4

Public School in Sioux City

I LIKED MY blue-and-brown plaid shirt—it looked good on me. I checked my hair one last time in the bathroom mirror then did an about-face and headed to the front door. My mother was there to wish me good luck. I grabbed my book bag, which already held five textbooks, even though it was just the first day of school—eighth grade at North Junior High. In the weeks leading up to school, we’d gone together to the school to sign me up, introduce me to the principal, and get some of the course materials. I would be the only deaf student in my class of several hundred boys and girls.

The school was within walking distance from home, and I set off into the crisp September morning. Home at last. Public school. This was really a new phase of life I was entering, and it was going to be a great one, I was sure. I’d always loved school, and now I’d have the fun and excitement of school combined with the comforts of home and the pleasure of being with my family every day, not just on holidays and over the summer.

When I neared the school’s entrance, the front of the school was crowded with kids my age swarming up the steps. Inside, the blue tiled hallways were crowded too. What were people saying? Greeting each other, comparing schedules, and saying things I couldn’t quite catch. People brushed by as I checked my schedule, which I’d folded neatly and put into my front pocket. First period was US history, with Mrs. Poppin, in room 48.

Mrs. Poppin, an elderly teacher with short, graying black hair and a friendly smile, seemed to recognize me as a new student right away. “Welcome to class!” she said and led me to a seat in the third row, near the front. When everyone had taken their seats, she announced my presence, saying, “Boys and girls, we have a new student joining us today, Tracy Hurwitz, and I’d like you to make him feel very welcome. Tracy is from right here in Sioux City, but he has been attending a school for the deaf in St. Louis.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw ten heads turn to look at me. The students in the rows ahead of mine twisted in their seats to glance back at me. There were at least forty students in the class, with desks extending to the very back of the room. I imagined that everyone behind me was now looking at the back of my blue-and-brown checked shirt.

Should I turn now and wave at my classmates behind me? I decided against it. I hoped Mrs. Poppin would change the subject fast, to something about US history as soon as possible, and thankfully, she did. It took all my concentration to follow what she was saying. I missed what my classmates were saying back to her. If only we could be seated in a big circle, where I could see everyone at once!

Later, I noticed that all my classmates to my left and right and in the seats in front of me had pulled out their heavy textbooks and opened them to the same page. There was an illustration of Abraham Lincoln standing at a podium in a field, flanked by other dark-coated speakers to his left and right. Mrs. Poppin caught my eye as she was speaking. She was saying something about reciting aloud. Did she want me to? But no, not just me. I saw that all my classmates were reading in unison from the textbook now: “… brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal …” I flipped through the book and found the page and quickly scanned the Gettysburg Address printed there for the correct section, to match my classmates. It was a delicate maneuver, like landing a plane in a windstorm, but by glancing up at the boy one row ahead of mine and on the aisle, noting what he was saying, and then glancing down quickly at the text, I was able to determine the right part of the address to come in on. “It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.” And then I continued to the next paragraph, my voice as clear and strong, I hoped, as my classmates’ voices. “But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” Head down, eyes concentrating on the words, I was reading steadily for a while before something made me glance up. Mrs. Poppin was smiling kindly, directly at me, and some of my classmates were staring at me, some were smirking. “Please, do continue, Tracy,” Mrs. Poppin said encouragingly. I had been reading aloud alone, somehow missing the cue to stop. Maybe she had told the class to read up until a certain line, and I had missed that instruction. I wanted to find a hole in the floor and disappear. But, as usual in these situations, there was no boy-sized hole conveniently located nearby, and so I suffered through the rest of the class, my humiliation making my face hot. When it was time to go to the next class—all my classmates started gathering their things, or they leaped straight from their chairs and headed to the door—I realized I didn’t know if we had homework or not. I’d have to check with the teacher.

At age thirteen.

“Do we have homework?” I asked Mrs. Poppin.

“Excuse me, Tracy?” she said. She hadn’t understood me.

“Do we have homework?” I had to ask her several times before she understood my question.

Walking to my next class, I vowed to survive it without any further humiliating moments. My mind went back to CID, where I could understand exactly what was going on in every class, where my classmates were more like siblings than strangers, where I knew every nook and cranny, every side door, every sidewalk and windowpane by heart. At CID, I’d been an excellent and popular student. At CID, it had always been easy for us to jump into conversations with our teachers and classmates since we understood each other, and the class sizes were small.

In my first few months at North Junior High, I often didn’t understand homework assignments or what to do on a test. In social studies, I went to the teacher on several consecutive days to ask him if I had done my work correctly. He finally got impatient with me and wrote down on a piece of paper, “Do you want to be spoon-fed all the time?” I was puzzled. What did that mean, “spoon-fed?” I didn’t know, but what was clear was that he didn’t want to answer my question. I walked back to my seat with a sheepish smile. That was the last time I asked him for feedback.

At least on the playing field, I knew what was happening, and I could excel. Before school started, a bunch of boys played football or baseball in the large park across the street from the school. If I left the house by 6:45, I’d get to the park by 7:00, an hour before school started at 8:00—enough time to play a whole football game or a few innings of baseball.

My favorite sport, though, was basketball. I decided to try out for the school’s team. The day after the first tryout, the coach posted a sheet on the wall outside the gymnasium with the names of those who’d made the cut. My name was there! I went to another tryout, and again my name appeared on the list. I survived three cuts before my name no longer appeared on the list. I didn’t understand why, but I didn’t talk with the coach. It was not until I was a junior at Central High School that I realized I needed to go to all the tryout sessions in order for the coach to continue to evaluate my athletic skills. I didn’t know about this requirement since I had no previous experience in trying out for athletic teams at school. I might have missed an announcement or didn’t understand the coach when he was talking to us during tryout sessions. Nobody else asked me about it, so I simply waited for a final decision. Then it was too late, and by then, I had already blown out my left knee after playing football in a community league, so I never had a chance to join the high school basketball team. I did join the JV golf team, though. I also tried out for swimming and track, but I didn’t have the stamina for distance trials. Mostly, I played softball and basketball for community leagues at the Jewish Community Center in the evenings and on weekends and during the summers. Many days, when I walked into the house after school, my mother would be sitting at the kitchen table reading a copy of her favorite publication, The Silent Worker, which in 1966 would change its name to The Deaf American. Published by the National Association for the Deaf (NAD), the magazine was a rich source of news and of happenings that didn’t quite qualify as news: “Jake Roberts of Minneapolis is set to retire on Jan. 1, but he admits recently that his plans may go awry unless his boss is able to find a man to take his place as a cylinder pressman for the American Printing Co. He specializes in color posters. For the past year or so, he has been suffering from a heart ailment and anemia.” This window into the lives of deaf people around the country, long before captioned television or the internet or even TTY (teletypewriter), gave us an idea of what was possible. The magazine also offered inspiring biographical profiles of deaf people, speeches and letters by prominent deaf Americans, meeting minutes from NAD’s annual convention, and essays and speeches by Gallaudet University presidents.

“There’s a deaf man from Sioux Falls,” my mother told me, “who moved up to Alaska with almost no money in his pocket in 1939, and today, he is one of the most successful hunters in Alaska! He owns several houses and is about to retire from the Alaska Road Commission!” My mother showed me the article, which had three photos. One was of Jonah Ephraim Evans in the snow on a sled pulled by a dozen dogs. Another was of his ramshackle hunting cabin that The Silent Worker claimed was one of the finest in all of Alaska, partly because it was so well situated to store lots of animal meat. The last photograph was of Evans holding a rifle proudly and leaning up against the first moose he’d ever shot, a mammoth animal that weighed nearly 1,000 pounds and whose antlers spanned fifty-four inches.

“See?” my mother said. “You can be whatever you want to be.”

All I wanted to be right then was a happy and successful junior high school student, but it was turning out to be much harder than I’d anticipated. In math class that week, as the teacher was writing out a mathematical formula, I noticed a mistake in the computation he’d written on the blackboard. Now here was a chance to participate! I’d always excelled at math, and math was a very precise language, for all its complexity. Either something was correct, or it wasn’t. If I pointed out the error, I would demonstrate to the teacher my understanding of the concept we were covering in trigonometry, and I’d also be joining in on the conversation, something I found difficult to do. I raised my hand.

“Sir, there is a mistake in the computation,” I said.

“What’s that? What did you say, Tracy?” the teacher asked.

I repeated myself three or four more times, but he couldn’t understand me. My speech was not always intelligible to hearing people who were not accustomed to listening to deaf people who used their voice. OK, I thought, I’ll just walk up to the board to make the correction myself. That will clear up all confusion. But, as I got closer to the board, I realized that the teacher was right. There was no error to correct! And here I was, at the front of the class, with every eye on me and the teacher looking at me with great interest and confusion, and possibly some irritation at the interruption. How I wished I hadn’t opened my mouth! Once again—this was becoming a theme for me at this school—I wanted to vanish. Instead, I walked nonchalantly back to my seat, in the manner of James Dean walking in Rebel without a Cause. As I slid back into my chair, I said, “Never mind.” I don’t think the teacher ever understood what I was talking about.

When my second report card arrived in the mail that year, it was like the first one had been: a disaster. I got Ds in all of my courses, except for gym, which I got an A for. My mother was worried, but not very surprised. She’d known the transition would be hard. Not only were my grades poor, but most of my interactions with teachers and classmates were fleeting and superficial—one-on-one exchanges outside of the classroom; some of them could understand my speech, but mostly I’d have to repeat myself more than once. My classmates and I would greet each other and talk a little about the weather, sports, cars, and school. We did not have deep and meaningful conversations. At times, we’d resort to writing on paper or a blackboard. My mother had been right: I was not prepared for a mainstreamed experience after spending ten years in self-contained, small classes at CID. Something would have to change.

OUR NEIGHBORS ACROSS the street had a son, Gary, who was three years older than me. While I’d been away at school, Gary had gotten to know my parents. He seemed fascinated by them and loved talking with them. When I’d come home for holidays and over the summer, Gary and I would sometimes talk on the sidewalks outside our houses, and over time, we’d become friends. Gary was into music and was a member of the high school drum corps. He was a fun and amusing friend who loved to laugh. We’d sit on the curb of busy streets near our neighborhood and name each vehicle that passed by us. “1941 Pontiac Streamliner,” “Ford Club Coupe,” or, “1955 Ford Fairlane.” We could tell the year, make, and model of all the cars manufactured in the late 1940s and the 1950s. “Imagine driving up to the high school in a blue Cadillac El Dorado,” Gary said. “Or,” I countered, “a white Chrysler Windsor, top down.” We could picture our friends’ and neighbors’ surprised and impressed expressions. Everyone would be dazzled by our good taste.

In my first car, a 1949 Chrysler Coupe.

Gary’s favorite celebrity was Pat Boone, a pop singer second in popularity at the time only to my idol, Elvis Presley. Gary and I loved to impersonate famous entertainers and musicians, especially Boone and Elvis. I combed my long hair into a ducktail, rolled up my short-sleeved shirts, and flipped my collar up. I didn’t smoke, so I didn’t have a cigarette packet in my sleeve, but I wore black motorcycle boots with a buckle on each boot. One day, Gary and I were hanging out together at a park, and a big group of guys from the high school joined us. After a while, the two of us headed back to our block, and Gary said, “You sure are lucky you’re deaf!”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

Gary said that other boys were making dirty and nasty remarks about my being deaf.

“What did they say?” I asked.

“Never mind,” Gary said. “They were just not being nice about deaf people.” I shrugged, not wanting Gary to know that this news bothered me. I’d thought those were nice boys, and I’d thought they understood that I was just as smart, just as capable, as they were. But I’d been mistaken. People had many misconceptions about being deaf and what a deaf person could do, maybe misconceptions about what deaf people thought about and hoped for. Deaf people can become hunters in Alaska, teachers, investors, artists, I thought of saying. But I kept my cool on the rest of the walk home.

From that day, it became important for me to educate the public that deaf people could do anything they aspired to do. I couldn’t keep getting Ds in school, that was for sure. In ninth grade, I made an effort to get to know the teachers at school better. I went to the public library many times every week and studied concepts and material the teachers had covered in class.

My new tactics paid off. I did better. The math teacher even posted my tests on the bulletin board when I got a perfect score. He told the class, “If Tracy, being deaf, can do this well, then everyone else in the class can do better too.”

One day in ninth grade, though, I was drinking water from a low-level fountain in a hallway when someone pushed my head down into the stream of water, causing my face to be all wet. I looked up in surprise and saw a guy in my class standing above me, laughing. It caught me by surprise. Since I was not a fighter or a rebellious guy, I decided not to do anything and instead laughed with him. A few days later, he must have realized he had been wrong. He came up to me in the hall and said he was sorry for what he did to me. I accepted his apology and, by getting to know each other through working on school projects together, we became good friends and even joined the Boy Scouts together. He eventually went to and graduated from West Point.

My tenure in the Boy Scouts in Sioux City did not last long since the scoutmaster moved out of town within months, and the troop was disbanded. I rose up close to Life Star but never had a chance to become an Eagle Scout. This is one goal I still regret not having achieved during my journey.

After ninth grade, I attended Central High School and did well academically, although interpreters or support/access services continued to be nonexistent. I obviously did not learn very much in the classroom because I could not always understand the teachers or my classmates. I met with teachers after class to find out about homework assignments. I continued to visit the public library almost every night to look for additional information so that I could keep up with my schoolwork.