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From: Russ Hicks
Date: 03 Oct 2006
Time: 23:46:55 -0500
Remote Name: 71.252.204.114
Hi Erin, ..... Thanks for your kind words. ..... Regarding the camp, it was the Shady Trails Speech Improvement Camp near Northport, Michigan, sponsored by the University of Michigan and I absolutely LOVED it! The camp opened in the 1940's sometime and finally closed about 10 years ago. The summer sessions I attended were eight week (yes that's right, EIGHT WEEK) sessions of pretty intense therapy. Even though it didn't help my stuttering, the camp and the people up there were amazing. One of my "speech correctionists" (as we called them back then) left camp for a week to become Miss Pennsylvania in the Miss America pageant. My swimming coach was an Olympic Silver Medalist. The camp was filled with the most remarkable people you've ever met. I grew up there. It was a totally amazing experience. ..... But that was in the "olden days" in a different world. Today, no one could possibly endure an eight week summer camp with all that goes on in a modern summer. As I understand it, the camp sessions were shortened to as little as two weeks at the end. It was subsequently sold to Tim Allen from the Home Improvement TV show. He kept the camp pretty much intact for various conventions and it finally became a camp for special needs children - I think. Several of us "alumni" have promised to attend a reunion up there maybe next summer and relive some old times. We even have a Yahoo group on that camp now. http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/ShadyTrails/ ..... Yes, you are correct in that my parents were FAR more concerned about me getting a decent job in order to support myself and my family than they were me "accepting" my stuttering. It was an endless search for the magic "cure." They were terrified that no one would hire a person who stuttered. It wasn't until the revelation of the stuttering iceberg in the 1970's that people began to realize there was more to stuttering than the mechanics of speech. Read my ISAD paper on the Iceberg Analogy of Stuttering at http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/isad6/papers/hicks6.html for more details on this. I'm convinced that was one of the major turning points in stuttering therapy (at least in understanding stuttering) in the last fifty years. But no one knew anything about that in my days at Shady Trails. I certainly don't blame them. They just didn't know. But we DO know about it today and the understanding of the iceberg is absolutely critical to modern speech therapy for stuttering. ..... My best to you in school, Erin. Hopefully someday our paths will cross. I hope so! ..... Russ, email is RussHicks@mail.com