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At Home at the Central Institute for the Deaf

February 6, 1956

My Beloved Parents:

Did “Skippy” stay at my grandparents’ home when everybody was gone?

Saturday afternoon, Johnny Thomson, Bill Jordan, Derek Sweeting, a boy from Canada, and I stayed here. The rest went to the movie. We didn’t go to the movie because we didn’t want to. From 1 till 3 o’clock, we went with the older boys to the park to go sleigh riding. When we came back, we went to the Barber Shop. I had not had a haircut since the first week of December. My hair was quite long. Before our hair was cut, we had some hamburger sandwiches and hot cocoa. Now I look a little bit different because of my hair.

How’s everybody in Sioux City? I wrote a card to Gary Baumann.

Thank you very much for the package of Valentine cards.

My black shoes aren’t too small. They fit just right. I use the play shoes for the rubbers. The rubbers fit my play shoes perfectly.

Sunday night, we had movies in the auditorium. One of the films was just what I wanted to see. It was about the “Kennel-Ling.” It was about all kinds of dogs.

Now Steve Mirsky uses only one crutch.

Saturday night we had a dancing lesson. We learned how to Jitterbug.

Your loving son,

Tracy Alan

EVERY YEAR FOR TEN YEARS, between the ages of four and thirteen, I looked forward to traveling back and forth from home to St. Louis by way of Council Bluffs in September, December, and June. It was a long ride, more than ten hours, but I loved sleeping in the Pullman car overnight. Sometimes, late at night, I would get out of my bunk to go to the bathroom but then take the opportunity to prolong my exploration of the train as it swayed down the track, the night sky outside above rushing fields. And in the daytime, you could walk a bit past other passengers and see all the families and businesspeople traveling with you.

During one of my trips when I was about eight or nine years old, a group of distinguished men came on board our train in Jefferson City, and a tall gentleman with white hair and a gray suit sat down opposite me. He had a very kind face and soft eyes that crinkled at the corners, and he tried gamely to talk with me. I couldn’t read his lips, so I just nodded my head and smiled as if I understood him. Did he understand that I was deaf? I couldn’t tell. He continued to talk to me all the way until the next stop in Independence, Missouri. When the train halted, he stood up and very formally offered to shake my hand. “It was nice to meet you,” he said as we shook hands—that much I could decipher—and then he got off the train. I looked outside and, as the train began to pull away from the platform, I was dumbfounded to see a station billboard declaring “Home of Harry S. Truman” illustrated with a large oval portrait of the very man with whom I’d been riding. The gentle-looking white-haired man who had spent so long trying to converse with me had been President Truman! (This, of course, is a true story, but I regret that I didn’t ask for his autograph so that more people would believe me.)

I'm (far left) on a seesaw with Bill Jordan in the courtyard of CID.

Living in a dorm with ten “brothers” was never boring or lonely, although it was likely a challenge for our housemother, who had her room adjoining our sleeping quarters. Many times, she had to come into our room after bedtime to urge us to stop playing and get some sleep.

We came from all over the country: Georgia, Texas, Florida, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, California, and so forth. Even though we ranged in ages and grades, we were close friends. Every week, we’d have a field trip to a library or the YMCA. St. Louis was a beautiful city—five times bigger than Sioux City. Like my hometown, it was a flat river city, with the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers meeting not far outside its city limits. On weekends, we’d play in nearby Forest Park, go to St. Louis Cardinals baseball games at the old Sportsman’s Park, visit museums, and play games in the dorm or on the fenced and sheltered roof.

At mealtimes, we sat at a long rectangular table with five seats on each side and a supervisor and a teaching assistant on each end. I thought the food was terrible, but breakfast is hard to mess up, and so it became my favorite meal of the day. “I’ll take that soft-boiled egg, if you’re not going to eat it,” I’d say, and several of my egg-averse roommates would hand them over to me. In this way, I managed to consume the majority of my daily calories before noon.

One dinner, when I was about eleven or twelve years old, I was sitting next to a teacher-in-training who was new and didn’t know me well. I was feeling sick to my stomach and didn’t think I could eat the peas on my plate, although I usually liked peas. I asked, “Could I please be excused?”

“No,” said the teacher-in-training. “Finish those peas first.”

I tried to reason with him, but he was insistent. I cautioned him that I’d get sick if he forced me to eat them. He wouldn’t budge, and so I dutifully shoveled the peas in, one sickening forkful at a time. Sure enough, those green peas and the rest of the dinner that had preceded them were soon all over the table in front of me. I hadn’t been able to hold it down. The poor supervisor jumped out of his seat and came around to pat me on the back and apologize profusely. To this day, I won’t touch a single green pea.

Classes at CID were small, mostly five to six students. In the early years, we stayed with one teacher for the full day, but in the last four years between fourth and eighth grades, we moved from classroom to classroom for reading, geography, arithmetic, social studies, and science. The teachers were excellent and very patient with us. All the teachers were hearing, and there were no interpreters since the main thrust of the school’s pedagogical modality was oral education. Mrs. Skinner, who had taught my mother how to read, was my reading teacher as well.

I was always busy at school. For instance, there was the Goldstein Club (named after the school’s founder, Max A. Goldstein, MD), which taught us how to run meetings using parliamentary procedures. We served on committees and became officers. I also learned how to appreciate parliamentary procedures, which, in my opinion, was all common sense and promoted fairness and respect for members’ opinions. This basic level of experience influenced me later to become engaged in community activities and assume officer/leadership roles in various consumer and civic organizations.

I joined the Cub Scouts and then the Boy Scouts, where I earned merit badges and rose to the rank of patrol leader. We did a lot of projects and went on many outings, including swimming, knot tying, and overnight camping trips. My scoutmaster was Frank Withrow, who was also my woodworking teacher. He later earned his doctorate and held high positions in the US Department of Education and served as a project liaison officer for RIT/NTID and Gallaudet University. One March, I was somewhat mischievous and talked too much in a Boy Scouts meeting, and Mr. Withrow asked me to be quiet and behave. Arrogantly and carelessly, I ignored him and continued to talk with other scouts. Mr. Withrow came up to me and stripped my patrol leader stripes right from the sleeve of my shirt. I was dumbfounded and quickly shut up. That was that: I was no longer a patrol leader.

With Ga-Ga in Sioux City, Iowa.

My summer months spent at home in Sioux City were nearly as busy as school, between visiting my grandparents and other relatives, reading with my mother, and playing and watching sports with my father. He’d happily play ball with me outside for hours at a time. Being a staunch sports fan, my father loved to read newspapers about sports and talk sports with his deaf friends and me. We went to watch the Sioux City Soos, a Class A farm team of the New York Giants, although the St. Louis Cardinals has always been my favorite team since I was a tot. I learned later that a Sioux City baseball team was one of the first farm teams of the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1920s, but it was dissolved, and later the New York Giants formed a new farm team, the Sioux City Soos, in the 1940s. This was an odd choice since the Cardinals received a lot of coverage in the Sioux City newspapers and radio/television stations.

My father and I also went to watch men play fast-pitch softball games at a field just a short drive from our home, close to where Dean Kruger, a close deaf family friend, lived. Dean and a few other deaf adults often went with us to watch the games, and we loved to talk about sports.

My dad Harold with his friends in Sioux City: Harold, Ed Humphries, Dean Kruger, Floyd Good, the owner of a bowling alley, and Don Haines.

My mother read books to me every chance she got or retold me stories she’d recently read in a book. She was dedicated to sharing articles with me about successful deaf people in various professions. Her message was clear: You can accomplish great things. You can become whatever you want to become.

Friends of my mother: Mrs. Norris, Josephine Lynn and her mother, Catherine Humphries, Rachel Moissant, Agnes Kruger, unknown, and Aunt Cranie with Tracy Alan.

WHEN I RETURNED to school at CID that fall, Mr. Withrow asked me if I had learned my lesson, and I quickly replied that I had. Over the summer, I hadn’t given much thought to my demotion, but I’d certainly absorbed that my insubordination had been wrong the moment he’d ripped the patrol leader stripes from my uniform. “Good,” he said to my answer. “I’m going to reinstate your role as patrol leader then,” and he handed me back the stripes. I learned from this incident an essential lesson about respect for adults, their responsibilities, and their authority. Perhaps more importantly, I also learned that people are capable of improving themselves if given another chance to prove themselves, especially if they are eager to learn and grow, as I was.

There was no harder worker than my father, but I saw that sometimes, hard work didn’t guarantee that you would move up a career ladder. After four years at the bakery, my father became ill, perhaps from the extreme heat of the ovens, and left the bakery. An old family friend who owned the Sioux City Furniture Company hired my father as an upholsterer.

My mother worked hard too. Once I started school in St. Louis, she worked to help pay for my tuition. My Uncle Bill (Mazie), my paternal grandmother’s half-brother, also helped pay for my education by way of an interest-free loan to my parents, who faithfully paid him back in small monthly installments for several years after I completed my elementary education. Uncle Bill’s generosity and my parents’ commitment to paying him back taught me that it is important to pay it forward and to continuously be aware of other people who may not be as privileged.

Before each of my summer breaks from CID, my mother would ask her supervisor if she could take time off without pay so that she could be with me. Her request was denied every time, so she always quit her job, spent the summer taking care of me, and then searched for another job after I went back to school in the fall. Over the ten years I was at CID, she had ten different jobs doing manual labor, such as sewing, cleaning, and assembly-line work.

After I started junior high school, my mother decided to look for a permanent job. She had always wanted to work at Wincharger Zenith Radio. She had a keen knack for working with electronics; she figured out how to fix our old television and do other repairs around the house. She applied to Wincharger and, after not being contacted, she reapplied. She finally decided to go to the human resources office to apply in person, but they told her there was nothing for her.

My mother remained in the waiting room all day until the personnel officer finally asked her to leave. My mother offered to work for free for the next two or three weeks. As a result of her assertiveness, the personnel officer told her to come to work the following Monday. She stayed at the job for the next twenty-five years working as a quality control tester for radios on the assembly line. She was a valued employee and received full retirement benefits. My mother’s persistence and hard work taught me the value of being a conscientious employee, and I have encouraged others to take their work seriously and always do the best possible job.

MY MOTHER HAD grown up with cats, and there was always a cat in our house in Sioux City. Betty was a black cat with one white foot. Socks was a brown and gray tabby with four white feet, thus the name. Blackie was a long-haired black cat who napped on a chair in the kitchen all day long. But when I was eleven years old, my parents got me a puppy, and I was thrilled. I named him Skippy. He was a rat terrier, white with a brown face and three large brown spots on his back. He was a strong, smart dog and loved to play with us and perform tricks. None of the cats had ever performed a single trick, as far as I could remember.

Me and Skippy.

We were as close as brothers, Skippy and I, and I took him out every day for hour-long walks. One day, when we’d had Skippy for about eight years, I was sitting on the porch when a neighbor ran to let me know that Skippy had been run over by a car over on a nearby block. I sprinted to the car and found Skippy lying underneath the vehicle. The driver had tried to retrieve him, but Skippy had snapped and growled and refused to come out. But as soon as Skippy saw me, he crawled slowly, painfully toward me. It was obvious his back was broken. I picked him up as gently as I could and held him in my arms. “Let me take you to the veterinarian,” the driver said, and so I sat in the back seat holding Skippy, who looked at me the whole time with sad eyes. The vet confirmed that his back was broken and couldn’t be repaired. “We should put him down to end his suffering,” the doctor advised me.

“Can I be alone with him first, for a minute?” I asked.

Sitting in the exam room, I petted my friend softly, trying to communicate through stroking the fur on his face and shoulders how much I loved him. After the doctor returned and put him down and he was gone, I was heartbroken, naturally, but also grateful that I had eight wonderful years with such a good dog.

ON THE LAST SABBATH before I would return to school for my last year at CID, my mother’s childhood friend, Josephine Lynn, was visiting us from Kansas City. That night, she joined us at my grandparents’ house for Shabbat dinner. On the short ride there, my mouth watered in anticipation because I knew my grandmother had been baking and cooking for the past two days in preparation, as she always did.

Mom (left) and her best friend Josephine Lynn.

Sure enough, the table was laid with a white cloth, and there was challah bread and rugelach, meat-stuffed cabbage rolls, matzo ball soup, roasted chicken, and apple cake. My aunts and uncles, who sometimes just dropped by the house on Fridays to pick up baked goods grandmother had made for them, were this time staying for dinner too.

MY PATERNAL GRANDPARENTS were Orthodox Jews and religiously observed Sabbath every Friday evening and Saturday, along with all the Jewish holidays. My grandfather walked to United Orthodox Synagogue every Saturday morning, and often my father would join him; however, my grandfather had discouraged both my father and me from pursuing bar mitzvah because he believed that the Torah exempted individuals who did not possess all of their senses from this responsibility.

I attended the services with my father during the Jewish holidays, and sometimes my grandmother and my mother would join us. It was challenging and somewhat tedious because the services were conducted primarily in Hebrew, and there were no interpreters back then. Neither my parents nor I could read Hebrew, but many of the books had both English and Hebrew versions of the prayers, and we would pass the time reading the English pages of the prayer books.

That night at my grandparent’s Shabbat dinner, my grandfather did a lot of praying in Hebrew, which the rest of us couldn’t follow. We simply sat in silence and waited for him to finish before we could go on with the dinner, and conversation could start up again. When the initial prayers had been said over the bread and wine, and everyone was enjoying the delicious food and talking, for some reason my mother’s friend Josephine, who was Catholic, reached down to get something from her purse. A little picture of Jesus fell out onto the floor between Josephine’s chair and my grandfather’s. We all held our breath while my grandfather picked it up from the floor and looked at it. After a few seconds, he said, “Jesus was a good man,” and gave the picture back to Josephine, who slipped it quickly into her purse. We all breathed a sigh of relief.

CID ONLY WENT UP to eighth grade. In the weeks leading to my graduation, I was torn between excitement to be returning to Sioux City and my family, and sadness that the camaraderie and fun I’d experienced was coming to an end. In my ten years at CID, I’d grown independent, confident, interested in math and science and sports, mature, and happy to discover that I had some aptitude for leadership. And over those ten years, I’d been relatively unbothered by the discrimination or isolation that sometimes follows deaf people. I was fully confident that I would excel at home, just as I had in St. Louis.

My graduating class at CID in 1956. From left to right: Karl Klenz, me, Mary Helen Pearl, Steve Mirsky, Rad Arner, and Bill Jordan.

While I felt ready to go into the public school’s ninth grade, my mother had different ideas. When I returned home, she insisted that I repeat the eighth grade because she thought I needed time to adjust from the small classes at CID to the large classes that had all hearing students. She explained that I didn’t know anyone from my neighborhood who was going to the same school, didn’t have any brothers or sisters to share experiences with me or give me support, and didn’t really have any friends in Sioux City. We argued hotly, but my mother stood by her decision. She told me that Dr. Helen S. Lane, the principal at CID, supported her decision, and that was that.