Suffering Succotash.

I am so grateful that St. Pius X gave me speech therapy. (My Catholic grade school, y’unnerstand, not the canonized Pope himself.) I find it shocking, how often these days I encounter a young person with a speech impediment, one that could have been surmounted. I suspect speech therapy went the way of art and music classes in the last generation or so, mistakenly deemed disposable, an unnecessary expenditure of money and time (but especially money).

I had a lisp, so starting around third or fourth grade, I got therapy once a week. (Upon these piddling details I will casually disclaim that while my memories are usually reasonably accurate in the rare provable instance, by no means do they come with a guarantee.) I, along with a handful of other students from various grades, was brought to the lower wing library to repeat tricky sentences and find out where, via cartoon mouth diagrams, my tongue should be for certain sounds. We gathered at a table in a space created at the back of the room. It was closed off in a way that I found pleasingly private, if a little claustrophobic.

I didn’t really take the lessons to heart; I mostly thought of them as mini-vacations from regular class, where I could giggle about funny-sounding phrases with my pal Chris I_____. His impediment, by the way, was a drawn-out “uh” when saying “er” words. For example, instead of “purple turtle,” he’d say, “puhhhh-ple tuhhhh-tle.” It didn’t register as an impediment with me at all. I just thought he was British.

There’s one session I still remember distinctly—emphasis on the stink—because a student I won’t name (but could) ripped a masterly fart. Like, deliberately--this ferocious gas leak was no accident (although it may have preceded one) and it reverberated so loudly on the molded plastic chair he was sitting on that students in the classroom next door later swore they had heard it. Around our little table, it was an occasion of much raucous laughter that refused to subside, and I’m certain the teacher (whom I don’t remember, oddly enough) felt that very little was accomplished after that.

After a year, maybe two, I was the only one from my grade still requiring lingual improvement, so now I was shuttled on a little bus (and what kid didn’t dig that?) to another school once a week and forced to speak before a large room of strangers. Not that I spoke a lot, as I recall. “Speech” was no longer a period I looked forward to. Quite the oppothite.

Then, first week of sixth grade (or seventh, which would be... 1981? Holy moly, who can remember?! Consider this another disclaimer!), everyone was milling around homeroom wondering why class hadn’t begun. Soon the word spread that some outside teacher or teacher’s aide was speaking individually with every kid, to determine if anyone would require speech therapy that year. I began to panic a little. I really didn't want to go back, but I had put so little practical thought into the correcting of my defect, I honestly wasn’t sure if I even still had a lisp or not! How was I supposed to know? I never listened to myself!

So the young lady at last came to me, and she seemed very nice. She found my name in some pages on a clipboard, asked me some questions, and as I answered I tried my damnedest to speak properly, without making my labor apparent. And by golly, it worked. I would liken it to when Bart Simpson barely passed a grade by off-handedly mentioning some historical fact, thus implying he had actually learned something even though he had bombed the test.

So that was it--I was officially cured! According to this lady! Thankth, lady!

As a lisp-free, deep-voiced teen, I considered doing something career-wise involving announcing, so I’d habitually read the cable TV on-screen graphics out loud: the Swap 'n Shop postings, the local Weather Channel forecasts, etc. That practice and the therapy may explain why I don’t have a Long Island accent today—until I get annoyed, and then I'm all “wudda-ya-DOOwin?” (Mostly to the cats, when they choose to do something, usually in the middle of the night.)

Anyway, I’m glad I don’t have a lisp, and for that I thank Saint Pius X.
(Again, meaning the school. Not the actual saint. Those lessons didn’t take at all.)

As a little bonus, here are the pals of Pals Vitamins, from their 1970 coloring-game-activity book. One of them has been name-dropped.

I also enjoyed the punk fish and the Greek cat.

Now here's a commercial from my collection, where we learn that P.T. had a fine speaking voice.

[Please note: it seems sometimes there's a video there, sometimes not, oy, for real, I give up. I'm sure it's me, but in any case I give up.]