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From: Russ Hicks
Date: 22 Oct 2006
Time: 15:12:40 -0500
Remote Name: 71.123.208.188
Hi Tany, ..... 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/ ..... The reason my therapy failed was that it was simply incomplete. I went to camp in the 1950's - when the earth's crust was just cooling - and the speech correctionists simply didn't KNOW what we know today, especially about the stuttering iceberg. See my paper on the stuttering iceberg at http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/isad6/papers/hicks6.html for details of this. The iceberg - one of the most fundamental breakthroughs in understanding stuttering in the last 50 years - wasn't even conceived until about 1970 and wasn't really publicized until nearly 2000. Back in the 1950's, people were clueless on the emotional/psychological baggage beneath the waterline of the iceberg so they never even thought to treat it! No wonder my therapy failed. But it wasn't their fault. It wasn't anyone's fault really. We just didn't know. ..... There are still some day camps running today, but they are only several hours a day a couple of times a week for a few weeks, nothing like what we had at Shady Trails. Nevertheless, the SLPs running most of the camps today KNOW about the stuttering iceberg and the importance of emotions and attitudes in stuttering therapy. So the camps can still be pretty good and I would definitely recommend them to kids today. ..... The primary reason I stuttered worse at the end of four summers was because the continual recriminations after my yearly relapses (You're not working hard enough! You're not smart enough! Don't you care? Etc., etc.) was only adding to the ice on the invisible underside of the iceberg and the size of my overall iceberg just grew and grew. If you don't understand the iceberg (which no one did in those days), relapse and failure was nearly inevitable. It's like holding a ten pound weight at arm's length. Sure you can do it for a minute or two, but for a lifetime? No way! Without the knowledge of the stuttering iceberg, and concentrating only on fluency, failure is almost a certainty. ..... I wish you the best, Tany. ..... Russ