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Henry Kisor’s segment on Deaf Mosaic
(See Deaf Mosaic #702, aired June 1991)
Meet a man of many talents: Best-selling author,
newspaper editor, literary critic. Meet Henry Kisor, book
editor of the Chicago Sun Times.
“I was not born deaf. I lost my hearing
when I was three and a half years old. I was a precocious
child. I already had a lot of language before I lost my hearing.
And my parents made me read. Not only did they make me read;
they made me read to them. I grew up thinking that written
English was the most beautiful language on earth.”
For a man with a life-long love of language,
Henry Kisor has the perfect job—reading books. As book editor
of the Chicago Sun Times, he assigns new books to reviewers
and writes a regular column on whatever subject catches his fancy,
frequently baseball or railroading. The Sunday Book Page is
his creation, from layout to headlines. One major editorial
responsibility, interviewing authors like best-selling Scott Turow,
demands a combination of communication tools.
“Some people are every easy to lipread.
So what I do is tape the interview on a small cassette tape recorder
and have a transcript typed up. When I wrote What’s that
Pig Outdoors, people wanted to interview me on the phone,
but I couldn’t do that of course, so we’d conduct an interview with
a fax machine. We went back and forth, back and forth.
It took a long time, but it was better than nothing.”
Having published a successful book, he
is now working on a new book about trains, his preferred method
of travel. “You have time to contemplate, time to read, time
to talk to people. When I meet people, they will be in the
lounge car or the dining car, and people will say something to me.
I will say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand that. I’m
deaf, but I read lips. Would you repeat that?” Many
times, they will say, “Oh, that’s very interesting. I have
a cousin Matilda who is deaf.” We will talk about my deafness.
And when we’ve worn out that subject, we can go on to a different
one.
From the beginning of their marriage, Debby Kisor
has contributed to her husband’s professional success. “Years
ago, when I was a young newspaper man, and I wanted to interview
authors, the newspaper I worked for, The Chicago Daily News,
wouldn’t pay anybody to transcribe the interviews. But Deb
knew how important it was to me to start doing this, to try it out,
see if it works. So she typed up the tapes for nothing.
Very few wives would do that for their husbands, day in and day
out. Family is probably the most important thing in the successful
adjustment of any deaf person to society. It is so difficult,
I imagine, for the parent of a deaf child to know what to do.
Has the child been pushed too hard? Has the child not been
pushed enough? I think my parents somehow found a good equilibrium
between those two. They allowed me to make my own mistakes.
And to learn from them. I am often asked by parents with hearing
children why their children don’t read. I go into their houses;
there are no books. The parents don’t read. If the parents
don’t read, the children won’t read either. This is also true
of deaf children.
Throughout his life, Henry Kisor has had to deal
with questions of communication, not only understanding, but being
understood. “It takes time and effort to meet a hearing person
more than halfway. I consider myself successful at having
done that when the hearing person stops listening to how I say something
and starts paying attention to what I said. But, if I am to
function as a deaf person in the hearing world, I have to make the
effort. Sometimes it’s not worth it. I have felt for
a long time that deaf people fight too much among themselves about
methods of communication and methods of teaching children.
My feeling is that every deaf person should use what he or she feels
comfortable with. The oral method has stood me in good stead
for fifty, . . . forty seven years I see no need to change
or to learn another method. I’ve traveled around the country
for my book, doing publicity for it. I met a lot of deaf people:
oral deaf people, signing deaf people, people in both worlds.
Very few of them were hostile towards me. They seemed proud
of what I did, just as I was proud of what they did. The people
who were hostile to me chiefly were hearing people, hearing educators
of the deaf. They couldn’t stand it that someone had been
successful using a philosophy different from theirs. That
is stupid. I think, as deaf people take more and more responsibility
for themselves, for their own education, for their community, things
may change. I hope so.
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