Herb Goldberg of Skokie is an affable entrepreneur who owns a string of car washes. What is interesting is that he forged his success despite a lifelong struggle with what could sometimes be a crippling disability.
“I remember I was about 7 years old and I wanted to say something to my dad,” Goldberg recalled. “I tried and tried, but I couldn’t get it out. Finally, he just looked at me and then turned his head away.” At 75, Goldberg is still pained by his father’s unintentionally insensitive reaction.
Goldberg is among the nearly 3 million people in this country who stutter. For many of them, trying to communicate even the simplest request, such as ordering a hamburger in a fast-food restaurant, can turn into a monumental task.
Until recently, stutterers living in and around Lake County had little opportunity to develop a kinship with other stutterers. But thanks to Judith Eckardt, a speech and language pathologist employed by the Special Education District of Lake County in Gurnee, that is no longer the case.
In October 1996, the Spring Grove resident, herself a stutterer, established a Metro North Chapter of the National Stuttering Project, a not-for-profit, self-help organization for stutterers and their families that has 2,500 members and more than 70 chapters nationwide. The organization’s only other Chicago-area affiliation is in Wood Dale.
The Metro North Chapter meets on the third Monday of every month in the Lambs Country Inn restaurant at Lambs Farm in Libertyville. The restaurant’s cozy dining room provides stutterers with a non-threatening environment where they can openly discuss their fears, frustrations and triumphs.
The meetings draw 8 to 10 people and attract an interesting cross-section of the community, from skilled tradesmen to scientists with doctorates.
“I run it as a peer counseling group,” Eckardt said. “We’re here primarily to support and encourage each other and to exchange information on stuttering and its treatments.”
Although it varies in severity, stuttering in general refers to the repetition or prolongation of a single word or syllable, resulting in halting, uneven speech. Although it has no definitive cause, current research by the National Institutes of Health indicates a link between stuttering and a breakdown in the neurological coordination of the speech mechanism.
The disability tends to run in families, affects more men than women and has no known cure but can be minimized through a host of available treatments. Besides traditional speech therapy, these can include psychotherapy, hypnosis and medication.
Group members of the Metro North Chapter of the National Stuttering Project are encouraged to select their own discussion topics. At a recent meeting, for example, the discussion centered on appropriate listener responses to people who stutter. Several members suggested that listeners remain patient with stutterers who hesitate too long over a word or sound.
“We don’t want people supplying our words or finishing our sentences,” Goldberg said.
“Telling us to take a deep breath doesn’t help us out either,” added John Szwedo of Winthrop Harbor. They said both reactions can be interpreted by stutterers as patronizing.
Maintaining eye contact also is important. “As a stutterer, it’s very distracting if you think a person isn’t listening to you,” explained Theophilus Kollie of Gurnee, “so give us your full attention. We really lose our concentration otherwise.”
All 11 members at recent meeting agreed that telephone conversations can be difficult, if not impossible, for stutterers. Callers to Eckardt’s office can even hear her stammering on her voice mail, but she said that is by design.
“If I’m already stuttering on my voice mail,” she explained, “then people just expect it, and they’re not surprised when I call them back.”
Chapter meetings also can complement professional speech therapy, which is recommended for people who stutter, especially children. In fact, one in every 30 children stutters, but 75 percent of them outgrow it, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Current studies by the National Institutes of Health have shown that if children diagnosed as at risk for chronic stuttering receive appropriate intervention before age 12, four out of five will not be chronic stutterers as adults. By age 12, however, speech patterns are set, and overcoming the disability is more difficult.
Joe White of Des Plaines said his stuttering left him feeling isolated as a teenager. In high school, no one knew he stuttered because he rarely spoke.
“Speaking is such a subconscious process,” he said. “If you think about it, it doesn’t flow. If you’re a stutterer, the temptation is to use brute force to get the word out. You end up doing battle with yourself.”
In their attempts to avoid stuttering, some people develop other distracting behaviors such as blinking and abnormal facial ticks. But once they confront their shame of stuttering and learn to eliminate such avoidance behaviors, their fluency can increase, Eckardt said. She said there are “handling” techniques that stutterers can use to smooth out their speech, such as easing into words and slowing down their rate of speech.
As stutterers mature and become more secure in their lives, other people’s reactions to their stuttering may begin to matter less. “You learn to desensitize yourself to what other people think,” said Leonard Farb of Highland Park. “If they can’t accept you, that’s their problem, not yours.”
Most of the group members have sought professional speech therapy, although several admitted that it was difficult to motivate themselves to seek treatment.
Art Struss called Eckardt only after he was faced with the prospect of losing his chemist’s job during a corporate takeover in the 1980s. “It was a real incentive to improve my speech because I thought I’d be out on the bricks,” said the Libertyville resident.
Because of her stuttering problem, Danielle Ippolito pursued a career she hoped would insulate her from excessive interpersonal communication.
“I thought I could shut myself into a lab with my rats and my microscope and I wouldn’t have to talk to people,” said Ippolito, who lives in Racine, Wis., where she works as a toxicologist for S.C. Johnson Wax. “I came to find out that that wasn’t the case at all. Now I face a constant challenge every day to try to speak fluently.”
Other members have come to view their stuttering as an asset. “When people told me I couldn’t earn a Ph.D., I said, `Watch me,’ ” said Kollie, a research scientist at Abbott Laboratories. “I’ve become very competitive because of my speech. It makes me disciplined, it makes me work hard. Because I’m not as fluent as others, I’ve had to become a thinker.”
Stutterers shouldn’t limit themselves or set their goals too low, agreed Tamil Kuppusamy of Park City, a second-year medical student at the University of Chicago-Finch School of Medicine in North Chicago. Kuppusamy credits a supportive family for giving him the confidence to set his goals higher. “My parents really helped me through their support,” he said.
Eckardt, who has been involved with the organization at the national level since 1991 and currently serves on its board of directors, will chair its national convention to be held in Chicago in 2000.
“This organization has been the best stuttering therapy for me,” she said. “I’ve met some wonderful people who have been truly inspirational. I’ve gotten so much more peaceful and accepting of myself.”
