What's That Pig Outdoors? (6 page)

My world broadened. Before becoming deaf I had understood, even as a toddler, that the country where I lived was fighting a faraway place called Japan, where people looked different from us. And I had understood that Dad wore a blue uniform because he was helping fight the yellow-skinned, squinty-eyed, buck-toothed caricatures I saw in propaganda posters everywhere on Navy bases. Otherwise I was in a soundless limbo about the rest of the world. Only after I had acquired enough language to uncover the facts through lipreading and print did I learn about Hitler and the Nazis. One of my earliest and most vivid memories is of a sunny spring day in 1945. While playing in a horse trough on my
grandparents' farm in Pennsylvania, I looked up to see Mother dashing down the hill from the farmhouse, tears of joy streaming down her face. “The Germans are finished!” she cried. “The Germans are finished!” I was rooted to the spot, for even as a four-and-a-half-year-old I knew exactly what Mother's words meant: the fighting in the Pacific would be over soon, too, and Dad would come home.

That fall, Mother drove me to the local public school in Ho-Ho-Kus to enroll me in kindergarten. I was eager to join my hearing playmates, but would the teachers accept me? I knew and cared nothing about such matters as I dashed gaily into the large kindergarten room. Two of my friends, off in a corner, beckoned me over to help them build a house of blocks.

Earlier, Mother had taken me to meet the principal. I had an advantage, Mother recalls, in that the principal and his teachers knew little or nothing about the deaf. In that small public school there was no teacher of the deaf; indeed, there were no other deaf pupils in the community. “Nobody had any preconceived ideas what deaf children could do or could not do,” Mother says. “We all expected you to do almost everything.”

My being able to read his lips and talk with him was important enough, but what evidently persuaded the principal to take a risk on an unknown deaf child was my ability to read. Today, thanks to
Sesame Street
and parental ambition, reading is a commonplace achievement tor preschoolers. But in the 1940s it was still a rare accomplishment. I was reading far ahead of my age group, so much so that Mother thinks I was better known in the community as the five-year-old who could read than as the town's only deaf child. The principal, visibly impressed, told Mother that though the school had never had a deaf pupil, he was most willing to give me a try on a year-by-year basis. There was no argument from the teachers either, for the same reason.

The Mirrielees Method had done its work well. Not only had it enabled me to catch up to my contemporaries in the ability to use language, it even had given me a head start.

Just once, when l was six or seven years old, did I stand in Miss Mirrielees' presence. Little memory remains of the brief encounter: just a foggy image of a tall, thin, benevolent wraith in bobby sox and white
tennis shoes, the whole topped with a bun of gray hair. She had been traveling, and had stopped in at our home in Ho-Ho-Kus to see how her pupil-once-removed was faring.

I was not the only deaf child who benefited from the Mirrielees Method. As far as I have been able to determine, her teachings set more than a score of deaf children on the road to successful and fulfilling lives among the hearing. Why, you may ask, was the Mirrielees Method not widely accepted by the deaf educational establishment of the time? The answer is complex. For one thing, she dealt in heresies. She promoted the renegade notion that parents could teach their deaf children not only to read but also to speak and read lips. Moreover, she was far ahead of her time in contending that very young children could learn to read. (Only recently have researchers confirmed that infants as young as fourteen months of age can indeed distinguish among shapes of letters and words and understand their meaning.) Perhaps worst of all, she possessed few professional credentials. She had earned no college degree and offered no mountains of research data to support her contentions. All she could muster was anecdotal evidence about the successful lives of a few deaf children.

In her memoir (in which she refers to herself as “the Teacher”), she tells how “the grandmother of a youngster whose mother had been a correspondence pupil of the Teacher took the child to visit the [Bell Association] headquarters' offices [in Washington, D.C.]. The child already, following his pre-school home training, had been successfully entered in public school. Much admiration was expressed by the incumbents of the Authorities' office for the child's accomplishments. Then came the inevitable question, ‘And where did he go to school?' When the answer disclosed that his mother had been his pre-school teacher with the help of the Teacher's correspondence course, the interview was ended on a strong note of disapproval.”

Most likely I was that child. My maternal grandmother, who supported Mother wholeheartedly in her use of the Mirrielees Method, lived in Washington, and I often stayed with her and my grandfather in the summers. I dimly recall having visited the Bell headquarters with my grandmother, though of course I would have been unaware of any disapproval. Nonetheless, many years later in the 1970s when I was a successful journalist, I got a taste of it. In Washington on business, I dropped by the Bell Association
and met its president. When he asked how I had been taught speech and lipreading, my answer brought forth an expression of surprise, consternation, and skepticism.

“But you are
adventitiously
deaf,” he said. “That must have made all the difference.”

Possibly having learned language before becoming deaf did mean a great deal to my later success with speech and lipreading. But I have no residual hearing, another factor frequently cited as being largely responsible for whatever oral success a deaf child might have. Neither, for the most part, do most of the former Mirrielees Method graduates I have been able to locate in recent years. There was, we are all certain, considerable merit to Miss Mirrielees' theories.

In the course of researching this book I not only met Ann Percy, the daughter of the novelist Walker Percy and herself a Louisiana State University graduate and successful bookstore proprietor, but also corresponded with Lamar Cason, a former Mirrielees pupil who is currently a chemist in Tennessee. He married Helen Estus, yet another successful Mirrielees product. The Casons are both deaf, as is Ann Percy, and they give much credit to the Mirrielees Method for the successful rearing of their own deaf children. While Ann has remained a champion of oralism, however, the Casons long ago added sign language to their repertoire. Sign was a method of communication of which Miss Mirrielees, who was in many ways a product of her oralist times, disapproved highly.

Yet the teaching of sign and the Mirrielees Method have a great deal in common. Though their vehicles could not be more different, their aims are nonetheless identical: to give deaf children the priceless diamond of language at the earliest possible moment. I can't speak for others, but I believe that the Mirrielees Method not only gave me a good chance at a normal life among the hearing but also laid the groundwork for my profession as a journalist. It gave me a deep love of language for its own sake.

Perhaps a researcher someday will discover a set of Miss Mirrielees' dusty old mimeographed manuals, study their ideas, and put them to the test in a rigorous academic setting—the test she always sought but never could obtain for her work. It's hard to dispute the idea that American Sign Language most likely is the quicker and easier way to communicate for
those born deaf or those who are deafened before acquiring language. But those who advocate “signed English” over the more “natural” American Sign Language might find a valuable adjunct to their philosophy in the Mirrielees Method.

And for certain fortunate children—luckier in their home situation and perhaps in their native intelligence than others—the learning of printed and spoken English as their first natural language might give them an important advantage: an early mastery of the primary tongue of the hearing world.

4

From ages five to thirteen—that lovely, unhurried span between innocence and adolescence when time and growth almost stand still—my life was for the most part no different from that of an ordinary American youngster. So little happened in my childhood that did not also occur in those of my hearing contemporaries that, to all intents and purposes, I was just another kid on the block. That was my impression then and it is my impression now.

As I remember it, my childhood was the kind of American sentimentality Norman Rockwell painted in
The Saturday Evening Post:
idylls of dogs and barbershops, skinned knees and bloody noses, baseball in the spring and football in the fall, Thanksgivings with turkey and Christmases with ham. I made friends and skylarked and fought with them. One day we swore blood oaths of mutual support and the next declared our perpetual enmity. The following week, of course, the grand alliances were restored.

One hot summer day, in classic six-year-old entrepreneurial fashion a friend and I set up a lemonade stand on the parkway in front of my house and did a modest business with the few passersby. Suddenly more customers than we could handle dropped in on us in the form of the entire local volunteer fire department, returning from a brush blaze nearby. The mayor was also the fire chief, and after he and his men drained our few jugs, he munificently pressed a five-dollar bill into my hand—more money than I had ever seen in my life.

That winter I scared the bejesus out of Mother and Dad when, sledding down the long steep hill that ran by our house, I somehow flipped over in a rut and zoomed upside down into the curb behind a parked
car, my Flexible Flyer emerging riderless from under the front bumper just like a Laurel and Hardy movie gag. Dad immediately took me to the family physician, Dr. Tomkins, a tall, graying, mustachioed general practitioner who strikingly resembled Boris Karloff and carried himself with the same solemn, almost funereal gravity. The doctor assayed the damage, pronounced it a mild concussion, and told me from now on to watch where I was going. Later on Dr. Tomkins would not only lance an abscess in my ear but also yank my tonsils and adenoids, a common if wholly unnecessary procedure that ought to have cemented the solidarity of the entire generation who had to suffer it. He had thought the surgery might improve my hearing, but his efforts were to no avail.

And, as do seven-year-olds everywhere, I fell in love with my secondgrade teacher, mooning dreamily over her lush, dimpled blondness every time she passed my desk, my heart leaping when she tousled my hair. She was a ringer for Jane Powell, a dewy-eyed film star of the 1940s. I was very put out that summer vacation arrived and school was out before she realized that she, too, was crazy about me.

My childhood was so stereotypically “normal” because my parents planned it that way: they wanted me to be just like any other American child of my time and place. This was “mainstreaming” before anyone had conceived the term.

Chance and location also had a good deal to do with the success of my mainstreaming. The open-minded little community of Ho-Ho-Kus was partly a small town and partly a bedroom suburb of New York City, almost entirely middle-class and full of young war veterans beginning their families. We were all white, mostly Protestant but with a smattering of Jews and Catholics, and upwardly mobile. I think that to most of the good citizens of that community, a deaf child was simply a mildly interesting phenomenon, to be remarked upon approvingly but forgotten so long as the child's welfare seemed in competent hands.