Famous People Who Stutter
- Singers and Actors
- Athletes
- Writers
- Photographers
- Leaders
- Scientists
- Serial Killers
- British Royalty and Commoners
- In the Ancient World
Stuttering is a difficult and demoralizing disability, but with persistence many stutterers overcome the disorder and go on to lead successful lives.
Singers and Actors
Some stutterers are afraid to open their mouths. But other stutterers earn their living with their voices.
Carly Simon, Singer-Songwriter
Carly Simon (1945- ) began stuttering severely when she was eight years old. She blames her stuttering on her then 44-year-old mother's affair with their 20-year-old live-in tennis instructor. The affair caused jealousy, anger, "lies and a train of deception" in the Simons' affluent household.
A psychiatrist tried unsuccessfully to cure Simon's stuttering. Instead, Simon turned to singing and songwriting. "I felt so strangulated talking that I did the natural thing, which is to write songs, because I could sing without stammering, as all stammerers can." [1]
Simon wrote some of the most-loved songs of the 1970s, including "Anticipation" and "You're So Vain." She won an Oscar and a Grammy. She was married to James Taylor for nine years. They have two children.
Mel Tillis, Country Music Entertainer
As a child, Mel Tillis (1932- ), was laughed at because he stuttered. [2] He said to himself, "Well, if they're gonna laugh at me, then I'll give them something to laugh about."
In 1957 he began working as a singer for Minnie Pearl, Nashville's great country comedienne. Pearl encouraged Tillis to talk on stage, but he refused, afraid that he'd be laughed at.
Pearl replied, "Let 'em laugh. Goodness gracious, laughs are hard to get and I'm sure that they're laughing with you and not against you, Melvin."
Little by little, Tillis increased his speaking on-stage. He developed humorous routines about his stuttering. Then "word began to circulate around Nashville about this young singer from Florida who could write songs and sing, but stuttered like hell when he tried to talk. The next thing I knew I was being asked to be on every major television show in America." Tillis' career took off.
But before Nashville and fame and fortune, Tillis was looking for a job in Florida. No one hired him. At the last place he applied, the owner said that he had once stuttered. He wouldn't hire Tillis, but gave him a piece of paper to read every night, saying that it had changed his life.
On the paper was a prayer:
Oh Lord, Grant me the Courage to change the things I can change, the Serenity to accept those I cannot change, and the Wisdom to know the difference. And God, Grant me the Courage to not give up on what I think is right, even though I think it is hopeless.
Tillis concludes his story,
For the first time in a long time, I slept well that night. I woke the next morning with a different outlook on life. I told myself that if I couldn't quit stuttering, then the world was going to have to take me like I was. What you see is what you get. From that day on, things started looking up for Mel Tillis. Soon after, I headed for Nashville in a '49 Mercury with a wife and a four-month-old baby girl—her name was Pam.
Tillis was 1976 Country Music Entertainer of the Year.
James Earl Jones, Actor
James Earl Jones (1931- ), the most in-demand voice in Hollywood, is a stutterer.
Jones was "virtually mute" as a child. [3] With the help of his high school English teacher, Jones overcame stuttering by reading Shakespeare "aloud in the fields to myself," and then reading to audiences, and then acting.
Jones is proudest of his role as Shakespeare's Othello, but is best-known as the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars. He portrayed a stutterer in the movie A Family Thing (1995).
Peter Bonerz, Director
Peter Bonerz (1938- ), who played Jerry the dentist on The Bob Newhart Show, and directed Friends, Murphy Brown, and Home Improvement, said about his stuttering: [4]
I'm 58 years old, and if I stutter while giving Candice Bergen a direction, who cares? If (the stuttering) is really difficult, I exaggerate it and get everyone on the set to laugh with me. A stutter can really be quite charming. We are human and not perfect.
Athletes
Some stutterers compensate for their speech difficulties by excelling at non-verbal activities, such as sports. But you'll see that top athletes must do more than score points in a game.
Bob Love, Basketball Player
Bob Love (1942- ) was a three-time NBA All-Star and led the Chicago Bulls in scoring for seven consecutive seasons. Reporters rarely interviewed him. "I would score 45 points, go into the locker room, and all the reporters would come down," Love recalls. "Everybody would pass me by."
Love retired in 1977. Because of his stuttering he went from one dead-end job to another. The low point was in 1985, at the age of 42, when a restaurant hired Love as a $4.45/hour busboy. Love had tried speech therapy twice before without success. He tried again. After a year of stuttering therapy, Love began public speaking. As a boy, he had a dream of standing on a podium, speaking to thousands of people. Love gave motivational speeches to churches, high school students, and other groups. He's now director of community relations and spokesman for the Bulls. "It's hard to believe I make a living speaking. It's a dream come true. I held onto my dreams, and I tell kids they have to hold on to theirs." [5]
Bill Walton, Basketball Player
Bill Walton (1952- ) led UCLA to two NCAA titles, and the Portland Trailblazers and Boston Celtics to NBA championships. His stuttering was so severe that he couldn't say simple phrases like "thank you."
Today, Walton has overcome his stuttering and works as a sports commentator for NBC Sports.
As Walton was battling stuttering through childhood, college, and his professional career, he used basketball as a sanctuary, a place where he didn't have to think about his speech. The challenges in his personal life pushed him to become one of the best players on the court.
Amazingly, on the court, he could not only play ball, he could speak, too. Or at least yell. "I never had any trouble yelling at the refs," Walton said. "In the heat of the game…when it was just totally spontaneous, I could get out there and really scream and yell at the refs. But it was only in basketball, and it was only at the refs."
When each game ended, Walton stuttered again.
"During college, the teasing was tough," he said. "I had a speech class one year, and they laughed me out of the class." It didn't matter to his classmates that he was the college basketball Player of the Year. "I was trying to make it in school, and they just laughed me out of the class."
At awards ceremonies and media events, Walton shied away from microphones. He even had other people speak on his behalf. "When I had to actually formulate words and make a statement, I could not do it at all," he recalls.
In the NBA, he faced some of the toughest and most legendary players in the history of the game. Playing basketball with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Larry Bird came naturally. Speaking did not.
After he retired from basketball, the sanctuary was gone. The hiding place that had protected him for 28 years could shelter him no longer. But his love for the game helped him with stuttering.
According to Walton, long-time friend and Hall of Fame broadcaster Marty Glickman pulled him aside at a social event and said, "You've got to learn how to talk."
"He gave me some very basic tips, and I applied those tips to the learning techniques I learned from my coach at UCLA John Wooden about how to develop as a basketball player," Walton explained. "I thought about fundamentals and how to start with the basics like the ability to mechanically duplicate moves on the basketball court. And I just applied that to speaking."
So Walton learned to speak, just as he had learned basketball years before. Not only did he stop stuttering, he found a way back —through sports commentating—to the game he loved so much.
When he began broadcasting for NBC Sports, his fears resurfaced. Off the court, he was still afraid to talk. He describes his first broadcast as "painful" but knows now that the worst is over. "I used to be really embarrassed about stuttering. But now I realize that it's something that is a part of me…something that I have to deal with and work on every day. If I don't work on it, I'm not going to be able to do my job. It's always a challenge," Walton said. He doesn't mind the challenge—that's what makes him strive to do his best.
Walton challenges others to get on top of stuttering too. "It's important to know that help is out there. The ability to learn how to talk is easily the greatest thing I've ever done. Winning two NCAA championships and two NBA titles was nice, but I knew it was going to happen. But learning how to speak has given me a whole new life. I have been set free." [6]
Bo Jackson
Baseball and football pro Bo Jackson (1962- ) wrote:
My teachers thought I couldn't read. I could read, but I'd never read aloud because I stuttered. The other kids would laugh at me, and I became a recluse. I was angry at myself and at them, and it often resulted in my beating someone up after school. I had to live with it for eight or nine years, but I finally decided to pay it no attention and forced myself to do everything from reading in class to making speeches. Eventually, I learned to relax and take my time. [7]
Writers
Essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote of novelist and stutterer Henry James (1843-1916), author of Portrait of a Lady and Turn of the Screw: "A stammering man is never a worthless one…It is an excess of delicacy, excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow-creature, that makes him stammer." [8]
Contemporary fiction authors who stutter include horror writer Peter Straub [9] (1943- ; Shadowland, Ghost Story); mystery writer Paul Johnson (Killing The Blues), [10] and David Shields (Dead Languages includes a funny short story about his childhood experiences in school speech therapy). John Updike (1932- ; the Rabbit series, Brazil) believes that his stuttering is precipitated when "I feel myself in a false position," such as guilt of being "in the wrong." [11]
Nature writer and editor Edward Hoagland (The Snow Leopard) not only stutters, but was blind for several years. He wrote of this experience in Tigers & Ice.
Benson Bobrick has written popular histories of the English Bible, the American Revolution, Russia and Siberia, and a history of stuttering, Knotted Tongues (1995).
Marty Jezer (1940-2005) wrote a history of the 1950s, biographies of Abbie Hoffman and Rachel Carson, and an autobiography, Stuttering: A Life Bound Up In Words (1997).
David Mitchell, author, of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel, wrote about what he calls "the willpower myth":
This one maintains that a stammerer is analogous to a newly wheelchair-bound character in a heartwarming American film. The doctors say he'll never walk again, but his gritty determination proves them wrong. This myth cost me angry years of believing that I stammered because I wasn't trying hard enough not to stammer. That homunculus feeds off gritty determination. Like a forcefield, the more will-power you throw at it, the stronger it gets, and the more surely you'll end up as a gibbering, face-contorted comedy spectacle like Arkwright the Grocer. [41]
Publishers who stutter include Henry Luce (1898-1967), founder of Time magazine and Sports Illustrated; and Walter Annenberg (1908-2002), founder of TV Guide and Seventeen. In 1993, Annenberg donated $500 million to improve American schools. [13]
Photographers
Howard Bingham, friend of Muhammed Ali and O.J. Simpson, stuttered as a witness in Simpson's trial. Growing up, Bingham "endured the usual teasing from schoolmates because of his stuttering. In high school…he hid behind his stuttering and didn't volunteer for anything."
Bingham's friendship with Muhammed Ali began in 1962, continued through photographing the Black Panther Party and "virtually every significant urban uprising" in the 1960s. Bingham later worked as Bill Cosby's photographer. He wrote the book Muhammed Ali: A Thirty Year Journey, and worked for years to get his friend the honor of lighting the Olympic flame that started the 1996 Atlanta Games. Ironically, Bingham now sometimes has to talk for Ali, due to Ali having Parkinson's disease. [14]
Leaders
Annie Glenn (1920- ), wife of astronaut and Senator John Glenn, once refused to talk to President Johnson because of her stuttering. [15]
Representative Dennis Kucinich (1946- ; D-Ohio) overcame stuttering as a child. Rep. Kucinich was elected mayor of Cleveland at the age of 31. As a state senator, he won the 1996 National Association for Social Workers Outstanding Senator of the Year Award. He also won an Emmy for his political analysis television broadcasts. [16]
Other political leaders who stutter include Berkeley Free Speech leader Mario Savio [17] (1942-1996) and congressman Frank Wolf (1939- ; R-Virginia). [18]
John Sculley
In the business world, John Sculley's (1939- ) stuttering "has taken him many years to overcome. He was also painfully shy."
Sculley wrote in his autobiography, "I was determined to build a strength out of what was originally a weakness. I went to the theater to watch how performers positioned themselves on stage. I'd practice for hours. I became obsessed with the idea that I was going to become better than anyone else as a business communicator." [20]
Sculley rose to president of Pepsi-Cola. He succeeded in overtaking Coca-Cola as the #1 soft drink. He then changed coasts and cultures to become president of Apple Computer for ten years. Sculley became a great public speaker, gaining "renown for his ability to deliver rousing speeches in front of thousands, sometimes without notes." [21]
Scientists
French Anderson (1930-) is known as the father of gene therapy and in 1995 was runner-up for Time magazine's "Man of the Year" cover (losing to Newt Gingrich). [19]
Zoologist Alan Rabinowitz's book Beyond The Last Village (2002) recounts his explorations in Asia searching for endangered wildlife, and his experiences stuttering. [12] Rabinowitz's story Man and Beast is the best personal story I've ever heard about stuttering. When he was growing up stuttering he promised himself that if he ever learned to talk he would speak for animals, who, like stutterers, can't speak for themselves. He later finds himself having to speak to the government of Belize asking them to create their country's first wildlife reserve to save the endangered jaguar.
Sidney Gottlieb, CIA Spook
The man who brought us LSD was "a lifelong stutterer." Sidney Gottlieb (1918-1999), described by friends as "a kind of genius," had a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Caltech. He joined the CIA in 1951. In 1953 he founded the MKUltra program, which gave LSD to thousands of CIA agents, military officers, college students, prisoners, and mental patients. Many of the study participants were unknowingly dosed with the drug. Gottlieb took LSD hundreds of times.
Gottlieb's later work at the CIA included developing "a poison handkerchief to kill an Iraqi colonel, an array of toxic gifts to be delivered to Fidel Castro, and a poison dart to kill a leftist leader in the Congo. None of the plans succeeded."
After leaving the CIA, Gottlieb became a speech-language pathologist, then raised goats on a commune in Virginia. [22]
Serial Killers
Not all stutterers are nice people.
David Carpenter, the Trailside Killer
After examining a series of killings near San Francisco-area hiking trails in 1979, FBI psychological profiler John Douglas concluded that the Trailside Killer was a stutterer.
Most serial killers approach their victims in a social situation and talk the victims into getting into a car, such as picking up hitchhikers. But the Trailside Killer attacked women hiking alone. The Trailside Killer used a "blitz" attack to overpower and dominate his victims, suggesting that he was "someone with some condition he felt awkward or ashamed about" who overpowered and controlled women as "his way of overcoming this handicap." But the power of the attack ruled out a physically-disabled killer. A "very homely" or disfigured individual would have been remembered by witnesses.
Douglas concluded that stuttering can make a strong man feel powerless, and was something the killer "could easily feel ashamed of or uncomfortable with…yet wouldn't 'stand out' in a crowd. No one would know about it until he opened his mouth."
One victim was a high school student working part-time at a bank. She had been "kind and sweet…to a regular customer with a severe stutter"—who had an incarceration record for sex crimes. 50-year-old industrial arts teacher David Carpenter was investigated and convicted of murdering eight women. [23]
Robert Hansen
In 1983, a seventeen-year-old prostitute in Anchorage, Alaska told police a fantastic story. A man had handcuffed her, taken her home, and raped and brutalized her. Then he took her to his private airplane, telling her they were going to his remote cabin. She escaped and ran to the police.
Robert Hansen was in his mid-forties, married with two children, and managed a successful bakery. He owned an expensive home, as well as an airplane and mountain cabin. He was "short and slight, heavily pockmarked, and spoke with a severe stutter. [The FBI profiler] surmised that he had had severe skin problems as a teenager and, between that and the speech impediment, was probably teased or shunned by his [childhood] peers, particularly girls. So his self-esteem would have been low. That might have [explained] why he moved to Alaska [from Iowa, when he was 25]—the idea of a new start in a new frontier."
Under attic floorboards police found a hunting rifle matching bullets that had killed four prostitutes, as well as "various items of cheap jewelry belonging to the victims…a drivers license and other ID cards from some of the dead women…[and] an aviation map marked with where he had left various bodies." Other jewelry "trophies" he had given to his wife and daughter. [24]
John O'Brien and Pierre Lebrun
Two murder/suicides strangely echoed each other. In 1993, John O'Brien asked members of his stuttering self-help group where the heart is located in a person's chest. The next day he brought a handgun to the New York subway equipment facility where he worked. He killed a co-worker in the head and wounded his supervisor. O'Brien then killed himself with a shot to his heart. [25]
O'Brien stuttered severely. He had been denied a promotion because of his speech. Friends described O'Brien as "an unbelievably nice guy," "quiet," who "never bothered anyone."
In 1999, Pierre Lebrun brought a high-powered hunting rifle to the Ottawa, Canada, city bus transit complex machine shop where he worked. He killed four co-workers and then killed himself. A suicide note listed many more co-workers that he disliked, and his pockets were full of ammunition, leading police to speculate that his gun jammed and prevented more killings.
Lebrun stuttered mildly. Lebrun's mother reported, "He said a group of people were harassing him—not only one person, but a group of people. That's why he killed, that's why he went there—to kill the people who harassed him."
Lebrun's cousin recalled teasing in school. "That was the only thing that bothered him. It didn't bother him that he had the stutter; it bothered him that people would bug him about it." [26]
Lebrun had completed a four-month speech therapy program two years earlier. He was described as "a really nice guy," "friendly," and "quiet and well-mannered." [27]
British Royalty and Commoners
Several British royals stuttered. Charles I (1600-1649) was king from 1625 until 1649, during the English Civil War. His inability to speak to Parliament "had an unfavorable influence on his affairs." Charles lost the war and was executed. It didn't help that he proclaimed that he was above the law: "a king and a subject are two plain different things." His father, James I (1566-1625), was described as "having a tongue too big for his mouth"—possibly an articulation disorder. [28]
George VI (1895-1952) was king from 1937 until 1952. He was father of Queen Elizabeth II. His annual live Christmas broadcasts were "always an ordeal." [29] Robert Graves' 1937 novel I, Claudius is ostensibly about the Roman emperor Claudius, who stuttered. But the personality and life of Graves' Claudius were taken from the shy George VI. George survived the scandals of his brother Edward's abdication, was thrust into a role to which he was thought unsuited, and surprised everyone by becoming one of the most capable and loved modern kings.
Winston Churchill and Aneurin Bevan, Statesmen
Sixty years ago the best orators of the British Parliament were both stutterers. Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960), leader of the Labour Party and architect of the National Health Service, forced himself to make speeches as often as possible. He spoke fluently when his passions were aroused, so he spoke passionately for British workers in the 1930s. Bevan developed an extraordinary vocabulary by substituting words to avoid stuttering. [30]
Winston Churchill (1874-1965), leader of the Conservative Party, could speak fluently only by preparing his remarks in advance. He studied issues weeks in advance, and wrote out responses to any possible objection. This extra effort made Churchill more knowledgeable than other leaders. [31]
As a young man, Churchill worried that his stuttering would have an impact upon his ambition to go into politics. But he didn't believe in submitting to failure so he practiced and persevered. He both practiced his speeches and practiced nonsense phrases as he walked, such as "The Spanish ships I cannot see since they are not in sight." When he was 23, he wrote, "Sometimes a slight and not unpleasing stammer or impediment has been of some assistance in securing the attention of the audience…" [32]
More British Stutterers
The British are fond of eccentrics and stutterers. [33]
Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was a physician and naturalist and was invited to be the personal physician for King George III of England. [34] His grandson, naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882), also stuttered.
Charles Canon Kingsley (1819-1875) was a Cambridge history professor, orator, and chaplain to Queen Victoria. His novels include the popular pirate adventure Westward, Ho! and the popular children's book The Water-Babies. He recommended treating stuttering with a "manly" diet of beef and beer.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898) was an Oxford mathematician, minister, and photographer. On July 4, 1862, while boating on the Thames, he told a friend's children, including a daughter named Alice, a story of a girl named Alice. Dodgson later published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland under the pen name Lewis Carroll.
Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was the highest-paid writer of the 1930s. His novels include The Razor's Edge and The Moon and Sixpence. In his autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage he substituted a clubfoot for his stuttering, because stuttering was too difficult to transcribe in writing.
Lord David Cecil (1902-1986) was Professor of English literature at Oxford in the 1950s. "Lord David's stutter was thought of as a mark of high-bred diffidence…As an Oxford undergraduate in the fifties, I expected my tutors to stutter; it was their way of not insisting, I thought, and very Oxford." John Bailey, husband of novelist Iris Murdoch and another student of Lord David Cecil, also stutters. [35]
Kim Philby (1912-1988) was a spy. Stuttering once saved his life, by confounding a fast-paced interrogator.
Patrick Campbell (1913-1980) was a British humorist and 3rd Baron Glenavy. He wrote, "From my earliest days I have enjoyed an attractive impediment in my speech. I have never permitted the use of the word 'stammer.' I can't say it myself." [36]
Margaret Drabble (1939- ) is the editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Her novels include The Seven Sisters and The Red Queen.
In the Ancient World
Stuttering is one of the few disorders that generally gets better over time. Most children who stutter outgrow it. Even adults who stutter severely in their teens and 20s often overcome stuttering—via speech therapy or on their own—in their 30s or 40s. At the life stage when other people experience the dreams of their youth crashing down, stutterers realize they can accomplish anything they want, regardless of their speech. Stutterers are less likely to be famous in their youth, and more likely to be famous five hundred years later.
Moses, Israelite Leader
Or five thousand years later. Moses stuttered:
But Moses said to the Lord, "Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either heretofore or since thou hast spoken to thy servant; but I am slow of speech and of tongue."
Then the Lord said to him, "Who has made man's mouth? Who makes him dumb, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Or who gives sight to one and makes another blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now, therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak."
But he said, "Oh, my Lord, send, I pray, some other person."
Then the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses and he said, "Is there not Aaron, your brother, the Levite? I know that he can speak well; and behold, he is coming out to meet you, when he sees you he will be glad in his heart. And you shall speak to him and put the words in his mouth; and I will be with your mouth and with his mouth, and will teach you what you shall do. He shall speak for you to the people; and he shall be a mouth for you, and he shall be to him as God." [37]
Aesop, Master Storyteller
Aesop (620 to 560 BC) was born a slave and "most deformed" and "he coulde not speke." One day he fell asleep under a shady tree. The Goddess of Hospitality appeared to him in a dream and gave him the gift of speech. His life changed and he became a master storyteller. [38]
Demosthenes, Orator
Demosthenes (384 BC-322 BC) was the greatest orator of ancient Greece. He overcame stuttering by speaking with pebbles in his mouth to improve articulation, shouting above the ocean waves to improve his volume, and working with an actor in reciting Sophocles and Euripedes to coordinate his voice and gestures. [39]
Virgil, Poet
Publius Vergilius Maro (70 BC-19 BC), known in English as Virgil or Vergil, was a Roman poet. His works included the Eclogues, the Georgics and the Aeneid, the latter becoming the Roman Empire's national epic poem.
Claudius, Emperor
Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (10 BC-AD 54), was the Roman Emperor from AD 41 to AD 54.
Claudius stuttered severely and was said to have weak hands and knees, although he was a tall, well-built man with no physical disability. His symptoms diminished after he became emperor. Claudius said that he'd exaggerated his weaknesses to avoid being murdered. By appearing to be weak and disabled, Claudius survived the deaths of rivals to the throne. He then served as one of the most effective and able emperors of Rome, for thirteen years.
Claudius' life was portrayed in Robert Graves' novel I, Claudius (1934), which was made into a television series in 1976.
Dekanawida, The Great Peacemaker
Dekanawida invented representative federal government. He united the Iroquois nations in what is now New York State, in the sixteenth century, before the Iroquois encountered Europeans.
The Iroquois federation was a model, thanks to Ben Franklin's experience making treaties with the Iroquois, for the Americans and French to create representative federal democracies.
The League of the Five Nations of the Iroquois was established, according to eighteenth-century sources, in the late sixteenth century. Iroquois tradition tells of constant warfare…One bereaved by this warfare was a Mohawk man, Hiawatha ("He Who Makes Rivers").
Crazed by grief for his murdered family, Hiawatha fled into the forests, living like a cannibal monster in the Iroquois myths. One day, Hiawatha met Dekanawida. The charismatic goodness of this man, said to have been a Huron miraculously born of a virgin, reawakened in Hiawatha his humanity.
Dekanawida confided to Hiawatha plans to free their peoples from the horrors of war by allying all the Iroquois in a grand league, a longhouse…in which [the leader of] each Iroquois nation would sit as a brother with brothers.
The visionary felt himself unequal to the task of forming the league because he suffered a speech impediment. Hiawatha, however, was an imposing man with a fluent tongue. Together, in the time-honored fashion of a wise leader who relies on his executive assistant to make his speeches, Dekanawida and Hiawatha might be effective in restoring sanity and peace to their nations.
Hiawatha was inspired. Tirelessly, the two men traveled up and down the land…Hiawatha fervently preaching the alliance outlined by Dekanawida.
Most Iroquois were at first hesitant to trust a plan that contained their enemies. Thadodaho, an Onondaga leader, relentlessly opposed Hiawatha. In a dramatic showdown, Hiawatha's superior spiritual power overcame the evil Thadodaho. Hiawatha combed out of Thadodaho's hair the snakes that had marked him as a fearful sorcerer.
Then the five nations—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—came together, fifty great chiefs meeting in a grand council at the principal town, in the center of the alliance territory. [40]
Each of these men and women found a way to overcome stuttering, and this became the basis of his or her success. For each, their disability became their strength—and perhaps each looks back and sees stuttering as a gift.
References
[1] Brenner, Marie. I Never Sang For My Mother. Vanity Fair, 58, August 1995, p.128.
[2] Nefsky, Art. Letter from Mel Tillis, Sept. 30, 1997, http://www.nefsky.com/tillis.htm
[3] Jones, James Earl. Voice and Silences, 1993.
[4] Drew, Polly. A Stutter Won’t Stop You. Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal, July 27, 1997, p.4L.
[5] Lawrence, M. A Man of Many Words. Sports Illustrated, v79, n18, November 1, 1993, p.91.
[6] Reprinted with permission from the Stuttering Foundation of America newsletter, Spring/Summer 1996.
[7] Ghostwriter, 1993 (PBS drama series focused on illiteracy).
[8] Bobrick, Benson. Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure. Simon&Schuster, 1995
[9] Gross, Terry. Fresh Air, August 15, 2000.
[10] Interviewed on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.
[11] Bobrick, Benson. Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure. Simon&Schuster, 1995
[12] Stuttering Foundation of America newsletter, Summer 2002.
[13] Wallichenski, David. Book of Lists (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995); Fonzi, Gaeton. Annenberg. New York: Weybright & Talley, 1969; Toch, Thomas. One man's gift to public education. U.S. News & World Report, November 1, 1993, v115, n17, p20.
[14] Zimmerman, I. Photography That Speaks Volumes. ADVANCE For Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists, 7:50, March 23, 1998, page 22.
[15] Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff.
[16] ASHA Leader.
[17] Richard Benyo, personal correspondance.
[18] Stuttering Foundation of America.
[19] Kahn, Jennifer. “The Unraveling,” Wired, October 2007, page 201.
[20] Sculley, John. Odyssey (1987). p.111.
[21] Carlton, Jim. Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders. (New York: Random House, 1997).
[22] Weiner, Tim. Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies; Took LSD to C.I.A. New York Times, March 10, 1999.
[23] Douglas, John. Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit. New York: Scribner, 1995.
[24] Douglas, John. Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit. New York: Scribner, 1995.
[25] Laboy, Julio. Newsday, September 12, 1993.
[26] Ottawa Citizen, May 3, 1999.
[27] Reuters, Sun Media; April 7-9, 1999.
[28] Fraser, Antonia. King James VI of Scotland, I of England. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; 1974) p. 163.
[29] Bobrick, Benson. Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure. Simon&Schuster, 1995
[30] Bobrick, Benson. Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure. Simon&Schuster, 1995
[31] Bobrick, Benson. Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure. Simon&Schuster, 1995
[32] Montalbo, Thomas. Churchill: A Study in Oratory. Finest Hour, 69, and The Churchill Centre (http://www.winstonchurchill.org/).
[33] Bobrick, Benson. Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure. Simon&Schuster, 1995
[34] Bobrick, Benson. Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure. Simon&Schuster, 1995
[35] Ian Hamilton, An Oxford Union. The New Yorker, February 19, 1996.
[36] http://www.logophilia.com/waw/Campbell-Patrick.asp
[37] Exodus 4:10-17, The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Edition, 1973.
[38] Bobrick, Benson. Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure. Simon&Schuster, 1995
[39] Bobrick, Benson. Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure. Simon&Schuster, 1995
[40] Kehoe, Alice. North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account, 3rd edition, page 227. Prentice-Hall, Inc. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1992. See also Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation and Proc. of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 30:324-341, both by Horatio E. Hale, 1882; and "Hi-a-wat-ha," by William M. Beauchamp, Journal of American Folklore 4(15):295-306, 1891.
[41] Mitchell, David. (2006). Let me speak. http://www.stammering.org/mitchell.html
