7

Deaf at a Hearing College

I SAT ACROSS A DESK from Morningside College’s registrar, Mr. Ira Gwinn. In his late fifties, with black-rimmed glasses and dark eyes, he peered at me thoughtfully. “Mr. Hurwitz,” he said, “you’ll need to arrange support services to help you get through college.”

I was offended.

“But I did fine in high school with no support services, sir,” I pointed out.

“Still, you’ll need them in college. College isn’t high school,” he said. “Here, you’ll find that your professors rarely use textbooks for their classroom lectures, so you won’t be able to catch what you missed by going to your books at night.”

“I think I can give it a try without help,” I said.

“No,” he said firmly. “I’m afraid that having support services will be a condition of your enrollment. There’s no point enrolling you just to set you up to fail. And don’t worry, the Iowa Vocational Rehabilitation agency will cover the cost of a notetaker.”

Having no choice, I relented.

Back then, “support services” didn’t look like they do today. In 1961, no one had ever heard of a sign language interpreter, especially for college. Once in a blue moon, there would be a child of deaf adults (Coda) or a hearing person who learned how to sign from a church with deaf congregants, but that kind of interpreting was always done voluntarily. Since these “interpreters” didn’t have any training, most of them would convey information consecutively, meaning they would listen to the speaker for a while and then ask the speaker to wait so they could summarize what was being said to the deaf person. Then they would watch the deaf person signing for a while, cut him off at some point, and summarize for the speaker what was signed. It was a very time-consuming process. Today, American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters are trained to facilitate communication simultaneously between both parties and are held to much higher standards professionally and ethically.

Having done very well in high school without the well-meaning intervention of hearing people demanding I use any particular remedy to even the playing field for myself in school, I wasn’t looking forward to this sudden, late-in-the-game interference in my studies. All I could imagine it doing was slowing me down. I hadn’t gone to CID for all those years, learned to speak and lipread, and mastered the challenges of attending a public high school to have my abilities completely discounted. But it seemed I had no choice but to go along with Morningside’s plan for me. I grudgingly gave in.

Mr. Gwinn recommended that the college find a classmate who took the same courses I was taking. This hearing classmate could take class notes using carbon paper, and I would get the blue copy. We agreed that whoever was selected would have to be an outstanding student and be able to handle the rigors of not only his coursework but also of providing adequate notes for me. Mr. Gwinn thought that the classmate should also study with me and provide tutorial assistance as needed. It sounded like a feasible arrangement, but unfortunately, a few days after we’d drafted the plan, Mr. Gwinn called me back to his office to report that he was unable to find a classmate who met the expectations we had discussed.

“I did find one student, though, who might just do,” Mr. Gwinn said. His name was Al, and he was from Chicago. Al took the same classes I was taking, but his high school grades weren’t as good as mine. Still, Mr. Gwinn told me, Al was willing to be my notetaker, and he needed the money.

The next day in Mr. Gwinn’s office, I met Al, a seemingly friendly guy with a chubby face and blond hair. He showed me a page from his notebook to check if I could read his handwriting, which seemed perfectly legible to me. We talked about our plans for a major—I was considering engineering and mathematics. Al was undecided, so he’d just signed up for the classes that seemed most interesting to him. We shook hands and agreed to see each other at our first class together, calculus, the next morning.

In class, Al and I sat next to each other, and I watched as he steadily took notes throughout the professor’s lecture. The professor spoke quickly and paced back and forth at the front of the class, making it very hard to read his lips. What he was talking about, I wasn’t sure. Most of the students in the class were taking notes, not just Al. I alone sat with my notebook open to a blank page. I might as well be back home at my parents’ house, I thought, reading the textbook and trying to work out the material for myself.

I glanced back over at Al. I could make out a line he’d written in his notes from the professor’s lecture: It was something about a Lagrange equation for rigid bodies in planar motion. Sounded very interesting. The classroom had a window, and I could tell by the way the trees were waving around that the wind was picking up.

After about three days of trying out the arrangement with Al, I told him that it wasn’t working. His notes were good—I appreciated their thoroughness and the care he was taking to keep his handwriting neat—but basically, I was biding my time every day until the end of class when I could get my hands on his notes and find out what the heck the professor had said. I was bored and wanted to be a more active class participant than the arrangement made possible.

Al and I discussed several possible alternative strategies, and finally, I told him to forget about the carbon paper. Instead, I would sit next to him and copy his notes as he was writing.

“That way,” I told him, “if I have a question in class, or want to say something to participate in the class discussion, you could say it for me, see?” The plan was that if I had anything to say or ask, I’d write it on a piece of paper and have him speak for me.

And it worked. Because I was reading Al’s notes in real time, and his notes were such a good record of what was being said by the professor and even the other students, I was able to interject questions and comments, just by writing them quickly on my own notebook and gesturing to them, indicating to Al that this was to be shared aloud. Sitting shoulder to shoulder, focusing intently on the class together, Al and I came to understand how each other thought. To our amazement, we became close friends for the remainder of the academic year. We studied together, and I found myself tutoring him. Sometimes he had difficulty understanding a theory or how a formula is set up based on a mathematical word problem, and I’d explain how to solve these problems and answer his questions. And I’d ask him questions for clarification of his notes to better help us to understand the points made by the professor or the class discussion. By the end of the year, Al was a straight-A student.

As for me, I did okay grade-wise, but I didn’t get straight As. I’m not sure why my grades were a little lower than Al’s. Maybe it was because I missed the nuances of the lectures and discussions by being deaf. Maybe it was subjective because the professors didn’t know me as well as they would have had I been able to participate in discussions on my own. In any case, we both benefited from our friendship and academic partnership.

MORNINGSIDE COLLEGE’S CAMPUS was tidy and attractive with brick and granite buildings, several newly built dorms, and a modern A-frame church. The campus also had large sycamore trees, a busy library, and a student union where we played cards at round tables and watched sports and news on the one large television pushed to the perimeter of the room, near tall windows. The students were mostly white, from Iowa, and male—the ratio of men to women was something around four to one—although there were a handful of people of color and international students as well. In fact, most of the students at Morningside were from right here in Sioux City and nearby northwest Iowa.

I’d grown up always aware of Morningside College’s existence because it was one of Sioux City’s three four-year colleges. I was a commuter student, and I returned home to my parents’ house each night after classes and studying. (On my very first day of college, my mother announced that evening, “When you left this morning you were a boy, and you’ve returned as a man!”)

I wasn’t sure I was getting the full college experience, though, by still living in the same town, in my childhood house, with my parents. But it was a nice arrangement.

Over the Christmas break, I took a 560-mile train ride from Sioux City to St. Louis to see Vicki, who met me at the train station. Weeks earlier, to my surprise, Vicki’s parents had invited me to stay as a guest at their house and had also kindly arranged for my visit to include meetings with some of my old teachers and friends from CID.

Vicki and I had been writing long letters to each other—fifteen-page, twenty-page, and even one thirty-seven-page letter from her to me—every week since the summer. In her letters, she shared news of friends we had in common, expressed frustration at her parents’ strictness with her, wrote poems, and told funny stories. Through our letters, we learned about each other’s backgrounds, lives, and hopes for the future.

VICKI WAS BORN in Richmond, Virginia, on February 6, 1944. Her mother, Irene Stutson Winer, graduated from Duke University and was a teacher who taught English, French, and piano. Vicki’s biological father, Bernard Abraham Winer, who aspired to be a doctor, died when Vicki was two months old while serving as a reconnaissance photographer in the Army Air Corps during World War II. Irene and Vicki moved in with Irene’s parents in Suffolk, a tiny town about one-and-a-half hours away from Richmond. Vicki’s grandparents, with whom she was very close, hailed from Latvia and Lithuania; her grandfather owned a furniture business and was also into real estate.

Vicki’s mother married Jack Bernstein shortly after they found out that Vicki was deaf when she was three-and-a-half years old. Jack, a New York City native, was a copy editor for the Suffolk News-Herald. Since her grandfather wanted an oral education for her, he went to the library to find information and identified three schools: the Lexington School in New York City, the Clarke School in Boston, and CID in St. Louis. Jack was a journalism graduate of the University of Missouri in Columbia but couldn’t find a job in New York or Boston. The St. Louis Post Dispatch told him he needed a bit more experience in the newspaper field, so Vicki’s family moved to Peoria, Illinois, where he found a job with the Journal Star. While on a waiting list to enter CID, she attended a self-contained classroom for deaf children at the Whitney Elementary School in Peoria for a year and a half.

Vicki as a toddler.

Like me, Vicki had been a young residential student at CID—in her case, beginning when she was five-and-a-half years old when she started a one-year stay at the school until Jack finally got the position that he wanted in St. Louis. She then commuted to CID until she transferred to Dielmann Road Elementary School for the seventh grade. Every Monday while attending CID, she had a letter-writing assignment to her maternal grandparents and aunt in Suffolk, Virginia. For the eighth and ninth grades, she went to the brand-new Ladue Junior High School. During that time, she volunteered as a candy striper at the Jewish Hospital of St. Louis and was active with the B’nai B’rith Girls.

Vicki’s seventh birthday party with her classmates at CID. Her mother Irene Bernstein and sister Linda, Lewis Moehlman, teacher, Jean Erickson, Mrs. Mrs. Monaghan, Kenny Travis, Warren Adolf, Jim Stuckenburg, Marianne Rouse, unknown, Bruce Clement, Donna Bowman, Beth Petree, Kathy McGuigan, and Annelyle Turner.

Vicki’s mother constantly drilled her on her English skills, and her father encouraged her to read books. Since her father did a lot of freelance work, she was encouraged to learn to type on her own from a library book. She often typed news releases from his written notes. She read every biography possible until he encouraged her to read other books too. She also wrote in her letters to me about her worries over schoolwork and tests. I encouraged her to do her best and to listen to her mother, who implored her to focus and excel. But Vicki didn’t enjoy school much and thought she might want to be a professional dancer, rather than go to college but was told she didn’t have much of a chance for a dance career because she was deaf. After graduating from Horton Watkins High School in Ladue, she decided to enroll at William Woods College (now University), a small women’s college in Fulton, Missouri.

Vicki in her first year at William Woods College.

Like me, Vicki did not have any interpreting support in high school or WWC, but she stayed in touch with deaf people by volunteering at the nearby Missouri School for the Deaf. She enjoyed working with elementary school students and tutoring high school students. It was there that she began to learn sign language. Once she met my father, who communicated primarily through sign language, she was even more encouraged to learn how to sign and fingerspell.

Vicki volunteering at the Missouri School for the Deaf.

Her letters were long and beautiful and fun to read. In mine to her, I told her about my friends and classes, my part-time job washing dishes at the Copper Kettle—a coffee shop by the bus depot—and my love of all things related to mathematics. We joked and traded random thoughts, endearments, and full accounts of our days.

In one letter, I wrote: “I showed Gary and Armella (his wife) the big picture of both of us. Armella admitted I am very lucky to have you. I told them that you might be coming for Thanksgiving, and I’d like for them to meet you. They’d love to meet you. Armella asked me if I missed you. I told her, ‘Oh, yes, I miss her very much although it’s been only three weeks since we saw each other. Besides, I got a thirty-seven-page letter from her yesterday.’ Armella exclaimed, ‘That’s too much.’ I talked back to her. ‘Well, remember before you and Gary were married, you used to talk with Gary on the telephone for two to three hours, two or three times a day.’ Gary said, ‘Who me, I never did it’ (slyly). I said, ‘Oh baloney, every time I came over to see you, you were lying on the floor talking and talking and talking for hours and hours.’ Armella then commented, ‘Yes, that’s true. And I don’t blame you and your girlfriend for writing long letters.’ HA!”

I’d made my point. For deaf sweethearts living in different cities, letters were the only available mode of communication. Every day, I made sure to make a stop at the mail room in the student union to see if there might be a letter for me from Vicki. Very often, there was.

Vicki and I on a date.

MY FIRST YEAR AT MORNINGSIDE was over, and the summer stretched before me. I would work, save money, and try to see Vicki in person again. My opportunity came in the shape of the National Congress for Jewish Deaf convention in Washington, DC. Vicki’s family always spent summers in Suffolk and Virginia Beach, so while there, Vicki’s parents drove to Washington so that she could attend the conference with me. I was going to it with my Uncle Max and Aunt Cranie.

On the first day of the convention, Vicki and I were in the hallway of the hotel, outside the small ballroom where the meeting was being held at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park hotel when my aunt and uncle stepped off an elevator and walked toward us. I couldn’t wait for them to meet Vicki and for Vicki to meet them.

“Uncle Max! Aunt Cranie!” We greeted each other, and I introduced Vicki. How wonderful to have my favorite relatives meet my sweetheart, whose beauty and intelligence and friendliness were so apparent to everyone. One evening during the conference, I gave her my high school ring as a commitment, though I told her she was free to date others. She wore it on a chain around her neck. And the next time Uncle Max and Aunt Cranie visited our family in Sioux City, he took me aside in the kitchen and said, “Keep that Vicki!” Even though we lived more than ten hours apart by bus or car, and I was in college, and she was still in high school, I was going to try to do just that.

TO MY DISAPPOINTMENT, Al did not return to Morningside the following year because of financial difficulties. The news was like a dark cloud over me. I didn’t bother seeking out a replacement notetaker through the registrar’s office, knowing from experience how difficult it would be to find someone qualified enough, someone as good as Al. Instead, during the first few days of classes, I looked for a classmate in each class who took a lot of notes. I would sit next to him and explain that I was deaf and needed help with the notes. To my surprise and relief, each of the classmates I approached with this request was willing to share his notes with me, and also agreed to ask questions and make comments for me. Not only did this allow me to succeed in class, but it was also a fine way to develop some new friendships with my classmates. And as had happened with Al, many of my notetakers also became my study partners outside of class.

I had moved out of the house and into the dorms at Morningside. “I decided it was time for me to ‘face the music,’” I wrote to Vicki about the move. My first roommate was an African American guy from Chicago who had played basketball at the legendary Loyola High School. He was one of only four or five Black students in the entire student body that year, and the first Black person I had ever spent more than five minutes with. We hit it off very well, but he left college after his first semester. My second roommate was Woody from Kansas City. When I went to Kansas City for Thanksgiving at my Aunt Sylvia’s, he invited me to meet his family.

Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Henry Katz visiting my parents' home.

That year, I became very close friends with Cyrus Riahi, a classmate who hailed from Tehran, Iran. One time while hanging out in my room, he noticed and stared at a Star of David on my dresser. He asked if I was Jewish, and I said yes. He thought some more and said, “Oh well, it doesn’t matter as long as we are friends.” Cyrus was a charmer and dated a lot of women. He also gave me a gift—handmade silver, beautifully painted cuff links—to give to Vicki, even though they’d never met. Vicki proudly wore them with her blouses for years. After we graduated and even later in life, I looked for Cyrus high and low, but to no avail. I could never locate him. I often wonder how he is.

THAT SPRING ON CAMPUS, the cherry and magnolia trees were in full blossom, and their pink flowers littered the quads. The sidewalks, library, and student union were crowded with students. My classes were going well—they were rigorous and challenging—but I looked forward to transferring to Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, for my upperclass studies. On the other hand, Ames was far away from Vicki too. Maybe I could find a way to get my education closer to her.

Vicki was a junior in high school, and we rarely saw each other, although we still wrote our long letters. What if we grew apart? What if she fell for a boy in her own city? I realized that if I wanted to do my best to ensure our relationship lasted, I should be closer to her. Greenville College, I discovered in my research, was located in Illinois about fifty miles east of St. Louis. Over spring break, I flew to St. Louis to visit with Vicki for a few days. While I was there, I would take a day trip to visit Greenville College.

Out on a date to a formal event with Vicki in St. Louis.

THE BUS TO GREENVILLE left at six in the morning, and no bus returned from Greenville to St. Louis until late that evening, which would give me the whole day to explore the college and the town. I met with the admissions officers, who regaled me with the many special restrictions the college imposed on its students, especially third-year transfer students. For instance—and this was what bothered me the most—I’d have to park my car off-campus and leave the keys with the office because it was the college’s policy for all students. On top of that, Greenville didn’t even have an engineering program, which I should have checked about earlier.

I walked around the campus in a sullen mood. By 10 a.m., I was done. This was not the place for me. As much as I was eager to move on from Morningside and be close to Vicki, what would be the point of moving somewhere smaller, more restrictive, and less able to prepare me for my intended career?

My return bus wasn’t due to depart until six that evening. I walked to the bus depot to see if other buses were going through other towns where I could transfer to another bus to St. Louis. There were none, so I decided to take a chance and hitchhike.

It was a hot day, and I was wearing a black suit and tie. The collar of my starched white shirt was scratchy and tight around my neck. I pulled on the back of it to make a gap and let in some air, but there was no breeze. The sun beat down, and sweat trickled down my back. Cars and trucks zipped by me without stopping, kicking up dust. Whenever I saw a car or a pack of cars nearing me, I stuck out my thumb and put a smile on my face; after two hours, I gave up. Nobody was in the mood to pick up a hitchhiker. I walked across the highway to hitch a ride back into Greenville. I’d have to pass the next five hours on a hard bench in the bus stop.

Then I saw an old car—rusty and blue and emitting black smoke from its tailpipe—chugging slowly over the hill heading west, on the side of the highway I’d just left. I ran back across both lanes and stuck out my thumb. To my great relief, the old car slowed and then stopped. “Come on, get in,” the driver said.

At first, I was hesitant since he was unkempt and smoking a cigarette. His smile was friendly, though, and I really wanted to leave Greenville, so I opened the passenger-side door and lowered myself into the seat. He took off again, and the engine felt rough. I smelled burning oil. He asked me where I was heading, and I told him St. Louis. We talked a bit, and I found out he was from Ohio on his way to California.

“Look in the back!” he told me after a minute.

To my surprise, there on the backseat was an injured man stretched out, and his face grimaced in pain. The driver said he was looking for help for this man, that his back was broken. I wondered how he’d broken his back, but I decided against asking. Maybe he’d fallen, or been in a fight? But why wasn’t he in the hospital?

“Now would be a good time,” I thought to myself, “to get out of this car,” but I watched the miles go by, hoping that we’d reach my destination without anything serious occurring. After about twenty miles, the driver said, “I’m getting sleepy. Can you drive?”

As I drove, I noticed that the gas gauge was nearly empty. “Should we stop for gas?” I asked. He said yes, and I stopped at the next gas station. As I pulled into the gas station lot, I noticed how tight the steering wheel was and that the brakes were nearly shot. It was all I could do to get the car to a complete stop at the tanks before running into them. He got out and filled up the car with gas, then leaned in the window and said, “Can you pay?” Fortunately, I had enough cash in my pant pocket and figured I should at least pay for my way since they were doing me a favor to let me ride. “Will you keep driving until St. Louis?” he asked me, and I agreed I would.

As we crossed the Mississippi River into downtown St. Louis, he told me to keep driving to my girlfriend’s house. The request gave me a quick chill. I didn’t want the injured fugitive or the car’s owner to know, necessarily, where Vicki lived. At the very next red light, I shifted the car into park, got out, closed the door, and walked away from the car as fast as I could. Was he following me? I hazarded a glance back, but the car was still idling at the light, and the car’s owner was still sitting in the passenger seat, his face expressionless.

I walked to the St. Louis Post Dispatch offices, where Vicki’s father worked as an editor for the newspaper’s TV magazine. As soon as I found him, I told him that my trip to Greenville hadn’t worked out well and that I decided to come back early. I didn’t tell him how I’d come back.

AT DINNER, we were five around the dining table—Vicki and I, her parents, and her adorable little sister, Jo Ellen, who was fourteen years younger than Vicki.

“Greenville College wasn’t for me,” I said, “so I’ll keep looking around for something better.”

“Why don’t you look into Washington University, right here in St. Louis?” Vicki’s mother asked me as she began to clear the dishes from the table.

Washington University? It was an elite school, one of the best private research universities in the country.

“I don’t think I could get in there,” I said.

“Well, it can’t hurt to try!” Vicki’s mother said, “Send in an application.”

So, the next week, I did. Much to my surprise, I was accepted.