6

Love at Second Sight

IN MY FOURTH YEAR as a newspaper delivery boy, I received a scholarship from the Sioux City Journal to attend Morningside College, a local four-year liberal arts college. It was a recognition of my successful years on the route as well as my academic record.

A reporter came to the house to interview me. He asked about my high school classes, my career ambitions, my dedicated paper delivery, and the highs and lows of delivering the paper.

“This is great, thank you,” he told me after we’d spoken for about twenty minutes. “My story about you should be in the paper next Sunday.”

Close to midnight on Saturday, our doorbell rang. This caused a series of lights to flash throughout the house, which woke us all up. My father pulled on his robe and rushed to the door, and I was not far behind him. Bob Dunnington, a deaf friend of my parents, stood on the doorstep. Bob worked as a Linotype operator at the Journal, and he wanted to alert me that the article was hitting the presses with the title, “Deaf Mute Successful on a Route.”

Mute? I wasn’t mute! I was shocked and thanked Bob for letting us know.

I grabbed a dictionary, jumped into my car, and drove to the Journal. I looked around for the night editor and found him, a balding man in his fifties getting the paper ready for printing. I pushed the open dictionary toward him, pointing to the word mute. I read the definition aloud to him: “speechless or unable to think.”

“Oh, gosh!” he said, pushing his glasses up on his head and rubbing his eyes. He looked up at me, embarrassed. “I’m so sorry, son! How about we change ‘mute’ to ‘dumb?’”

“That’s worse!” I said, flipping as quickly as I could to the “D” section of the dictionary. “Here,” I said, showing him that “dumb” was defined as “speechless and unintelligent.”

He was dumbfounded and seemingly stumped. He tapped his front teeth with his index finger, squinting his eyes. “Well,” he said at last, “I’ll think of a better way to describe you.”

I stood there wondering if I could trust him to come up with a better title since he had already suggested two inappropriate words. I decided to hope for the best, and I thanked him and left. The first thing the next morning, with something like dread, I looked for the article in our newspaper. There it was, accompanied by a large picture of me wearing my winter coat and standing with my favorite customer, the ninety-year-old lady, at her door: “Journal Boy Not Bothered by Handicap.” Phew! Disaster averted. (Today, many decades later, we do not use the word handicap to describe deaf people and other people with disabilities; at the time, however, I was just happy not to be described as “dumb.”)

Since I already had a scholarship from the Sioux City Journal to attend Morningside College in Sioux City, I decided to apply there. After I was accepted, I met with the registrar to prepare for my entry into the preengineering program that had a 2+3 arrangement with the Iowa State University School of Engineering in Ames. This program would allow me to study preengineering at Morningside for the first two years and then transfer to Iowa State for the last three years, enabling me to earn two degrees: a bachelor’s in mathematics from Morningside and a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Iowa State. Nice deal!

I tried to talk my friend Dennis into coming to Morningside with me.

“It’ll be fun. It’s a good school. It’s coed!” I told him. But he had no interest in going to college, any college.

“I might join the Navy,” Dennis told me. The military had been his idea all that year. I encouraged him to sign up, and one day that summer, he informed me that he’d applied and been accepted by the Navy.

“I’ll get to see the world,” he joked, “but unlike in the Army, I won’t have to walk the whole way.” He was supposed to get on the bus to the naval training academy in the middle of June, but he backed out at the last minute. His new enlistment date was set for July, but again, he backed out of getting on the bus at the last minute.

In August, a few weeks before I was to leave for Morningside, I told Dennis, “You’ve got to do it! Hey, I’ll drive you myself.” We packed his stuff into my car and drove him down to the bus depot. We hugged. I watched him hand over his suitcase to the driver to put under the bus and then walk up the stairs to take a window seat. He gave me a goofy smile—half-excited, half-scared. He waved. I waved. I waited until the bus pulled out of the lot and disappeared around the corner. I was relieved he was finally on his way.

THE SUMMER OF 1961, after my high school graduation, with Morningside College firmly in my future, the world looked bright. I’d faced the challenge of public school with hearing students and hearing teachers, and I’d prevailed. By taking my education into my own hands, working the extra hours in the library, and building relationships with my teachers and some of my classmates and neighbors, I’d come out of that bad place, where I was alone, confused, and failing. I had worked many jobs and earned and saved enough money to buy myself no fewer than three cars since turning sixteen. And I’d chosen a career path.

Since my mother was also an alumna, she had come with me to St. Louis for my first CID reunion, but she was staying with one of her old friends, while I was sharing a hotel room with my classmate, Bill, from Georgia. I was happy to see my old friends whom I hadn’t seen for five years. We talked about our experiences in high school, and some of them (those who hadn’t repeated eighth grade as I had) told the rest of us about their first year in college.

Bill and I, along with our classmate Karl, walked into the Roosevelt Hotel for lunch. The hotel’s café featured a 1950s fountain-type counter with stools, and right away, I spied four other CID alums sitting in a booth. They were about the same age as us. One of them, a girl named Vicki, turned to see us walk in, and she said “Hi” to us. I shyly said “Hi” back, and turned around to sit at the counter and order my lunch.

After they were done with lunch, Vicki stopped next to me on their way out. “Do you remember me?” she asked.

“Yeah, I do,” I said, and then, because I couldn’t think of anything good to say next, went back to eating my lunch. Vicki and her friends walked away.

I did remember her from school. She’d been a little girl, about eight years old the last time I’d seen her. I remembered that she did solo dancing on the stage at CID. She was a good and graceful dancer and a cute and pretty girl, but I hadn’t cared much for her at CID. I remembered her as always talking and telling others what to do, and I thought she was somewhat bossy. But at the café, I was surprised to see that she had become a beautiful young lady with a great personality. She must still be in high school, I realized.

Later that evening, another friend and I, late going to an alumni event on the four-level Admiral steamboat on the Mississippi River, raced through red lights in his car, speeding down empty streets near the river. It was sheer luck that he didn’t get any traffic tickets. We screeched abruptly into a parking space by the pier and jumped out of the car. The crew was pulling up the ramp to the boat but waited a moment when they saw us, two desperate teens, rushing toward them.

We hadn’t had time to eat dinner before getting on the boat, and I was hungry, so I went to get two hot dogs with all the trimmings. As I walked down the stairs to join the alumni group, Vicki happened to walk by. She gave me a small smile, and I smiled back and stopped to talk with her. She glanced meaningfully at my hot dogs and asked, “Are you hungry?”

“Yes!” I said. We could read each other’s lips easily, which was very helpful, given that I was carrying hot dogs in both hands and Vicki didn’t know “sign language” as we called it in those days. We talked while we walked until we joined our classmates, and then we sat next to each other and continued to chat away the rest of the evening. Later in the evening, I noticed that Vicki was cold, and so I gave her my jacket to cover her shoulders. We felt that we could talk together forever. Our eyes kept meeting, and when they did, it felt warm and exciting and right.

Back on land the next day, another alumnus came up to me and said, “Leave Vicki alone. She’s my girlfriend, so back off.” My reaction to his order surprised me. I felt not an inkling of backing off. “I don’t know that,” I told him with a shrug. He wanted to fight with me, so I said, “Fine, let’s go outside.” He decided to back off and left.

Vicki found out about our near skirmish from one of her friends and was furious at the other guy. She told him off, saying she was neither his girlfriend nor his property. Vicki was only seventeen but clearly had the maturity to handle it. I didn’t know she knew what happened until she told me years later.

That same day, we all got on buses to go to Grant’s Farm, an old St. Louis landmark and home to many different animals, including the famed Budweiser horses, for an all-day alumni event. I was on one bus and Vicki was on the other. After we got off the buses, I looked for her and found her, and when I ran into my mother, I introduced them to each other.

After a full day, we went back to our assigned buses, where my former classmate, Steve, from Ottawa, Canada, and I sat together. He was dating an alumna from Minnesota who was staying with Vicki at her home in St. Louis and was with her on the other bus. As we waited on the parked bus, looking out the window at the other bus, I asked Steve whether Vicki was dating anyone. When he asked me why I said I wanted to ask her to be my date to the banquet on the last night of the reunion. Steve jumped off the bus and ran to the next bus where Vicki was. As that bus began to pull away, Steve jumped back off of it and ran back to ours. He plunked himself down in his seat beside me, grinning. He’d asked Vicki point-blank if she was committed to anyone, he said, and Vicki had, without hesitation, replied, “No way!” and asked why. “I told her you wanted to ask her to go to the banquet with you, and Vicki said, ‘Tell him YES!’” I was flattered; boy, did it feel good.

We got off the buses at an alumnus’s home for a barbecue. Vicki saw my mother and told her that I had just asked her to the banquet. My mother was thrilled about this and chatted with Vicki for a bit.

The next day, Vicki and I decided to walk around Forest Park across the street from CID. As we walked, we talked a lot and eventually sat on a bench with a great view of a large pond glittering in the sun. Several groups of ducks and two large swans swam in little clusters on the surface of the water. Before we knew it, we kissed each other. We suddenly noticed a few alumni walking on the other side of the pond quite a distance away from us. We smiled but continued chatting.

“What time will you pick me up?” she asked, referring to the next evening’s banquet.

“4:00 p.m. and I’ll be riding on a motorcycle and wearing my leather jacket,” I said. At first, she thought that I was serious.

On one of our first dates at the CIDAA reunion in 1961.

That night, there was another alumni event at a bowling alley. Vicki and I had fun bowling and talking. She was so beautiful in her yellow dress. We decided to walk outside to the back of the building, where we passionately kissed each other. A short time later, we walked back to the front, and Vicki was petrified to see her father. His face was red with anger, and he was waiting to take her home. He commanded Vicki to get into the car, and as they drove off, I thought I was doomed. To my relief, she was still full of life the next day, and we continued to spend time together. I learned later that her father was more protective of Vicki than of his two younger, hearing daughters. Vicki’s mother, on the other hand, was happy because she remembered seeing my picture and reading about my interview with the newspaper in the CID Newsnotes.

BEFORE I WENT TO COLLEGE, one of my last jobs was chasing turkeys. It was a one-time all-night job that some of my friends asked me to join them in doing. We were in the back of a pickup truck. The sun was sinking below the flat horizon, all orange and gold. I was glad I’d thought to wear my denim jacket because it was windy in the back of the truck. We laughed at the hair whipping into our eyes. The truck slowed and turned into a dirt driveway. We had arrived at the turkey farm. The farmer told us what to do, and it sounded pretty simple: “Go out to the field, catch turkeys, and when you catch one, bring it to this fenced area to be vaccinated. Then, dump the ones that have been vaccinated into this other fenced area.”

Farmed turkeys are not that hard to catch (they can’t fly), but it does take some scrambling, some sprinting. They can lay their necks down, point their heads forward, and race, their heads bobbing forward and back with each step. You had to set your sights on one, then go for it. The hardest part is after you’ve already gotten your hands around a turkey. The turkeys fought us with strong legs and sharp toenails. The best thing to do was hold it by its body out far away from your body as you carried it to the corral. We repeated that process, turkey after turkey after turkey, all night long. I estimate I personally caught sixty to eighty turkeys. There was a crescent moon in the dark sky, and electric lights strung to the shoulder-high fence around the turkeys. After about twelve hours of chasing and catching, we finished the job early the next morning. We rode back into town in the back of the same truck, with the low morning sun climbing up from the fields and lighting a gentle dawn. Then we all went out to a restaurant for a hearty breakfast of eggs, sausages, and big buttermilk pancakes soaked in strawberry syrup. It had been an exhilarating and surreal experience. I felt elated and also ready for college.