• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3503 0

needs. All manner of kids were being brought to the clinic—not just the hearing impaired—and although testing wasn’t mandatory, Louise found that all the mothers seemed to want it. All had experienced the same basic stages of denial, anger, and grief, and all benefited from the kind of emotional support they could only get from one another. Louise drew on her own experiences in shaping the program, arranging for the help and services she wished that she’d had when her own little boy was not yet six and she was constantly being advised to wait until he was older—precious learning years being lost forever. She was also intimately aware of the damage the birth of a handicapped child could inflict on a marriage and that while it was too late for her and Spence, other marriages could be addressed and saved with the psychological counseling they never had for themselves.

Louise went to Howard Strickling at M-G-M and asked how they could get publicity. He said there was no problem, that he would make some phone calls, and articles appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Hearst papers, and May Mann’s syndicated “Going Hollywood” column. Mann described a woman who typically came to work in a simple blue suit and hat to match, a ring of linked platinum horseshoes—studded with diamonds and rubies, a gift from Spence—on the small finger of her right hand, her simple white gold wedding band on her left, down on her knees scrubbing the floors before the kids came in. “The children must not sit on dirty floors,” she told the clinic’s new executive secretary. “You can run a typewriter. I can’t. But I know how to scrub and clean.”

News of the clinic spread quickly; inquiries poured in. In July the clinic initiated its first summer session, an intensive six-week course for mothers and children set up by Mary New of the Lexington School for the Deaf. Miss New came from New York without salary—only the barest of expenses were paid—and presided over a program designed specifically for parents and children who came from out of state and couldn’t otherwise participate. Sixty-two years later, Carol Lee Wales, who attended the last two weeks of that first summer session, could still vividly recall the old frame building and the playground, and the tutor helping her with her speech during individual sessions upstairs. “She would put my hand on her cheek or throat to feel the sounds, and we blew on feathers or tissue to see the breath sounds.”

Spence was preparing to write another $10,000 check when he told Louise it was time to formalize the arrangement. “If I’m going to give all this money,” he said, “we’ve got to set something up. You have to incorporate or else I can’t take it off on the income tax.” To get it all together, Louise instinctively turned to her polo buddies, the closest and most enduring circle of friends she had. She called Neil McCarthy, the millionaire sportsman and attorney whose racing silks were represented at all the major tracks, and asked him what to do about incorporating. “It’s very simple,” he said. “I’ll do it for you. I’ll be your secretary.” Then he said, “You know, you have to have some people to incorporate.” She called Walt Disney, whom she had first met “riding and playing out on the dirt field. He played with all the women. He was a beginner, you see, and he just loved it for the fun. Both he and Roy Disney played. So I called him and asked if he would go on the board, maybe be the vice-president. ‘Sure,’ he said. So we had him and Mr. McCarthy and then Mrs. Caldwell, Mrs. Orville Caldwell, one of my very best friends.”

John Tracy Clinic’s first summer session, July–August 1943. Carol Lee Wales is the child whose painting Louise is admiring. (CAROL LEE BARNES)

Tracy filled his time away from A Guy Named Joe recording broadcasts for Armed Forces Radio and visiting hospitals up and down the California coast, shaking hands, signing autographs, posing for pictures. Occasionally he showed up at the Hollywood Canteen, where he was known to sing “Pistol Packin’ Mama” to the soldiers, a song he would eventually