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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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