My stuttering is a result of polio, which I had while in Vermont at age five. We were there for the summer at my grandparents’ house and my father drove up for a few days every few weeks. The house was twenty miles of dirt roads away from the nearest doctor. The family doctor, an osteopath, drove up every day to give me a treatment, trying to keep my muscles working, which was mostly successful.
As a kid, stuttering was just part of life and I wasn’t really aware of it. When I was seven, my parents noticed me hitting my right thigh with my fist. This was my way of interrupting the stuttering, but it caused a constant bruise. A speech therapist came to the house to work with me every week. She told me to relax when I had trouble saying something, instead of hitting my thigh. While this took me a long time to learn, it was something that my parents could remind me of when they saw me hitting my leg.
As I was writing this post, I wondered whether I’m an introvert because of the stuttering and whether they are associated. A brief search led to opinions about it, but nothing remotely scientific. My impression is that I would have been an introvert regardless. The introversion made a bigger impact because my father was a naval officer, so we moved every 2-4 years – requiring me to make new friends.
At School
There was little effect of my stuttering in school, both the teachers and other students seemed to accept it without comment, until high school. I went to high school in Long Beach, CA – with 4,000 students. We lived in quarters on the base, and the Navy provided a bus to and from school. While I had spent a year in a local junior high, it didn’t feed that high school so the few friends I had made there didn’t help. So I entered the school knowing no one except the few others from the base. The only thing that helped me was that the school was “tracked”, separated into classes by perceived ability. This meant I was generally with the same students. Gym class was the problem.
Gym class wasn’t tracked, I was in class with kids that were larger, stronger, and more mature. While I’d been active, the polio had left me generally weak – so I was a safe butt for taunting about stuttering, and anything else. Mostly, it didn’t affect me outside of gym class, but one day I was running somewhere and ran through a classroom building. A student from my gym class who enjoyed taunting me tripped me as I entered; I flew halfway across the building and slid the rest – anyway, it felt like that. I got up and continued running, hearing the laughter behind me. I’ve always wondered if that would have occurred without the stuttering. And I still remember the incident with all the intensity of when it happened.
The only other place that stuttering affected me was when I met a girl I found attractive. Not only did the stuttering make asking her out more difficult, my concern about it frequently kept me from doing so.
Stuttering When Teaching
In the first night of my First Teaching Gig the class didn’t go as I’d expected, and my nervousness caused stronger stuttering – which declined when the evening improved. That was the only time I really thought about the stuttering until an event at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
It was the last class of the course. At the beginning of each class I had a piece of paper that the students could sign, saying they were not prepared. This meant that I wouldn’t call on them for the first third of the class unless they raised their hand. For that class, every person signed the paper! When the class started it became apparent that they had completely prepared for the class, but wanted to talk about other things. So it became a general discussion about life, school, and work. Along the way I asked them how my stuttering affected the class. They said that they noticed it for the first couple of classes, and never noticed it after that. I’m now in my late 70s, I still stutter, and don’t care.
April 9, 2020
Fred, I’m glad you wrote this.