Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [288]
A motion was made for Louise to take the chairmanship.
I finally got my wits about me and I said I didn’t know what I could do. They were looking at me. “The only thing I have is a correspondence course from the Wright Oral School. If we can form kind of a group and start meeting together, maybe we can do something.” So we started, and our first meeting was at the Biltmore Hotel. They let us have [a meeting room] for five dollars. It was just at the beginning of the war; transportation was going to be difficult. I think we started to meet every two weeks … Dr. Markovin popped up again and said, “Why don’t you go down to the [university]?” He was head of a reading clinic and he said, “We have a little back porch.” It was really makeshift. We had one meeting there, and then Dr. Markovin said we could go in the office there, which had been a living room, at a certain time of day.
We had to look for a teacher. She was very nice and smart, but she had no idea about talking to parents. She gave lists of books they could read, but they wanted something that you could do right now. After about four meetings, I said, “Well, this is pretty bad.” In the meantime, I must have been looking around. I had heard of the parent-teacher leaders—there were about 14 of them—engaged by the Department of Education. They got this program going and met on a Saturday … I never envisioned having children coming to the clinic. It was simply to pool our experiences, [but] they brought these children along with them. It was an all-day meeting. Each mother was given one child—not her own—to observe so they could look objectively, and the teacher gave them a thing to look for. The teacher got all the mothers together and talked to them about child development, and she asked them what they had observed.
There were just twelve mothers to start—thirteen counting Louise—and still attendance lagged. “We hung on by a thread,” she said. In September Dr. Rufus von Kleinschmid, the president of USC, offered the use of a two-story cottage at 924 West Thirty-seventh Street. The first meeting of the Mothers of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children took place at the newly acquired “Mothers’ Clinic” on October 17, 1942. A course on child guidance was announced, and Mrs. Florence Browne offered to give whatever spare time she had to the testing of children for hearing disorders. Louise reported that two checks had been received: one for five dollars and the other for $1,000. She asked that members donate as much furniture as possible so that the money could be spent on equipment, and she called upon each mother to give at least one day a month to act as “hostess.”
The call went out for volunteers to paint floors, and officer elections were held. “We got some furniture … we got some carpeting … we did some painting.” Once they had a telephone and some letterhead, Louise felt emboldened enough to hire a secretary. When she settled on a candidate, she told the woman it wasn’t much of a job “but someday it might be.” As they all worked toward an official opening, she hung a shingle over the door of the plain mustard-yellow house at the edge of the campus. It read
JOHN TRACY CLINIC
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In the year following the rousing reception for Woman of the Year, there was only Tortilla Flat to keep the Tracy name in front of some 80 million domestic moviegoers, and even the kindest of critics greeted that picture with muted enthusiasm. He was announced for a film with Wallace Beery, an immigration epic for King Vidor, and a Byron Morgan story called By the People. Betty Rogers let it be known that he was her personal choice to play her late husband in Warners’ planned biography of Will Rogers—a prospect Tracy privately found horrifying—and Fox was anxious to borrow him to play A. J. Cronin’s gentle priest in Keys of the Kingdom. The Yearling remained