by Henry Kisor
But like big-city evening newspapers everywhere in America, it was losing circulation, owing to the inroads of the 5 p.m. television news and the difficulties of trucking newspapers from the presses to the suburbs on crowded daytime expressways. The moment I sat down for the first time on the rim of the Daily News copy desk in May 1965, a white-haired veteran peered from under his green eyeshade, shook my hand gravely, and said, “You’re making a mistake, kid. This paper is about to fold.” A dozen years would pass before his forecast came true, and they would be among the best of my life.
8
Almost as soon as I set up housekeeping in my new apartment in a highrise building on Chicago’s Near North Side, I obtained a hearing-ear cat. Well, sort of.
Fred was a large yellow tom of vague ancestry. I didn’t acquire him expressly as a guide cat; felines are too independent, arrogant, and ornery to be educated about such things. He just arrived one day, an ineffably cute stray kitten, the gift of someone on a floor below who had found him wandering the plaza in front of our building. But Fred had his moments.
Whenever anyone knocked on the door of my efficiency apartment, he’d sit up straight and stare at the door. A second knock and he’d run to the door as if expecting the friendly fishmonger. I’d spot his movements and open the door myself. This worked about 90 percent of the time, so long as I was awake.
At other times Fred could be a hazard. One evening as I slept, he padded in the dark atop the bookcase next to my bed and knocked over my alarm clock. The clock, a popular hardware-store item sold to people who hated noisy alarms, featured a lamp that flashed on and off repeatedly for a minute or two before triggering an audible alarm. It fell on its back, pressing in the plunger that stilled both alarms. As a result, I was two hours late at the Daily News, where I worked the midnight-to-8 a.m. shift.
Fred was by no means stupid. While still a kitten he learned that when I was asleep, yowling for his dinner fell on deaf ears, and that only when my eyes were open could he expect me to open the pantry door, too. So he’d roust me out by sitting on my chest and sandpapering my eyelids with his tongue. That is hardly a pleasant way to awaken.
Worse—for him—he seemed to think all humans were deaf, just as I thought, when I was a toddler, that everybody read lips. While still a stripling Fred tried the eyelid-grinding gambit on Craig, a Harvard Law School student who briefly shared my apartment that first summer. Craig awoke with a pained cry and with a reflexive sweep of his hand rocketed Fred across the bed and into the wall. The thump addled Fred’s personality, and for the rest of his short life he behaved in unpredictable and neurotic ways.
These days hearing-ear dogs for the deaf are common. Though of course I can’t take credit for it, perhaps I was the first to conceive of the idea. Shortly after dawn one brisk spring Sunday when I was in my late teens, I had driven the family collie to the public beach in neighboring Wilmette for a run. I’d thought that no policeman would be around at that early hour to enforce the “No Dogs” sign at the entry to the park.
But no. Within ten minutes a prowl car had parked and an elderly cop trudged through the sand to the water’s edge where the boy and his dog sat, the picture of innocent togetherness. “Didn’t you see that sign, sonny?” he growled, unholstering his ticket book. He had the drop on me. “Yes, Officer,” I said, thinking fast, “but you see, I’m deaf, and my dog is a hearing-ear dog. You know, like a seeing-eye dog for blind people.”
The policeman gazed at the collie, which by now had trotted a hundred yards up the beach and was sniffing happily at a dead fish, oblivious to the world. Lifting one eyebrow in disdain, the policeman said, “Your driver’s license, please.”
Clearly the hearing-ear dog was an idea whose time had not yet come, and the fine was five dollars.
But now the time had come for other ideas. Ever since I had retired my squealing hearing aid at age ten, I had not used any kind of artificial device to make up for my deafness. None had seemed necessary, and in any event I knew of none. I could always depend on hearing people to make phone calls or answer the doorbell. But now that I was a bachelor living solo in a high rise, with friends to come calling, it was clear I needed help. Fred notwithstanding, I had to be able to know when someone was buzzing my apartment from the foyer many floors below, so that I in turn could press a button to let the caller into the building.
My old chum Sam Williamson, now a brand-new Ph.D. in economics and an instructor at the University of Iowa, had the answer. Since boyhood he had been an electronics hobbyist, the sort of inspired tinkerer who could build a shortwave radio out of bell wire and bottle caps. One day, when he paid a visit to my apartment, I laid the problem before him. He thought for a moment, then borrowed a screwdriver and removed the grille that concealed the apartment’s intercom system. He poked about inside, nodded sagely, then said he’d be back the next weekend with something that ought to work.
He returned with a crude wooden box painted black, several wires hanging from its innards. Inside lay a spaghetti maze of wire and switches. Sam placed the box on a table underneath the grille, wrapped the bare ends of two slim wires around terminals on the buzzer, then plugged a common household electrical cord into a 115-volt outlet in the wall. Instantly I saw the principle, which sounds complicated but is really very simple.
When someone far below pressed the annunciator button, the buzzer’s current would trip a low-voltage relay switch. That in turn would trip another relay, a bigger one. The large relay switch would close a second circuit. At one end of the second circuit was the electrical cord and plug for the 115-volt house current. At the other end was a receptacle into which Sam plugged an ordinary table lamp. Inside the lamp’s electrical socket Sam placed a thin metal wafer, a common dime-store device that causes a light bulb to flash constantly.
When I saw the flashing light, I’d go over to the box and turn off the circuit. Sam, who carefully thinks things through, had anticipated that I might not be within view of the lamp at first, so had constructed the circuit to stay on, flashing the lamp, until I finally saw it and pressed a button on the box to douse the light. Before leaving the apartment I’d turn off the entire thing with a switch so that the device would not flash endlessly in my absence, perhaps alarming people in the street below.
What a brilliant idea! I pumped Sam’s hand, thanked him profusely, and blessed him and all his children and grandchildren to come.
Today Sam’s black box seems embarrassingly primitive. A good-sized emporium devoted to gadgets for people with disabilities might be stocked with scores of electronic “assistive devices” now available for the hearingimpaired. No deaf parents of a newborn, for instance, would be without a “baby crier,” a microphone affixed to a crib that flashes a lamp when the infant wails. Or other such electronic visual attention getters as burglar alarms, wake-up alarms, fire and smoke alarms, pagers, phone and doorbell signalers, and more. Some of them, like Sam’s gadget, operate ordinary household lamps. Others use strobe devices that look like electronic camera flashes but pack the power of stun grenades. Bed shakers, rough cousins of motel-room Magic Fingers massagers, awaken exceptionally sound sleepers. These devices were a long time coming—many of them had to wait for the invention of the transistor—but when they finally began to appear, they made the lives of deaf people immeasurably easier. Including mine.
The telephone is probably the world’s most unremarked appliance; once installed, it hardly earns a second thought in the hearing household. Telephone amplifiers for the hard-of-hearing have been around for a long time, but the deaf had no means of communicating on the phone until the late 1950s, when a deaf Bell Telephone engineer finally had a bright idea that solved the problem for some hearing-impaired people. He invented a device that would allow old wire-service teletype machines with keyboards to be plugged into ordinary voice telephone lines so that they could “speak” to each other. On one machine a deaf person typed out a message that was instantly transmitted to another teletype, whic
h tapped it out onto a roll of paper. Thus was born the TTY, as the deaf world calls the teletypewriter.
For those who could afford one, the TTY was a salvation from telephone isolation, but it had its drawbacks. Teletype machines were big, ugly, and rackety—not that the noise disturbed their owners. And a TTY user could (and still can) talk only to another person owning a similar device.
The closed world of the deaf grew larger, but it remained circumscribed, for TTYs were to be found only among deaf people and their organizations. As I grew into young manhood, I often wished I owned a TTY, but inasmuch as all my friends and family were hearing, the idea of having such a device seemed an exercise in listening to the sound of one hand clapping.
That is, until the Sensicall came along in 1966, not long after Sam bestowed his magic set of relays upon me. It was a simple device cobbled together by a Western Electric telephone engineer and rented for a nominal sum by Illinois Bell. Nothing more than a small black box that plugged into an ordinary telephone, it bore a tiny red lamp that flashed on and off in time with the voice of the person calling. The idea was for a deaf person to watch the red lamp blink in Morse code as a hearing caller voiced the code orally with short “di”s and long “dah”s. With pencil and paper the deaf user could then decode the message—on the fly, if he knew Morse—and answer by speaking normally into the receiver.
This was a godsend. Only one of these devices was necessary—at my end. I could call perfect strangers, and explain with speech that I was deaf but used a flashing lamp device that would respond to the oral noises they made. They might not know Morse code, I would say, but I’d ask simple yes-and-no questions that they could answer with a short “di” for “yes” or a long “dah” for “no,” and I’d watch the flashing lamp and understand them that way.
This notion worked better in theory than it did in practice. For technical reasons my breathy speech does not come across well over the phone, unless the listener is accustomed to it. And almost always, a hearing person, confronted on the phone by a peculiar-sounding stranger with an outlandish proposal about flashing lights and “di”s and “dah”s, would be thoroughly nonplussed. Usually he’d hang up before I had a chance to finish my spiel. Clearly this idea needed more work.
Yet once my family and friends were “trained” in Morse—the process consisted of handing them small wallet-sized cards printed with the code—I could “talk” with them. Slowly and clumsily, yes, for the caller had to search out on the code card each combination of sounds that made up a letter of the alphabet, then sound it out into the telephone mouthpiece. Things stopped while I decoded each letter, then asked for the next one. The caller had to voice each sound crisply; drawling or huskiness often caused the lamp at my end to flicker crazily.
But the Sensicall was better than nothing. As Dr. Johnson observed about a dog’s walking on its hind legs, one marveled not that it was done well but that it was done at all. And at last I had something with which I could talk to young women on the telephone without a go-between.
Good things, they say, come in threes. That same summer of Sam’s gadget and the Sensicall, I met Debby.
She says that the idea of going out with a deaf man on a blind date almost overwhelmed her, and her roommate had to push her down the stairs to meet me. She says that she could not understand a word I said the entire evening. She says that before I had taken her home she knew she was going to marry me. Go figure.
With the ineffable wisdom of a young deaf bon vivant, I took Debby on that first date to a trendy cocktail lounge where for the entire evening my voice was drowned out by a bush-league Bobby Short at the piano. Debby says she was too frightened to tell me she couldn’t hear me, let alone understand me.
But I didn’t have any trouble lipreading Deborah Lee Abbott, a pretty young woman with the world’s most adorable nose, eyes that still can mesmerize, an extraordinarily vivacious personality, and a sangfroid so unshakable that I had no idea she felt spooked on that blind date. We had been fixed up by an old girlfriend of mine, a fellow senior with Debby at National College of Education in Evanston.
As the pianist crashed out chords a few feet from our table, she told me that just two months earlier she had transferred from William Smith College in Geneva, New York, so that she could get a head start on a career as an elementary school teacher. She was from Marshfield in central Wisconsin, her engineer father owned a construction company, and her mother wrote and published children’s stories. And she hoped to follow in her mother’s footsteps.
“Ah, a fellow writer. This young lady is worth further investigation,” I thought as I returned her to her hotel late that evening and said good night. A few days later I asked my friend Myron, a fellow copyreader at the Daily News, to call her and ask if she was free for dinner that Saturday night. She was sorry, she said, but she had made previous plans.
As Myron hung up, I said resignedly, “Oh, well, it was worth a try,” and muttered something about other fish in the sea.
“Nononono, Henry,” said Myron. “She really is interested. Try her again.” Flies don’t grow on Myron, who is a truly perceptive human being. He could hear the genuine regret in Debby’s voice; her “I’d love to, but” was not a brush-off. A few days later I called her again, and she said yes. I’ll save an entire chapter of this book simply by writing that one thing led to another, and another, and another. Some things are too precious not to keep private.
Debby says that what initially attracted her to me was that I was “interesting,” clearly not one of what she considered a herd of “superficial” young careerists. The deafness, of course, was a novelty, part of the intrigue. In the beginning, she admits, she was a little disconcerted about the consequences of my speech in potentially awkward situations, such as ordering a meal in a noisy restaurant. (I simply have to repeat myself, sometimes with the help of a finger pointing at the item on the menu, until the waiter gets it right.) Once the newness wore off, she realized that we had a good deal in common: similar middle-class backgrounds, similar liberal politics, similar conservative views of family life.
She adds that we shared enough commonality so that she could shrug off, and even chuckle about, the genuinely embarrassing social situations into which my deafness sometimes lands me. One evening early in our courtship, we stopped in with friends at a popular Chicago folk music night spot. Of course, I wasn’t interested in folk music, or music of any kind, but, deaf or not, one is smart to go with the social flow, and Debby wanted to hear the featured singer. I have no idea who that was, but she evidently sang like an angel, her heavenly voice warming the poorly heated club and moving the audience almost to tears. Except me.
As the last strains of the music drifted into the rafters and a hush settled over the club, I turned, shivering, to Debby. I had absolutely no idea that the song had ended and, in what must have been a reverent, even sepulchral silence, I loudly and clearly said, “Let’s go. My ass is freezing off.”
Ours was the first (and only) romance I have ever carried on via the telephone. You can guess what our conversations with the Sensicall must have been like. In the beginning Debby sent each hard-earned endearment in painstakingly “tapped” Morse, and I’d reply with the usual sweetnesses in voice.
Before long we settled on a simple and quick way to chat: I’d do all the talking (the only time in our relationship I have ever been able to do so), and Debby would reply with “di” for “yes” or “dah” for “no” as appropriate. It was a ridiculously one-sided way to converse, but it sufficed.
What must strangers have thought when they happened upon a pretty young woman trilling “di-di dah-dah” nonsense into the receiver of a public pay phone? The scene might seem comic, but for me it meant a kind of rebirth.
Two decades ago Sam’s box and the Sensicall seemed to me merely conveniences, like refrigerators and washing machines. They were marvelous gadgets, and I thought I’d miss them if they weren’t around but I could live without them, as I had all my l
ife. Of course, I missed the point. Modern conveniences are instruments of freedom. A life without something to cool perishables and freshen clothing would be a very different one. We would need to devote a great deal of time and energy to basic survival tasks such as obtaining fresh food and clean clothes. Life without fridges and washers would be tolerable, but our spheres of activity would be severely limited. We would have less freedom to do things that matter—such as communicating with the rest of the world.
Now it seems that, crude as those two early devices were, they meant the beginning of the end of my isolation—isolation from other people. Those who hear cannot imagine how grindingly lonely deafness often can be. A comfortable home can feel like a maximum-security prison if there is no easy means of communication with the outside. This is one important reason why the deaf tend to gravitate toward one another. Just as do the hearing, the deaf need to communicate, to share their thoughts and feelings with others. Only a fellow lifer in the jailhouse of silence understands how important that is to sanity and how difficult it can be to achieve.
Yes, I was living in the world of the hearing, and so long as I was in the presence of family, friends, and fellow workers, I connected. But I needed to enlarge the envelope of my life. As I grew older, like every other young man I needed to create and maintain my own physical and temporal space and from it communicate with the outside.
Partly because I now had a means of doing so, however crude it might be, my romance with Debby was of an entirely new kind. Every evening, not every other week-end, we communicated on the Sensicall and shared the day’s events. Three or four times a week I’d call and say, “Have you got a bit of time before I go to work?” and forty-five minutes later, I’d be on her doorstep. Now I could act on impulse, just like everyone else. I didn’t have to save my thoughts for days, waiting for the next time we met to spring them upon her.