by Henry Kisor
He would offer advice and counsel only when asked, and only if he thought it was necessary. When I confronted him with a problem, most often he would suggest that I try to solve it myself. For instance, I might not have understood all of a teacher’s instructions on an assignment. To save a little time (and a potentially uncomfortable confrontation—in my misdirected pride I loathed the idea that my teachers might know I could not lipread every last word they said), I might ask Mr. Epler to call the teacher and get the details. He would gently suggest that if determining such academic details was a hearing student’s responsibility, why couldn’t it be mine as well? He seemed to believe, like Mother, that in the end only I could discover my limits, and in his subtle way he encouraged me to expand them as much as I could. I owe him a great deal.
In no manner was I a brilliant student. Throughout my high school career I earned respectable grades, mostly B’s but with the occasional A and a few C’s, chiefly in algebra and physics. This was in the laid-back 1950s, remember, when a decent C-plus high school average could get you into a respectable college provided your Scholastic Aptitude Test scores were satisfactory. I was no slacker, but neither was I a humorless grind. There was just too much else to do. I was still active at the Y, and competitive swimming was a serious sport at Evanston High.
During my freshman year I was a starting freestyle sprinter and relay swimmer of decent speed, not a star but a dependable point earner. To my astonishment—and that of my teammates—I managed to win the eight-school Suburban League freshman 50-yard freestyle championship of 1954, in one of the slowest winning times ever recorded for that event. As a sophomore, I swam the third leg on the four-man varsity freestyle relay that finished third in the Illinois state meet, enabling Evanston High to win the team championship by a single point. That was the apex of my swimming career.
I had been a fast-developing physical specimen at thirteen and fourteen, but by fifteen my growth had topped out at a bit more than five feet six inches, and as we turned sixteen my taller and rangier teammates were taking the medals while I rode the bench as a second stringer. They deserved to win; they trained a good deal harder than I did. Though swimming had been good to me, I had neither ambitions for stardom nor the physical equipment required for it. For years the sport had allowed me to compete with hearing athletes as an equal. Now it was time for me to do something else.
And that something was journalism. In freshman and sophomore English I showed a talent for writing, thanks to all that reading I had done as a child, and perhaps to heredity as well. My father, who was a businessman, not a trained professional writer, nevertheless had a talent for writing clear and lively prose, and if such a thing can be handed down through the genes, he passed it on to me. My sophomore English teacher, who apparently had never heard that the verbal skills of deaf students are supposed to be deficient, suggested to the journalism teacher that I might make a good candidate for her course as a junior. Though I had no idea what journalism entailed—the notion brought to mind a vague mental picture of a grizzled newspaperman in a fedora, dribbling cigarette ashes on his typewriter while barking commands into a telephone—I accepted her invitation to take the course. It was the best decision I had made in my young life.
Journalism, I learned quickly, did not involve merely the gathering of news by talking to people in person and on the telephone. For a deaf reporter the former was possible, though not very easy, but the latter was clearly impossible. Journalism, however, also involved a good deal of desk work. As a rewrite editor I found I had a definite knack for the shape of a story, for reducing it to its “who-what-where-when-why-how” components and reassembling these facts in the most efficient and pleasing manner. Once the stories were done, the next task was to assemble them, together with photographs, on the page, and then write a headline for each. For these things I also had a flair, and I also got along well with my fellow editors-in-training. At the end of the year I was appointed managing editor, or second-in-command, of the school paper.
As I grew older, sooner or later I would learn that conventional lay attitudes about deafness could severely—and unfairly—limit my horizons. The first occasion arose when at the end of my junior year I sought a summer job as a swimming pool lifeguard, and the experience was shattering.
Traditionally, Evanston High swimmers worked as lifeguards at country clubs so that they could train in the pools during their off hours. At the Y, I had earned all the qualifications: the Red Cross lifesaving and water safety instructor certificates. As a junior leader and swimming teacher I’d spent many hours sharing lifeguarding tasks around the Y pool. No one had ever suggested that deafness might be a hindrance to such a responsibility.
That spring, after the competition season, I asked Mr. Sugden, the Evanston High diving coach, for a guard’s job the following summer at Sunset Ridge Country Club, where he ran the pool when school was out. “Sure thing,” he said. “I’ll set it up and get back to you.” April arrived, then May, but I still did not hear from him. As June came closer I began to wonder why, and decided to seek out Mr. Sugden in his office to see if anything was wrong. Before I could do so, my parents, while attending a conference at the school, ran into the coach outside his office. “Henry’s looking forward to his job with you this summer,” Dad said.
Mr. Sugden looked at the floor in embarrassment. “I’ve wanted to tell him this,” he said slowly, “but I can’t figure out how to do it. You see, the club’s board of directors won’t let me hire him. They don’t want a deaf lifeguard. They’re worried about the lives of their children.”
When my parents broke the news to me that evening, I was devastated. Nothing in my young life had prepared me for the rejections that were bound to come—especially arbitrary ones made in boardrooms by people I had never met, people who had never seen my capabilities, people who knew nothing about the deaf.
The notion of a deaf lifeguard is not as farfetched as it might seem. Bathers in trouble rarely, if ever, cry for help. They can’t. They’re choking on water and can’t get out a sound. They either thrash madly or disappear quietly under the surface. That’s why lifeguards are trained to scan the surface with their eyes. They’re not listening for cries of “Help!” but watching for abnormal behavior in the water. When actual rescues aren’t being conducted, lifeguarding is almost entirely a visual task.
As a group, I would later learn, the deaf are measurably superior to the hearing in the discernment of visual cues and the speed of responses to them. There’s nothing superhuman about this phenomenon. The loss of a sense forces the remaining ones to compensate, to stretch and exercise their capabilities beyond conventional thresholds. The average deaf person has the peripheral vision of a fish-eye lens, almost 180 degrees, and spots the tiniest movement within this range long before the average hearing person can do so.
In practical terms this superior visual acuity has led some automobile insurance companies in recent years to give sizable rate discounts to deaf drivers. Because the deaf are more visually alert behind the wheel than the hearing, we tend on the average to have fewer accidents, and thus are better insurance risks.
Many years later I laid this argument before an old childhood friend who had spent summers in college and afterward as chief of lifeguards at a string of beaches on Lake Michigan. He had known my capabilities at age sixteen, and he agreed with me, though he was careful to point out that a lifeguard’s deafness could be a liability on a large lakefront beach during a complex rescue operation involving several lifeguards and a series of barked commands. That would, however, be irrelevant at a small swimming pool watched over by one or two lifeguards.
Of course, none of these arguments were available to me at the time, and even if they had been, nobody in a remote country-club boardroom was going to listen to the wild imaginings of a sixteen-year-old boy. Fortunately the staff at the Evanston Y had a different viewpoint, and the hurt soon healed.
For several years the staff at the Y had watched me
grow. I’d spent all my summers at Camp Echo, first as a camper and then as a “counselor-in-training” and as a member of the kitchen crew. It was not difficult to perform those responsibilities, and as Sam Williamson and my other classmates applied for jobs as full counselors, so did I. It never occurred to me that my deafness might prove a problem.
I don’t know precisely how the Y officials felt about my lack of hearing, but like the school authorities, they seemed open-minded enough to allow me to try one step at a time, and if I negotiated it successfully, to go on to the next. For four summers, beginning in 1957, I played barracks sergeant to a dozen thirteen-and fourteen-year-old-hearing boys. I was, I think, as adept as any other counselor, and the problems I had seemed no different from anyone else’s.
The only limitation the camp director imposed on me as a staff member was to excuse me from lifeguarding duties. “I know you can do the job,” he said, “but if our insurance agent visited camp and found a deaf guy being a lifeguard, what’s he going to think? He doesn’t know you. He doesn’t have time to be convinced; He’s going to raise our rates through the roof.”
It was easier for me to accept that pragmatic decision because I had another waterfront responsibility that was just as heavy: while other counselors stood lifeguard duty at the swimming area, I ran the water-skiing program outside it. Much of the time I’d drive the tow boat, instructing skiers with hand signals. Sometimes I’d stand in the water by the dock, helping novices learn the complex and unfamiliar skill of getting up on skis. Either way, I was responsible for their safety. Nobody thought my deafness a liability on the lake outside the boundaries of the swimming area. Maybe the noise of the tow boat’s outboard motor made hearing an academic issue. In any case, I never felt that anyone patronized my abilities.
Except for me. My long-simmering fear of speaking in public led me, that first summer as a counselor, to hobble myself needlessly. It happened when another counselor, a quiet and popular fellow of college age who suffered from a terrible stammer, froze one morning while trying to deliver the brief chapel homily with which the camp began its day. Nakedly, agonizingly, he stood before some 150 campers and counselors, the sweat bursting from his brow, trying to get out the first word. Minutes passed. He tried, and tried again, his face flushing with humiliation. Finally an older counselor stood up, squeezed his arm in commiseration, spoke a few words, and quietly dismissed the assembly.
A few of the younger campers may have snickered, but most of us sat in silent sympathy. We liked Pat, and we didn’t know what to do. I suffered with him. I knew what was going through his mind. When he disappeared that night, abandoning his job to wrestle with his devils, I wasn’t surprised. That could have been me up there, I thought. Maybe I would have frozen, too. The next day I stopped the director and told him that what had happened to Pat might happen to me, too. Could he excuse me from giving chapel and speaking before assemblies?
He did. That may not have been the wise thing to do. Maybe he should have insisted, “No, Hank. You can do it, and I don’t want to hear any more of that nonsense.” Just the same, there was nobody to blame but myself. I was responsible for my own actions.
Later in the summer, however, the director made an astute decision on the only other occasion at Camp Echo I can remember in which my deafness became an issue. The parents of one of my campers had heard that the young man charged with their son’s care was deaf. They demanded that their boy be moved to another cabin under a more capable counselor, one who could hear. The director quietly reassigned the child without telling me why. Cabin reassignments weren’t uncommon, but not for years did I learn the reason for that one. The director knew that a youth who was just turning seventeen was not mature enough to handle with equanimity that sort of ignorant thoughtlessness on the part of someone he had never met.
I was growing mature enough, however, for some new experiences. At siesta time one August afternoon, an older counselor pressed a well-thumbed paperback into my reluctant hands. “Give it a try,” he insisted.
The book was The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, of whom I had only vaguely heard. To me, an indifferent schoolboy, the cover did not look promising. Depression? Dust bowl? Tenant farmers? Okies? Old stuff long forgotten. Who cares?
Within an hour I was electrified. Almost all night I sat up with a flashlight in the darkened cabin, my charges sleeping quietly while I read of the trials of Steinbeck’s Joad family. The Grapes of Wrath opened my young eyes to many things. For the first time I learned of my country’s appalling history of labor exploitation and the blinkered refusal of its economic royalists to appreciate the misery of the dispossessed. The novel’s graphic depiction of human dignity in the face of adversity showed me, a white-bread middle-class Midwestern suburbanite of the Eisenhower Age, that the poor and unlettered were capable of astonishing heroism, and that it could be celebrated in epic fashion.
For the rest of that summer I devoured as much Steinbeck as I could get my hands on. One by one I read his other fine novels of the 1950s— Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, and Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck became my new hero, replacing Joe DiMaggio. For the first time the urgency of literature had struck me.
Expanding on this discovery, however, had to wait. When September rolled around and school resumed, I was suddenly and to my considerable surprise a prominent member of the senior class, one whispered about by goggle-eyed freshmen and envious sophomores as I passed them in the hall. But I was no longer the “deaf kid,” as I had imagined my schoolmates had condescendingly classified me. I was the managing editor of the school paper, a true celebrity. Not necessarily because of any cogent wisdom or witty repartee in my columns, but because of one of the perks of the job. I was one of a handful of students who held a coveted “open pass” that allowed me to leave the campus at any time during my lunch and study periods, presumably on official school business, but sometimes just to enjoy a cigarette. In those days student smoking was strictly forbidden, with frequent detentions for those caught stealing a puff on school property. Most tobacco addicts had to suffer without a fix from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon. Often, however, pretending to be off checking proofs at the printer’s or interviewing a prominent downtown merchant, I’d drive around the block furiously inhaling a Lucky Strike, then return in plenty of time for the next class. (Not for nineteen years would I succeed in kicking the habit.)
Naturally this new prominence did wonders for my maturing ego, and I was as comfortable as any fellow senior, airily treating underclassmen with benign contempt. Why, I even spoke up in class on occasion, though I still hated and dreaded delivering any sort of formal address, and was an expert at ducking that responsibility. I had also begun to outgrow my pimply awkwardness with girls and had started dating regularly, though not as earnestly as some other seniors. Like most of the men in my family, I was a late bloomer in my relations with the opposite sex. Not until well into my college career would I enjoy my first grand passion. Nonetheless, I moved easily among a variety of social circles, although I lacked the smooth, polished manner of the truly self-assured. I even had a splendid time at the senior prom—a highly charged event that often tested the social and emotional mettle of youths in the 1950s.
On graduation day I ranked a respectable 90th in a class of 591 students. The nightmares of eighth grade seemed far in the distance.
6
Like every college freshman of any era, I had an enormous adjustment to make when I arrived at Trinity College. No longer was I a member of the elite, a standout in the crowd. As high school seniors, the three hundred members of the new Class of 1962 at this distinguished “little Ivy” men’s college in Hartford, Connecticut, had been proud cocks of the walk. Now we all were hatchlings again, scratching nervously for our places in a strange new barnyard.
Half were public high school graduates, the other half products of Eastern prep schools. Many of us “publics” harbored vague feelings of social and intellectual inferiority toward the
wealthy men’s sons who wore the old school ties of Choate, Exeter, and Andover. How could we possibly compete with these blond young Apollos who drove Jaguars, quoted Cicero, dated Muffys from Smith and Graemes from Holyoke, and looked forward to instant vice presidencies in the family firms? So overwhelming a challenge did that seem that it never occurred to me to worry about making the grade as a deaf student at a hearing college.
I had chosen Trinity for three reasons: because it was small and intimate, with an excellent student-professor ratio; because it had awarded me a partial scholarship, which I badly needed; and because Buck had made a bold mark there. The previous June he had graduated in a gust of glory, with honors in economics and a Phi Beta Kappa key. Moreover, he was a member of Medusa, the elite palace guard of nine seniors—the highest honor a Trinity undergraduate could achieve. He had also won a Woodrow Wilson fellowship for postgraduate study at Northwestern.
But I was not fretting about living up to that example. Luckily I had never suffered from the second-son complex. Certainly I’d followed in Buck’s large footsteps down many trails, but instead of resenting the inevitable comparisons other people made between us, I welcomed them. I felt that his success had established a family tradition, that people would measure my performance not as a deaf student but as a Kisor, and that their expectations therefore would be high. I was proud to be Buck’s little brother and grateful for his achievements.