Eleven is the worst shoe size.
Words that begin with vowels catch in Timothy Flynn’s throat, turning his voice into a skipping record, an engine that won’t turn over.
But he wanted those $90 Size 11 Nikes on the top shelf more than he needed to keep his stutter silent. So Flynn, then in 11th grade, hailed a sales kid, who apparently had never met a person with a chronic stutter.
Flynn, now 21, told the story last week before people who understand that feeling of failing words. They are members of the National Stuttering Association, an advocacy group that held its 22nd annual conference in Chicago.
The group promotes no magic cure for stuttering; there is none. Instead, it provides information about the disorder and treatment options and opens friendly dialogues with a simple motto: If you stutter, you are not alone.
At the gathering, held at the Westin Hotel on North Michigan Avenue Thursday through Sunday, people who stutter grabbed a microphone, shared their stories and were congratulated with applause for finding the courage to speak in public.
Flynn said that back in the shoe store, he was nearly greeted with an ambulance.
What size? the sales kid asked.
“E-e-e-e,” stammered Flynn, who lives in Upper Marlboro, Md.
The sales kid became alarmed: Are you having a seizure? Do I need to get help?
Flynn shook his head no and raised his hands to waive off the notion.
“But I guess that only made it worse,” he told his audience of about three dozen people in a comic deadpan. The sales kid started to leave to call 911; Flynn grabbed his arm. The kid thought Flynn was reaching out in a medical panic.
Finally, Flynn managed to tell the sales kid he was a stutterer. No medical emergency. Just a stutter.
Oh, so what size? the sales kid asked.
“Ten,” Flynn said clearly, concisely. And he bought and wore those $90 Nikes, one size too small, rather than face those three syllables again.
Experts estimate that anywhere from 5 to 14 million people in the United States stutter, a speech condition marked by the repetition of syllables, prolongation of words or the inability to say a word. It tends to begin by the time a child is 6 years old, although many youngsters outgrow stuttering.
Boys are more likely to carry stuttering to adulthood than girls. For every woman who stutters, four or five men have the disorder.
Its cause is a mystery. The problem was once thought to be psychological, and people who stutter were often labeled as having weak minds or mental illness, said Larry Molt, an associate professor at Auburn University in Alabama who studies speech disorders.
The latest research suggests stutterers process language differently, said Molt, himself a stutterer. The condition often runs in families and seems to be hard-wired in the brain. But any genetic programming can’t be separated from the environment, he said.
He has long been a proponent of early speech therapy for children who develop a stutter, but Molt said he is reconsidering that position given new research suggesting intensive treatment for youngsters might not be the best course of action.
Parents of children who begin stuttering should take them to a speech therapist educated in the condition for an evaluation, Molt said.
Those options have improved for today’s children, said Scott Palasik, 31, a speech therapist in Wadsworth who was one of about 600 people attending the conference.
A stutterer himself, he said he fell victim to bad therapy.
When Palasik was a boy, a speech therapist told his mother to stop him and tell him to slow down when his words became jumbled.
“`Stop, slow down, breathe, Scott’ turned into `Stop, Scott,'” Palasik said. So he did.
For six months during his senior year of high school, he fell silent. And he spent many of those years overcompensating, wanting to be the perfect athlete and later the perfect chef.
“I didn’t want people to see me as something less than what I was,” he said.
With the Internet and other resources, parents now seem to be more savvy and aggressive about getting proper help, Palasik said.
Treatment crushed Jimmy Zerlentes, according to the 41-year-old Chicago native.
He was taken out of class and to a therapist who would listen to him talk, marking slashes on a piece of paper each time words failed him. Zerlentes watched her pen work the page, afraid of the growing number. Sometimes, hundreds of slashes covered the sheet.
Other times, she used a clicker, sounding it with each stutter. It encouraged him to be silent.
Back then, they tried to treat the stutter, said Zerlentes, who became a speech pathologist, now with the Chicago Public Schools. But few bothered to look at the underlying fear and anxiety brought on by the condition, he said.
He never met another child with a stutter. For almost 30 years, he thought the problem was his alone, until he learned of the National Stuttering Association.
The convention offered panels tailored for children, and most of the rambunctious youngsters were quick to raise their hands to answer game-show-style questions about stuttering. Teens talked about frustrations with parents, such as not understanding why mom or dad might finish their sentences or turn their backs when the stammering is at its worst.
Parents admitted they just wanted to be helpful and turned away because they couldn’t bear to see their children struggling.
But the biggest challenge for Naudia Jones, 17, of New York City, came from high school teachers, she said. She is originally from Guyana in South America. That, coupled with halting words that take a moment to form, made for a double hurdle.
“She’s a foreign student and she can’t speak, so she must be retarded,” Jones said of their attitudes. “Then they got to know me, and all the teachers after the first semester realized I was a great student and they shouldn’t take me for granted.”
It’s not stuttering so much as lack of listening that causes problems, said Doug Capraro, 14, also of New York City and a member of a theater group for children who stutter.
“The root of all stuttering frustration is ignorance, because when you stutter, people just don’t care and don’t care to listen to what you’re saying. Listen to me,” he said. “In my opinion I’m a cool guy. Don’t dislike me because I’m a stutterer.”
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tmaxwell@tribune.com
