Positive Attitude

By Paul Paquin

When I was about five years old, I started to stutter badly. It would take me about five minutes to read a sentence. Going to school made me more afraid to speak. High school was a little better because I had teachers who understood me. After I graduated from high school, I went to Harvard Ellis Technical School and graduated with a 95 in carpentry and cabinet making.

After five years in the trade, I was offered a teaching position in cabinetmaking, but I refused because of my speech. I went to work in a furniture factory and after 11 years, I became assistant foreman in the specialty department. When the company went bankrupt, I started working for myself, making custom furniture, repairing and refinishing antiques, and installing ceramic tile and hardwood floors. I am now retired.

When I started going to the fluency group at the University of Connecticut with Susan Munroe in 1990, I learned a lot of new ways to improve my speech: doing cancellations, talking more slowly, easy onsets, and avoiding word substitutions. After attending for several years, I feel more confident about myself. I had trouble on the telephone all of my life. Now I can have a conversation with a lot of people, and ordering food in a restaurant is now easy. The University has been a wonderful experience for me. I feel I am about 80% fluent today.

Thank you for taking the time to talk to me and for sending me Malcolm Fraser’s book, Self Therapy for the Stutterer. It has also been useful to me in continuing to improve my fluency. I’m 71, which proves that it is never too late to work on your speech. I keep a positive attitude about life!

CELEBRITY FOCUS

King George

In November 2010, worldwide movie audiences were presented with a most interesting and unusual movie release with The King’s Speech, starring Colin Firth as King George VI and Helena Bonham Carter as his wife Elizabeth.

Unfortunately, history may have forgotten the courageous and inspiring story of Prince Albert who stuttered badly and never dreamed that he would ever be king when his older brother, King Edward VIII, abruptly abdicated the throne in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee.

Jack Paar

While Jack Paar is among the most prominent of the entertainers on the Stuttering Foundation’s list of Famous People Who Stutter, he deserves special recognition as he was among the first to openly address his stuttering in public. As host of The Tonight Show from 1957-1962, he spoke of his difficulties as a stuttering child and teenager, giving hope to young people.

Bruce Willis

While the world knows Bruce Willis as an A-list actor, few know that he struggled with stuttering throughout his first 20 years.

Walter Bruce Willis was born in 1955 in West Germany to his German mother, Marlene, and his American GI father, David Willis. The family settled in David’s hometown of Penns Grove, New Jersey in 1957, and the couple has three other children.

Lewis Carroll

The recent Disney version of Lewis Carroll’s classic, Alice in Wonderland, garnered a great deal of media hype. Even though the mainstream media has not made mention that Carroll was a person who stuttered, his family history gives credence to the discovery of the genetic link to stuttering. Carroll was born to parents who were first cousins; almost all of their eleven children, three girls and seven boys, struggled with stuttering past childhood.

Darren Sproles

Darren Sproles, a former player for The Philadelphia Eagles, the New Orleans Saints and the San Diego Chargers, made history in 2007 when he became the first player in NFL history to return a kickoff and a punt for his first two NFL touchdowns in the same game. In 2021, he was selected to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.