the embodiment of her native land. Proud but not boastful, optimistic yet a realist, tough but easily wounded, loyal but at times distant, independent but willfully vulnerable, always prepared to fight for what she loves, and willing to love based on blind faith. She is like all the women I love. An inner beauty cast inside an outer toughness. A beating heart wrapped in warm steel. Open to all but truly welcoming only to a few.
Ülle was born in Tallinn, Estonia, during World War II, when the country was caught in the middle, with the Soviet Union pulling and bombing from one direction and Germany pulling and bombing from the other. Her earliest memories of childhood were running into the basement with her mother during aerial attacks by both sides. At the age of three, with her father off fighting the war, Ülle and her mother, grandmother, aunt, and a cousin escaped from Estonia on a barge. They eventually became refugees, first in Latvia, then Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and finally in Germany. It was there that she took her first bitter taste of discrimination. She went to school with German kids who hated the foreigners. Surrounded by prejudice, Ülle would pass by police checkpoints and soldiers every day going to and from school. The innocence of childhood and each new day were often interrupted by slurs and intimidation. Her tales of life in a distant world drew me closer to her. The difficulties she had to overcome put my own in a new perspective.
Eventually, in November 1951, Ülle and her family would immigrate to the United States, with the promise of a better life. Sponsored by the Lutheran church for the first six months, they settled in Roxbury, Massachusetts. But amid the promise of the New World was an old and familiar problem: prejudice. On the postwar streets of a Germany scarred in battle, people had hated the Estonian girl because she was foreign. In the racially segregated city of Boston, on the awkward side of the civil rights era, black kids hated the nine-year-old white girl, who did not look like them or sound like them.
When she first came to the United States, it was the same as it was in Germany, the mean looks and crazy questions. But Ülle found peace and comfort in her schoolbooks and in words. Eventually, her family moved to Buffalo, where she graduated valedictorian of her high school class and earned a full scholarship to Cornell. She was fluent in Estonian, Spanish, French, Latin, and German. Ülle’s first love was comparative literature. Soon the little girl from Estonia found her path. After graduate school at Harvard University and a brief time teaching at Temple University in Philadelphia, Dr. Ülle Lewes took a job in the English Department at Ohio Wesleyan University.
When I met her, Ülle was a full-figured woman, with thick, curly, reddish brown hair, round glasses, and a perpetual smile. Even on those days when her knees hurt or life did not treat her kindly, there was that smile tickling her eyes and stretching across her kind face, along her soft round shoulders down to the tips of her fingers. She was born to teach English. She taught it the way a good masseuse gives massages: with her entire body. During lectures she would actually extend her arms in the air, rub her fingers together like a sculptor rolling clay, as if the words were alive in her hands. That was Ülle, working to become one with the right word.
She started at OWU in the fall of 1978, the same as me. “I was a new-bee,” she said, describing those early days. And soon the “new-bee” from Estonia and the freshman from Baltimore would cross paths on a cold morning outside University Hall. Perhaps it was Ülle’s own encounters with disappointment or her feelings of being out of place that allowed her to notice me. Although Ülle has never considered herself a religious person, she acknowledges that some sort of spiritual guidance might have been at work.
At that first meeting in her office she made a commitment to help me. We planned to meet for two hours a week at first, and eventually it increased to three and then four hours. We would get together either in her office or in the Writing Resource Center set up across campus. In the early days, as I struggled with an English assignment, complaining and voicing doubt, she always reassured me. Ülle identified my two basic problems: not enough attention to (as she called them) stupid details; the other, a simple lack of structure. She began to work on my structure issues by organizing my life. Ülle never taught me a single class my freshman year, but she was the only professor I cared about pleasing. She set up something that resembled a shadow class to my scheduled English class. In one hour Professor Lucas would strip at my confidence like a craftsman stripping varnish off an old floor. I would go to Professor Lewes for a new coat of confidence. She rarely questioned the content of my work. She would patiently have me correct punctuation, grammar, and sentence structure. She insisted I pay attention to every detail. Secretly she would grade Dr. Lucas’s papers with her own grading scale. While Dr. Lucas was still giving me Ds and Fs, Ülle would grade the same assignment and give it As or Bs. Dr. Lucas measured the outcome, and there was simply a right or wrong, black or white. Ülle graded in the gray area. She measured effort, creativity, and the slightest improvement from the previous assignment.
“He graded you on surface areas like punctuation and sentence structure. It’s all important, of course. I graded you on rhetorical structure, development, and detail. Detail provides those vivid nuggets,” she said.
With the improvements I was making, by the end of the semester, Dr. Lucas would mark my papers with Bs and Cs and an occasional A. Dr. Lewes, on the other hand, had changed her standards, and suddenly she was giving Cs and Ds. She had helped break Dr. Lucas’s code, his standard. Now she was teaching me to set my own and continually move the bar higher.
“Never settle. Push! Push! Push harder.”
Ülle showed the sort of kindness, optimism, and concern I had seen in only a handful of people till this stage of my life. She and my mother were from completely different worlds, but they shared this relentless faith in me and in hard work. Both would flash their tempers, not at results but at lackluster effort. Both would use profanity to lecture but never once to scold. It is a characteristic they shared with my favorite athletic coaches. And Ülle seemed inexhaustible. We would often meet at the end of a day after she had taught several classes and met with several other students.
When you are in Ülle’s presence, you have her undivided attention. It was during one of those sessions that Ülle touched my hand and shouted, “Look at me! Someday you will write a book.” I was eighteen, on academic probation, and a breath away from flunking out of college. A book seemed beyond impossible.
The closer we became as professor and student, the more she sounded like Clarice. I do recall at least one F from Dr. Lewes. On at least one occasion, she did not like my effort.
“Don’t get lazy,” she snapped. It was as if she had cut me with a knife. Laziness was rarely my problem, but impatience often got the best of me in college and in the years that followed. Why am I still struggling? Why do I still comprehend things so slowly? Why can’t I read a chapter once and grasp its meaning? There were times I wanted to give up, not because I was lazy but rather because I was overwhelmed by impatience. The two-step forward one-step back dance often became tiresome. Ülle would always push me past those moments.
“Anyone who reads your work carefully can see you have a brilliant mind,” Ülle said. “You have to make them see it and I will help you.” Instructive and encouraging. That was her style. Over many years and a few meals, we have discussed Dr. Lucas. What could she see that he could not? “I don’t know,” she would answer modestly.
To his credit, Dr. Lucas had a wonderful reputation for working with and inspiring honor students. In fact, he was one of the leading advocates for raising the academic standards at Ohio Wesleyan. Standards quite frankly that would have kept me from ever being admitted to OWU. I am sure there are countless OWU grads who can attest to his brilliance and care. That is not my testimony or that of at least two other OWU graduates I’ve met over the years. Twice while giving speeches around the country, where I told the story of my experience at Ohio Wesleyan and without mentioning his name, a person in the audience would walk up to me afterward, shake my hand, and ask, “Were you talking about Dr. Lucas?” I guess I wasn’t alone. We would exchange notes and quickly come to the conclusion that the experience only made us stronger. Perhaps it just serves to illustrate that even in a place as small as Ohio Wesleyan, there are the right people and the wrong people placed in a person’s path. You must survive one and cling to the other. I was in Dr. Lucas’s class, but I was never one of his students. That first year I was not in a single one of Ülle’s classes, but I was most certainly one of her students.
As often as she would allow it, I would eat my lunch in Dr. Lewes’s office. Sometimes she was there. Sometimes she wasn’t. Her office had become my second home. There were even times I would sit outside her classroom and do my homework. Even her encouraging words aimed at other students would lift my spirits.
Ülle and my mother first met by phone and hit it off instantly, although there was some adjustment required in the beginning because college professors are not used to being treated like daycare providers. Clarice has always taken great pride in keeping tabs on her children. She has called teachers, professors, and a few news directors whenever she has seen fit. One of the few who never seemed to mind was Ülle. “Once your mother called me and asked, ‘How is my boy doing? Is he getting an A?’ I said no, but if he works hard he may get an A-,” recalled Ülle. “She really wanted to understand. I liked Clarice right from the start. She wasn’t pushing me—she wanted to understand. Her tone was, I want to understand what’s going on. I could sense her heart,” Ülle said of my mother.
Two women from different worlds who endured different hardships and whose paths intersected. There have been countless strong women in my life: my mother, sister, grandmother, aunts, and my wife. I revere Ülle Lewes as much as I do any of them. Others have been bonded to me by blood or marriage, but Ülle just showed up one day and never left. Because of her, I believe in angels.
While some students found Dr. Lewes’s style odd, pushy, and invasive, she did teach one course that was a particular favorite. Advanced English Composition. It was a class in which profanity was encouraged. Early in the semester Dr. Lewes would have us close our textbooks, and she would ask us to scream. Then scream and curse. Initially, students were reluctant and shy. Eventually, they would embrace the concept. Before long, she would have to temper their enthusiasm.
“I want to break you down,” is how Dr. Lewes described it. “It takes half the semester to break students down. They’re so stiff and proper, they’re not writing authentically. Just writing school shit and not writing real shit. There is absolutely nothing worse than school talk. Almost all the talk we talk is fake talk. There is nothing wrong with curse words. They’re only words. I want my students to write authentically. You can decide if it’s [profanity] not proper for the audience and change, but first it must be raw.”
I remember the experience. It was both frightening and fun. I had never, not once, cursed intentionally in front of an adult. Dr. Lewes always seemed to value effort and authenticity; perhaps that’s why she questioned my occasional speech pattern. Thus far, I stuttered only when I was nervous, angry, or tired. I was never any of that around Dr. Lewes, but occasionally my enthusiasm would get the best of me, and I’d stutter, if only just a bit.
“I thought you were faking some odd British accent or something,” Ülle would say many years later.
I believe God equips us all with different gifts and just a select number of them. Ülle Lewes’s command of the written word would help shape and change my life. For stuttering, I had to go elsewhere. Fortunately for me, help with stuttering was actually in the next building. If Dr. Lewes was all things kind and encouraging, Dr. Ed Robinson was all things cranky and gruff. He was a professor in the understaffed, less-than-glamorous department of speech communications at Ohio Wesleyan. Simply put, it was a department few people on campus seemed to take seriously at the time. Dr. Robinson was a bear of a man. A few inches over six feet tall and with a thick Midwestern build, he was more old lion than cuddly teddy bear. His voice was just as loud and scratchy as the Harley-Davidson motorcycle he rode to campus. At a university where some professors rode bicycles, walked, or drove fuel-efficient cars, the sight of Dr. Robinson riding his Harley was often greeted with a turned-up nose or rolling of the eyes. Oddly enough, he always seemed to have a soft spot for the inner-city kid who, like him, didn’t seem to fit in at this small liberal arts college in Ohio.
“I like you, Pitts,” he’d say. “You’re a tough kid.”
Dr. Robinson noticed my problem with stuttering one day when he asked each student to declare what they wanted to do for a career after college. Many of my classmates were children of privilege or came from stable middle-class families. Their career plans seemed consistent with their upbringing. Some answered with ease and conviction. “I will be a teacher. . . . A lawyer. . . . I will work in my dad’s company. . . .” When it was my turn, I said, “I want to be a jour . . . jour . . . jour . . . journalist.” I could hear the whispered laughter around me. With a stone cold stare, Dr. Robinson looked at me and said, “See me after class.”
Expecting harsh advice from yet another unyielding professor, I braced myself for Dr. Robinson’s comments. “How long have you stuttered?” he asked.
“Sir?” I answered.
“You heard me—how long have you stuttered?” Dr. Robinson wasn’t into pleasantries or repeating himself. “I think I can help you.” That’s all he ever said. It was a quick glimpse of kindness he would never betray again. I wish now that I had been looking directly in his eyes because perhaps they would have revealed more. Except for those six words “I think I can help you,” I had all but missed a precious moment with a man who had joined the list of those who would change my life.
For the next year or so, Dr. Robinson, with the help of a colleague of his from Ohio State, worked with me patiently. He would force me to sit in a booth at the radio station for thirty minutes at a time and record my voice. The recording was easy. Speaking with pencils in my mouth was the challenge. There was no money in his budget to teach speech pathology, and I did not have the money or the means to drive to Ohio State University in Columbus, which had the resources I needed. So, with Dr. Robinson’s help, we improvised. He would have me read Shakespeare or the sports page forward and backward. He insisted I take a theater course called The Actor’s Voice. He also encouraged me to take on a hosting job at the radio station. Odd choice for a stutterer, but he believed in confronting the problem. And it worked. I never stuttered on the air. I used a technique of singing my sentences. It helped me transition between the words without taking a breath. I likened it to church, where the minister sometimes sings the words in a sermon. I did the same thing with my scripts. (It was a habit I had to break years later as a professional journalist.)
“You gotta keep working, keep practicing,” he insisted. “You can lick this if you work at it,” he’d say more as an order than as words of encouragement. I would often greet his directives with a smile. If I closed my eyes, ignored the smell of his cologne and the scratchy bass in his voice, he too sounded like my mother. Often my smile would turn into a brief and quiet laugh.
“Concentrate! Slow down! Breathe!” That was as detailed as his coaching ever was. I suspect he had little or no training as a speech pathologist. In the same way, he was not a trained motorcycle mechanic, but he tinkered and cursed over his Harley-Davidson and kept it on the road. Much the same way, he kept me on the path God was paving for me. Through the years I have talked with skilled speech pathologists who talk about the dark ages of working with people who stutter. Many of the things Dr. Robinson had me do were long ago cast aside as outdated. Today, there are a number of institutions across the country that work faithfully and skillfully with people of all ages who stutter. There are even associations for people who stutter. I have done a few news stories on stuttering but have never sought specialized training. I could certainly still use it. There are words with which I still struggle. Phrases I avoid. It has forced me, as best I can, to think before I speak. It has left me vulnerable in verbal confrontations. But the practice of pausing and gathering my thoughts before speaking has served me well as a journalist.
Life is always about choices. The choices we make for ourselves and the choices people make for us. Dr. Robinson and I lost contact. He left Ohio Wesleyan not long after I graduated. Some people saw him as bitter and outdated. His old school ways and unpolished manner suited me perfectly. I believe we are all instruments of God. There aren’t many uses in life for an old rusty hacksaw, except when only an old rusty hacksaw will do.
Dr. Lewes and I continued our tutoring sessions for well over a year, but by the end of my sophomore year, most of my visits to Dr. Lewes’s office were more social than academic. I’d go by her office for lunch, and we would shoot the breeze, sometimes talking about her life and not my academics at all. By now she was becoming my friend. She had helped me unlock Dr. Lucas’s system, and she’d taught me to do two things that applied to every class: meet the instructor’s expectations and do my best. Before college, my teachers and tutors and counselors had always come to my level to figure out my problems. What Ülle taught me was that now I had to meet the professors at their level. I had to learn to interpret what each professor needed and to deliver it, not always plead with them to help me understand or give it to me in smaller bits so I could digest it.
I began to select classes based not just on the credits I needed but on professors to whose style I could adapt. I even avoided the professors who had a reputation for easier courses because I recognized the need to challenge myself in as broad a way as possible. I had a philosophy professor my sophomore and junior years who loved his students to be engaged in class, challenging him in the discussion. So I would prepare for his class by having mock discussions in my dorm room, sometimes alone, sometimes with Pete. Spelling was a challenge, too. In the journalism department, one professor would give a red F for misspelling someone’s name, lowering your grade by a full letter. Two red Fs and you could easily fail the class. Before Ülle, that kind of standard would have intimidated me, but after Ülle’s counsel, I embraced it. Once I understood his standard, I worked harder to achieve it. Steadily my grades in all my classes began to improve.
With an unbreakable bond and affection, Dr. Ülle Lewes quickly became a permanent part of my family. She wept with my mother at my graduation and years later attended my wedding as a member of my family. The weekend my wife and I got married we threw two parties: a reception for family and friends and a luncheon for just family. Ülle showed up at both. My aunts and uncles loved her light Estonian accent. After the wedding, she danced and laughed with my mother and grandmother. Ülle Lewes taught me English in college, but she taught and still teaches me so much more. Perhaps more than an English professor, she is a life coach. I asked her once about her teaching philosophy, and after a long silence she said, “Challenge them [students] to be better than they think they can be.”
Leaving the nurturing tutelage of Ülle at Ohio Wesleyan reminded me of what it felt like to break that childhood connection to my mother. Clarice had molded me and guided me, been there to fight my battles and level her expectations. I still carried a lot of baggage, emotional and otherwise, but we had gotten me this far by faith. But now I was heading into adulthood. Clearly not ready to stand all alone, I would need the counsel and support and mentorship of countless friends and colleagues. Many of them shared those characteristics of passion, toughness, and commitment that my mother and Ülle had. They all would have a pivotal role in shaping my future. But I was no longer simply a student of those around me; it was time to venture out. Apply the lessons learned. Fall and get up again on my own. Though fear and anger were still vital, a spiritual strength and optimism were growing inside me.