Free What's That Pig Outdoors? by Henry Kisor

“hostile,” and needed some psychological therapy. Dad, who had taken me to Northwestern and had stayed there for the entire six-hour session, lost his temper. “Of course the kid is tense!” he said. “Any normal child would be tense if he’d been asked all day to do something he can’t do!” And with that he swept me out of the building. I would not return to it for more than a decade.
    On separate levels both Dad and Myklebust probably were right. A sixhour battery of tests is bound to try a child’s patience and affect the results. Dad knew that outside the psychologist’s laboratory I functioned well, in all ways a happy nine-year-old child growing up in a limitless world. Had Myklebust been out in the field for weeks, observing my normal everyday interactions with hearing adults and children, perhaps he would have come to different conclusions, ones that acknowledged that I perhaps displayed a larger potential for success in the hearing world than most deaf children. It’s not always easy for social scientists to recognize exceptions to the rules they formulate, especially if the data for those rules come entirely from testing in the laboratory. In those situations, “counseling” might do more harm than good. In 1949, I am certain, it might have proven more a hindrance than a help. A few years later, perhaps not. For a seed of truth was buried in Myklebust’s findings, a seed that eventually would sprout and take root.

    In any event, Mother and Dad by this time had no doubt that they had chosen the right path for me. I was doing well at Orrington School, keeping abreast of, if not a little ahead of, most of my classmates in all subjects— even, of all things, drama—and had built up a large new circle of friends. An emblematic memory of the time comes from an October day in 1951 when I walked out of school to see a knot of boys gabbling excitedly around a classmate with a portable radio. One of my friends peeled away from the group and dashed over to me. He joyfully punched my shoulder. “The Giants won the pennant!” he cried. “Bobby Thomson hit a homer in the last of the ninth!” I have never been certain whether Steve wanted to be sure his deaf friend knew what had happened or whether he simply was sharing momentous news with the nearest warm body. I like to think it was the latter: that I was just another kid in the schoolyard.
    Certainly I was doing everything the other youngsters were, even taking lessons on musical instruments. My parents thought musical instruction might benefit my speech, even if they weren’t quite certain exactly how. They didn’t force me into it, as so many reluctant hearing children are; they simply asked if I was interested, and I eagerly said yes, because I had the normal eleven-year-old’s enthusiasm for new experiences.
    Mother and Dad paid the small fee for private after-school lessons with the school’s instrumental teacher, who manfully tried to guide me in what must have been several extraordinarily painful—for him—sessions with the trumpet. I understood the broad notion of a musical note: it was a certain frequency of vibration. I had no idea, however, how to produce it, let alone when. I never could synchronize the vibrations of my lips on the mouthpiece with the fingering of the valves. Occasionally, quite by accident, I’d hit upon some semblance of a note, and the teacher would praise me for doing so. But I never could repeat the note.
    Stubbornly I kept on, session after session, the teacher sitting beside me sweating as profusely as I was, marking the proper valve fingering on the sheet music before me and gritting his teeth over the sounds I produced. To call those sounds off-key was probably to flatter them. Finally I admitted defeat. “Do you think I should keep on doing this?” I asked the teacher in frustration. “I don’t want to.”