Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [292]
They resumed filming with a double on April 13, but there was only so much work they could do without showing the young flier’s face or hearing his voice. Within a week, A Guy Named Joe was shut down indefinitely.
The official opening of John Tracy Clinic took place on the evening of February 1, 1943. After introductions at Norris Hall on the USC campus, the nearly three hundred attendees were invited to tour the old clapboard house on West Thirty-seventh, where classes on child psychology were ongoing and where a new series of Saturday morning talks would focus on the formation and development of the elementary sounds of speech. A correspondence course, based on a long-discontinued one from the Wright Oral School, was in its early stages of development, and a nursery school observation group had just been added. On prominent display was the clinic’s first publication, Suggestions to the Parents of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children by Louise Treadwell Tracy. At the open house, Doris Jackson, who would soon fill the role of secretary to Mrs. Tracy, observed the founder’s husband keeping very much to himself and doing his best to go unnoticed amid the festivities of the open house. “I can remember Mr. Tracy—him rubbing his hand down the woodwork saying, ‘This is nice …’ ”
At first, said Louise, Spence seemed pleased she had decided to name the clinic after John; then, after thinking about it, he didn’t think it was such a good idea after all.
He felt it was a great mistake to have called it that, because the impression became so firmly ingrained with people that this was the Tracys’—they were paying for everything, and then they thought Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was paying for it. The things were just absurd. We needed money. We couldn’t have taken care of the whole thing even had we wanted to. It was too much money, and also we felt it was not ourselves, it was too big a thing, that if it were as worthwhile as we thought, and as necessary, everybody should have a hand in it, because then it was everybody’s and it would be much bigger. This was not a little family thing at all.
Contributions for the first year came to $1,440, while expenses ran close to $5,000. “Mr. Disney was one of the first contributors we had. I remember he gave us a hundred dollars. Before we were organized or incorporated or anything, I signed a little letter. I had my nerve, but then they didn’t have all the restrictions they have now. So I just wrote a little letter and we had it printed and I got a list of names from one of those people who furnish names. It was a silly list of five-thousand people, and a lot of people were on that list who couldn’t give ten cents. We sent it out, and out of the five-thousand, we had maybe sixty contributors. Not too many, but one of them was Mr. Disney, who I was sure would.”
At its inception, John Tracy Clinic was the first institution of its kind that was entirely free, and the only one that was exclusively for the parents of deaf and hearing-impaired children. It was a model destined to cost money; the Wright Oral School had charged one hundred dollars for its correspondence course alone and couldn’t come close to breaking even. When they had stretched their meager resources as far as they could, Louise went to Spence: “He thought about it, and we talked about it a little, and he said, ‘How much do you figure it would cost for a year? Would ten-thousand dollars be enough?’ I said, ‘My heavens, yes, that would be wonderful.’ So he gave us the ten thousand and he said, ‘We’ll try it and see what happens.’ And he really, for the first three years, with very minor exceptions—these nickels and dimes that we got from a few people—he furnished all of the money.”
In March the clinic began offering tests for mothers coping with the emotional and psychological stress of parenting a child with special