MY SEARCH CONTINUES

My parents’ efforts to have me cured, however, did not cease with my visit to the medicine man. We were still looking for something that would bring relief. My teacher, Miss Cora Critchlow, handed me an advertisement one day, telling me of a man who claimed to be able to cure stammering by mail. In the hope that I would get some good from the treatment, my parents sent this mail order man a large sum of money. In return for this I was furnished with instructions to do a number of useless things, such as holding toothpicks between my teeth, talking through my nose, whistling before I spoke a word, and many other foolish things. It was at this time that I learned once and for all, the imprudence of throwing money away on these mail order “cures,” so-called, and I made up my mind to bother no more with this man and his kind.

So far as the mail order instructions were concerned, they were crude and unscientific merely a hodge-podge of pseudo-technical phraseology and crass ignorance a meaningless jargon scarcely intelligible to the most highly educated, and practically impossible of interpretation by the average stammerer who was supposed to follow the course. Even after I had, by persistent effort, interpreted the instructions and followed them closely for many months, there was not a sign of the slightest relief from my trouble. It was evident to me even then that I could never cure myself by following a mail cure.

Today, after twenty-eight years of experience in the cure of stammering, I can say with full authority, that stammering cannot be successfully treated by mail. The very nature of the difficulty, as well as the method of treatment, make it impossible to put the instructions into print or to have the stammerer follow out the method from a printed sheet.

As I approached manhood, my impediment began to get worse. My stuttering changed to stammering. Instead of rapidly repeating syllables or words, I was unable to begin a word. I stood transfixed, my limbs drawing themselves into all kinds of unnatural positions. There were violent spasmodic movements of the head, and contractions of my whole body. The muscles of my throat would swell, affecting the respiratory organs, and causing a curious barking sound. When I finally got started, I would utter the first part of the sentence slowly, gradually increase the speed, and make a rush toward the end.

At other times, when attempting to speak, my lips would pucker up, firmly set together, and I would be unable to separate them, until my breath was exhausted. Then I would gasp for more breath, struggling with the words I desired to speak, until the veins of my forehead would swell, my face would become red, and I would sink back, wholly unable to express myself, and usually being obliged to resort to writing.

These paroxysms left me extremely nervous and in a seriously weakened condition. After one of these attacks, the cold perspiration would break out on my forehead in great beads and I would sink into the nearest chair, where I would be compelled to remain until I had regained my strength.

My affliction was taking all my energy, sapping my strength, deadening my mental faculties, and placing me at a hopeless disadvantage in every way. I could do nothing that other people did. I appeared unnatural. I was nervous, irritable, despondent. This despondency now brought about a peculiar condition. I began to believe that everyone was more or less an enemy of mine. And still worse, I came to believe that I was an enemy of myself, which feeling threw me into despair, the depths of which I do not wish to recall, even now.

I was not only miserably unhappy myself, I made everyone else around me unhappy, although I did it, not intentionally, but because my affliction had caused me to lose control of myself.

In this condition, my nerves were strained to the breaking point all day long, and many a night I can remember crying myself to sleep crying purely to relieve that stored-up nervous tension, and f ailing off to sleep as a result of exhaustion.

As I said before, there were periods of grace when the trouble seemed almost to vanish and I would be delighted to believe that perhaps it was gone forever happy hope! But it was but a delusion, a mirage in the distance, a new road to lead me astray. The affliction always returned, as every stammerer knows returned worse than before. All the hopes that I would outgrow my trouble, were found to be false hopes. For me, there was no such thing as outgrowing it and I have since discovered that after the age of six only one-fifth of one per cent. ever outgrow the trouble.

Another thing which I always thought peculiar when I was a stammerer was the fact that I had practically no difficulty in talking to animals when I was alone with them. I remember very well that we had a large bulldog called Jim, which I was very fond of. I used to believe that Jim understood my troubles better than any friend I had, unless it was Old Sol, our family driving horse.

Jim used to go with me on all my jaunts I could talk to him by the hour and never stammer a word. And Old Sol well, when everything seemed to be going against me, I used to go out and talk things over with Old Sol. Somehow he seemed to understand he used to whinney softly and rub his nose against my shoulder as if to say, “I understand, Bennie, I understand!”

Somehow my father had discovered this peculiarity of my affliction that is, my ability to talk to animals or when alone. Something suggested to him that my stammering could be cured, if I could be kept by myself for several weeks. With this thought in mind, he suggested that I go on a hunting and fishing trip in the wilds of the northwest, taking no guide, no companion of any sort, so that there would be no necessity of my speaking to any human being while I was gone.

My father’s idea was that if my vocal organs had a complete rest, I would be restored to perfect speech. As I afterwards proved to my own satisfaction by actual trial, this idea was entirely wrong. You can not hope to restore the proper action of your vocal organs by ceasing to use them. The proper functioning of any bodily organ is the result, not of ceasing to use it at all, but rather of using it correctly.

This can be very easily proved to the satisfaction of any one. Take the case of the small boy who boasts of his muscle. He is conscious of an increasing strength in the muscles of his arm not because he has failed to use these muscles but because he has used them continually, causing a faster-than-ordinary development.

You can readily imagine that I looked forward to my “vacation” with keen anticipation, for I had never been up in the northwest and I was full of stories I had read and ideas I had formed of its wonders.

The trip, lasting two weeks, did me scarcely any good at all. The most I can say for it is that it quieted my nerves and put me in somewhat better physical condition, which a couple of weeks in the outdoor country would do for any growing boy.

But this trip did not cure my stammering, nor did it tend to alleviate the intensity of the trouble in the least, save through a lessened nervous state for a few days. Today, after twenty-eight years’ experience, I know that it would be just as sensible to say that a wagon stuck in the soft mud would get out by “resting” there as it is to say that stammering can be eradicated by allowing the vocal organs to rest through disuse.

Shortly after my return from the trip to the northwest, my father died, with the result that our household was, for a time, very much broken up. For a while, at least, my stammering, though not forgotten, did not receive a great deal of attention, for there were many other things to think about.

The summer following my father’s death, however, I began again my so-far fruitless search for a cure for my stammering, this time placing myself under the care and instruction of a man claiming to be “The World’s Greatest Specialist in the Cure of Stammering.” He may have been the world’s greatest specialist, but not in the cure of stammering. He did succeed, however, by the use of his absurd methods, in putting me through a course that resulted in the membrane and lining of my throat and vocal organs becoming irritated and inflamed to such an extent that I was compelled to undergo treatment for a throat affection that threatened to be as serious as the stammering itself.

I tried everything that came to my attention first one thing and then another but without results. Still I refused to be discouraged. I kept on and on, my mother constantly encouraging and reassuring me. And you will later see that I found a method that cured me.

There are always those who stand idly about and say, “It can’t be done!” Such people as these laughed at Fulton with his steamboat, they laughed at Stephenson and his steam locomotive, they laughed at Wright and the airplane.

They say, “It can’t be done” but it is done, nevertheless.

I turned a deaf ear to the people who tried to convince me that it couldn’t be done. I had a firm belief in that old adage, “Where there is a will there is a way,” and I made another of my own, which said, “I will find a way or make one!”

And I did!