Deaf Hearing Boy: A Memoir

8. High School (1952–1956)

8 In the fall of 1952, I was bused off to an even more elegant school building, Defiance High School (now the middle school), where, for the first time in a long while, I was rubbing shoulders with kids very much like the ones I had grown up with in Toledo. As a consequence, I fared a little better than my classmates from Defiance Township School, yet I was still very much out of my element. As I mentioned earlier, my parents were still struggling financially. Buying me clothes for high school was an incredible burden for them because students were not allowed to wear jeans. So I found myself in the situation of trying to succeed in a crowd of smart, affluent, middle-class town kids while my parents could barely afford to even have me in school. In some cases, friends of mine from the farms dropped out of school because of the cost. Every fall, my parents shouldered the burden to come up with enough money to outfit their kids for school, especially the one in high school. 116 High School (1952–1956) High School (1952–1956) 117 In the fall of 1952, I am thrust as a freshman into the social whirl of high school. Helen Potts asks me to the Turkey Trot, the biggest social event of the fall. Helen is originally a city girl; her father bought the old George Newton farm and moved the family out to the country a short mile up the road from us toward Defiance. I have a secret crush on this gorgeous , sandy-haired, vivacious girl, but she’s more a pal than a girlfriend. So far, our relationship has been all been buddy-buddy, and I suspect she’s asked me out of compassion, but I don’t care. That evening, I tell Mom that Helen has asked me to the dance. Mom is ecstatic and goes into high gear; nothing propels her into action more than a social event. Because the dance is “ladies’ choice,” Helen pays for the tickets, which saves me some money, and I get the flowers. Dad is dragooned into doing the driving. Grandma agrees to let me take some money out of the bank to cover the flowers. Only one hitch remains: clothes. Somehow, my parents scrape up a few dollars, and Mom and I go off on a shopping trip to Defiance, not to the fancy menswear shops such as Pixler’s or Sherman’s but to J. C. Penney’s.There, we find the cheapest sports coat, a pair of passable trousers, and a tie, and my ultra-cheap wardrobe is complete. Luckily, I have a decent pair of shoes that will pass. At the dance, everything is too weird. Helen is way out of my league. She moves in another world at school, and I sense from the way her friends react to me that I am a real bumpkin in this crowd, with my homecut hair and my ill-fitting coat with cuffs that hang down to my knuckles and rear flap that rides up unflatteringly on my butt. But Helen’s a good sport, doesn’t lose her poise, and we have a good time. We end the evening at a party at Carolyn Ingle’s, where we all try to pass out by hyperventilating into a paper bag—hot times for fourteen-year-olds! When Dad brings me home, Mom is waiting. She says, “Bobby, now you have a girlfriend, this is a good thing for you. Helen is a wonderful girl!” 118 High School (1952–1956) I reply, “Sure, Mom.” Then I go upstairs. How can they understand? How can I explain it to them, who I really am—just the kid of Deaf parents who’s lucky even to get a foot in the door. ❦ My mother’s romantic aspirations for me were so wide of the mark that I didn’t even bother to try to make her understand what kind of a place Defiance High School was, with its glitzy girls in expensive poodle skirts, who exuded health and wealth, and their male counterparts in their convertibles, their “hot cars,” who displayed their immaculate smiles and their tanned, muscled bodies. I wasn’t alone, but I and others who were not in that exclusive group lived in a world apart. Defiance in the ’50s was a much different place...