I feel lucky in the way I found speech and language pathology, because I certainly didn't know anything about it when I was growing up. But how I got into it started with my sister. And when she was born, she sort of changed our family because she was born very, very disabled. She had very severe Cerebral Palsy. And there were no services available for people with disabilities then unless you were paying for it privately. And our family was working class and they had seven kids and they really didn't have any money. And it really changed my family. I mean, my mother became very depressed and my father started drinking more than he had even been drinking before. And it was devastating to the family. And so first being raised Catholic and being very fervent, I would sprinkle holy water on her. I would pray to God all the time. I would make deals with God. That if like, he would get one of her legs working, it would be okay if one of my legs didn't work. She was very, very disabled. She never learned how to walk or talk or could feed herself. She was basically like an infant.
So I set about trying to teach my sister how to talk. And one day I had gotten her propped up in such a way and I had practiced enough with her that I told her that I was gonna call my mother in. And that when Mom came in, that then I wanted her to say ‘hi’, which is what I had taught her to say. And my mom walked in the room and now you're thinking like my mom's kind of depressed already to begin with. And she walks in the room and I say to her, I say to Margaret, say ‘hi’ to mom. And Margaret does. She says, ‘ah-hi’, which is how you say hi when you inhale. And I thought it was really cool that I had taught her how to say hi, but my mother just turned around and walked out of the room and never said anything about it. And that was pretty devastating to me because I just really didn't understand why my mom didn't think that this was really great, like, look, she can do this.
My first job that I went to was in a very impoverished area called the Northeast Kingdom. And I worked there with preschoolers. And I met my first child who didn’t speak at all. And I was really confronted with the fears that I had from when I tried to teach my sister who couldn't talk at all. It's called the Northeast Kingdom. And I worked there with this boy. And he just understood everything I said to him. He should have been able to talk, but he just, anything I tried, he just looked at me and shook his head, no. He wasn't gonna do it. So one day I was like in such a panic, he came to the clinic and I just forgot everything that I learned in graduate school about how you're supposed to be a professional. And I just remembered my sister and that when I would play with her, I would just do things that she really liked the best. And so I just, I picked him up, I took him, I put him in my car and I drove to a horse stable where there was a baby horse there. And his mother had told me he liked baby animals. And when we got ready to leave the stable, he ran up to the horses and I heard him speak. I heard him say, ‘bye bye, horsey.’ And so when the next day he came into the clinic, I had gotten some new books, some Sesame Street books that I knew he liked Sesame Street. And he climbed in my lap and I, you know, I was basically, you know, he's pointing to the books and I'm like, yeah, David, I know, I know, I know you like Sesame Street, but it was so much fun with you at the stable yesterday. And I heard you talk to the horses. I heard you say bye-bye to the horses. So now that I know that you really can talk, I want you to tell me who this is. And he just looked at me and he said, oh, that's
Ernie. And after that, he opened page after page of the book and he did have problems speaking. He sounded funny when he spoke. And it's because he had what's called the repaired cleft palate, which is a hole in the roof of your mouth, but it had been repaired when he was a baby. And so he knew that he sounded different and we would spend, you know, many months working on making his speech better. But that initial when I got to be the person who got to hear him speak first, just like I got to hear my sister speak first, that one word.