Deaf Hearing Boy: A Memoir

6. Sherry School (1950)

6 Sometime in January 1950, several weeks after we have moved from Toledo to the farm, I am headed to the schoolyard at Sherry School. As I move to get off the bus, I feel a hard shove and grab the side rails along the steps to keep from rolling out the bus door and into the slush and mud of the drive. No one looks at me, no one shows any signs of guilt. The school looms gray and forbidding in the early dawn, like Lowood School in Jane Eyre, its belfry prominent against the treeless horizon. I go in, hang up my coat, put my lunchbox on the shelf, and go to my seat. I see one of the Nelson kids bent over another desk close by. Mrs. Custer, our teacher, is busy outside, herding kids in for the opening of the day. The Nelson kid turns to me, puts his mouth next to my right ear, and says, “Hey, Miller, CAN YOU HEAR ME? HAHAHAHA!” I come up from my seat swinging and graze his chin. He hits me with a powerful blow to my right ear, the ear that always has infections, and the tears well up in 91 Sherry School (1950) 92 Sherry School (1950) my eyes. But I manage to hold them back. I can feel the ache begin deep inside my head, and I know it will develop into a full-blown earache. Mrs. Custer comes in and says, “What’s going on in here?” No one says a word, especially not me. ❦ When we moved back to the farm, I had no idea what kind of school I would be attending. I had been coddled by an urban education that included field trips to museums, concerts, firehouses, and police stations and that also included structured playtime, educational assemblies, and one of the best physical facilities in the city. What a surprise was in store for me when I stepped off the bus to see Sherry School, a one-room, dilapidated, clapboard building with a belfry but no bell and, out back, two rickety, unpainted outhouses, one for each sex. The schoolhouse was heated by a coal stove cased in a metal jacket, which was fired up each morning by Bud Rohlf, an eighthgrader who lived close by. The four older grades were taught at Sherry, and the four younger ones at Kiser School. Because I was in the sixth grade, I attended Sherry while Dick, in the fourth grade, went to Kiser. Today, Sherry School has been restored and is now on display at the Auglaize Village Museum, off U.S. 24 west of Defiance, on Krouse Road. I happened to spot it one day in the 1970s when I was driving around the countryside with my wife and children. We stopped and went inside it, and I showed them where I had sat in sixth grade. I have to confess, they were mightily underwhelmed. ❦ One afternoon at recess, as I am walking past some seventh graders, I catch a little bit of their conversation, which goes something like this Sherry School (1950) 93 (in low tones): “There’s that Miller kid, he’s got them deef-and-dumb folks, you know, they can’t hear.” Another kid: “Yeah, more dumb than deef I hear. Ha, ha, get it? ‘I hear’?” At that point, I jump the garbage-mouth and promptly get the shit kicked out of me. ❦ After a while, once the kids got the message that, even if I got knocked around, I wasn’t going to take the insults, they stopped. If I hadn’t stood my ground, their tortures would have gotten worse. True to my nature, which I shared with my dad, I was not a fighter , but I learned soon enough that, if you were going to survive or at least have a tolerable life at that school, you had to be willing to fight, even if you lost every fight you got into, and I lost quite a few. On that first school day in January, Dick and I were put on the bus in the dark. We rode together for more than an hour, objects of curiosity, until I was let off at Sherry and Dick was taken on to Kiser. Mom had cleaned us up, put nice city clothes on us, and generally Sherry school (restored), Auglaize Village, Defiance, Ohio, c...