What's That Pig Outdoors? by Henry Kisor

not lipread every last word they said), I might ask Mr. Epler to call the teacher and get the details. He would gently suggest that if determining such academic details was a hearing student’s responsibility, why couldn’t it be mine as well? He seemed to believe, like Mother, that in the end only I could discover my limits, and in his subtle way he encouraged me to expand them as much as I could. I owe him a great deal.
    In no manner was I a brilliant student. Throughout my high school career I earned respectable grades, mostly B’s but with the occasional A and a few C’s, chiefly in algebra and physics. This was in the laid-back 1950s, remember, when a decent C-plus high school average could get you into a respectable college provided your Scholastic Aptitude Test scores were satisfactory. I was no slacker, but neither was I a humorless grind. There was just too much else to do. I was still active at the Y, and competitive swimming was a serious sport at Evanston High.
    During my freshman year I was a starting freestyle sprinter and relay swimmer of decent speed, not a star but a dependable point earner. To my astonishment—and that of my teammates—I managed to win the eight-school Suburban League freshman 50-yard freestyle championship of 1954, in one of the slowest winning times ever recorded for that event. As a sophomore, I swam the third leg on the four-man varsity freestyle relay that finished third in the Illinois state meet, enabling Evanston High to win the team championship by a single point. That was the apex of my swimming career.
    I had been a fast-developing physical specimen at thirteen and fourteen, but by fifteen my growth had topped out at a bit more than five feet six inches, and as we turned sixteen my taller and rangier teammates were taking the medals while I rode the bench as a second stringer. They deserved to win; they trained a good deal harder than I did. Though swimming had been good to me, I had neither ambitions for stardom nor the physical equipment required for it. For years the sport had allowed me to compete with hearing athletes as an equal. Now it was time for me to do something else.
    And that something was journalism. In freshman and sophomore English I showed a talent for writing, thanks to all that reading I had done as a child, and perhaps to heredity as well. My father, who was a businessman, not a trained professional writer, nevertheless had a talent for writing clear and lively prose, and if such a thing can be handed down through the genes, he passed it on to me. My sophomore English teacher, who apparently had never heard that the verbal skills of deaf students are supposed to be deficient, suggested to the journalism teacher that I might make a good candidate for her course as a junior. Though I had no idea what journalism entailed—the notion brought to mind a vague mental picture of a grizzled newspaperman in a fedora, dribbling cigarette ashes on his typewriter while barking commands into a telephone—I accepted her invitation to take the course. It was the best decision I had made in my young life.
    Journalism, I learned quickly, did not involve merely the gathering of news by talking to people in person and on the telephone. For a deaf reporter the former was possible, though not very easy, but the latter was clearly impossible. Journalism, however, also involved a good deal of desk work. As a rewrite editor I found I had a definite knack for the shape of a story, for reducing it to its “who-what-where-when-why-how” components and reassembling these facts in the most efficient and pleasing manner. Once the stories were done, the next task was to assemble them, together with photographs, on the page, and then write a headline for each. For these things I also had a flair, and I also got along well with my fellow editors-in-training. At the end of the year I was appointed managing editor, or second-in-command, of the school