Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [323]
Collier’s devoted three pages to the clinic in its issue of July 14:
Little wonder the parents flock to this unique clinic with their handicapped offspring. They have heard how Mrs. Spencer Tracy, wife of the movie star, helped her born-deaf son, John, “to hear”—to find his normal place in everyday life through heightened observation, lip reading, and speech. John Tracy, now twenty, acts as natural and rugged as if he had been born with hearing. He drives his own station wagon through traffic, is a talented cartoonist, and plays tennis and polo. His training was no miracle. It was the result of long, patient years of faithful, sympathetic experimenting and persistence on the part of his mother. In gratitude, Mrs. Tracy now devotes her zeal and experience to developing this progressive clinic, in her son’s name, for other deaf children all over the country.
Pictures surrounding the text showed Louise serving lunch to a trio of curly-haired moppets; Miss Hattie Harrell, formerly of the Rochester School for the Deaf, holding a boy’s hand to her cheek as headphones amplify her voice; other instructors in group exercises as parents look on; and a lineup of giggling children arrayed along the rustic front porch of the clinic, some three, some four, one four and a half. Throughout, Louise preached the gospel of “normalcy,” the importance of treating the child as if he or she could hear. “He must be talked to and played with and must be shown that he is loved and wanted.” Though the annual cost of a family’s participation in the demonstration nursery program had been set at $950, Louise was able, by simplifying the sense-training material, to get the cost of the correspondence course down to fifty-five dollars. “Today there is a long waiting list of parents eager for the home training instruction of the Tracy Clinic,” the article concluded. “But they will have to wait until further facilities are available. Funds are urgently needed for more space, personnel, and material.”
The Collier’s piece brought a flood of new inquiries but no comparable flow of donations, and when Spence made the financial concessions for his return to the stage, the ever-increasing needs of the clinic could not have been far from his thoughts. In October, as the first troubled performances of The Rugged Path were taking place, John Tracy Clinic was granted the use of a second building on the SC campus, a small house next door to the original where two additional tutors could be located. That same month, a parents’ auxiliary was formed and Louise began taking on speaking engagements, spending long hours away from the ranch. The drive from Encino took nearly an hour, and with John now a full-time student at Pasadena Junior College, Susie was left largely to her own devices.
The Tracy property was surrounded by the alfalfa fields of the Ador Dairy Farm, and during the war an army camp was directly across the street. Susie was never bored at the ranch; there was always something to do and she never felt she was stuck there. She rode her chestnut mare, Missy, to Encino Elementary, and Hughie would be waiting for her every day after school. At home, Margaret Hunt, the Tracys’ cook-housekeeper, would have crackers and peanut butter and cold milk waiting. The closest businesses were on Ventura Boulevard, half a mile away, and Susie occasionally would go to a drugstore on Ventura to look through the movie magazines.
“She was a very happy, self-sufficient sort of child,” her mother said. “I remember thinking, ‘Well, I don’t need to worry about you.’ ” People sometimes assumed that Susie was neglected by her parents, given Louise’s relentless focus on her brother, but Susie could never remember feeling that way. When John was home, she’d go to his room and watch him get out his paper. Occasionally he’d take her and a friend to the