Dear Elizabeth,
I have read part of Judith Heumann’s book—up to the point where she wins her case against the New York Board of Education, so that she can become a teacher.
Thank you for suggesting the book. In some ways her story parallels mine. She is dealing with a much more severe paralysis than mine, but on the other hand she has both her parents willing to go to bat for her. I am sorry to say that Dad was never a strong supporter of my young life.
Looking back on my early years, I think Dad was always hoping that I would “die young.” I remember him giving me a couple of prayer books when I was about five, and I remember a couple of times when Mom had to scream at him to give me an antibiotic when I had a high fever.
If she threatened to call Dr. Sechrist, the doctor overseeing my birth, Dad moved pretty quickly. I did not understand this at the time, because the one time that I can remember that Dr. Sechrist visited us, before you were born, I am pretty sure that he was actively avoiding Dad. Dr. Sechrist was the doctor supervising my birth, who handed the forceps to my father, and saw my father deliberately crush my hip. At that time, the end of World War II, there was no padding for the device which would re-set my hip bone, so I was released from the hospital without it. (My long-form birth certificate, required when I began taking Social Security, says that my birth was an “attempted abortion.”) As I remember, Dr. Sechrist died when I was about 16, and that’s when Dad started his song and dance about how I did not need friends, I did not need a social life, and I definitely was never, ever going to college.
However, I did receive an actual, real-life National Merit Scholarship, and the nuns at OLP wanted bragging rights about it, so Sister Evelyn Joseph arranged for me to go up to the College for Women and fill out an application on the weekend before graduation, so that I could receive an acceptance. Mom then spent the whole summer arguing with Dad about whether I could actually attend the college. (He had torn up and thrown away my scholarship papers the minute I showed them to him —“Nobody’s going to want you when they see you!”— so there was never any question about my actually getting any money.)
I will say that living at 120 East Palm during the years when I was out of school was truly a gift for me. So many books, collected from both our grandmother Belle’s years as a teacher and our great-grandmother Julia’s years as a teacher… As you may know, when I took the required fourth-grade California state assessment test (from Miss Lang, the children’s librarian in Redlands, because I had not been in regular school that year) it showed that I was reading six years above my grade level. It did not mean much to me at the time, but it meant that I was statistically valuable to any school thereafter.
I always felt rather isolated from the world as I was growing up. Dad actively discouraged any social life for me (although Mom was of a different opinion) and he was always very, very slow about accomplishing any medical treatments. But my physical impediments were not nearly as severe as Ms. Neumann’s, and I was lucky enough to meet a nice young man who thought that the smartest teacher he’d ever had as a kid was Mr. Dorsey, who happened to be a polio survivor.
Thank you again for suggesting the book.