January 6: Loretta Young (1913-2000)

I hated school . . . . One of the reasons was a learning disability, dyslexia, which no one understood at the time. I still can't spell . . .

-- Loretta Young

American actress Loretta Young (portrait at left) was born Gretchen Young 95 years ago today in Salt Lake City. She won an Oscar for Best Actress in 1947, for The Farmer's Daughter, and had a long-running anthology program on NBC in the 1950s.

She remembered complaining to her mother that she couldn't tell the b's and the d's apart in her school readings; so the family had her vision checked, but there was little more support available in the 1910s and 1920s. By her early teens, she was tutored on movie sets, and not expected to study much. She recognized herself as having dyslexia when she first heard the word, after a career in which she memorized whole scenes to avoid reading unfamiliar text in front of others. She was one of the early celebrity readers to volunteer her time and voice for making audiobooks produced by Recording for the Blind -- now named Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic.

Desiree Hawks

I probably won't get many chances to mention my interest in NHRA drag racing on a disability blog, but this scholarship announcement caught my eye. The winner of the Sears Craftsman $25,000 scholarship (intended for high school seniors planning a career in automotive/industrial technology, marketing, or manufacturing) is a California girl this year, Desiree Hawks. I sort of expected a story that highlighted her gender--most of the 650 applicants were boys. But I didn't expect the story to highlight her status as a student with a learning disability, too: "Not everyone has the same abilities. We are all good at different things, which makes us the individual people we are," Ms. Hawks explains in her statement. The dreaded word "overcame" appears in the article, and she sounds a bit Miss America in her goal to "show kids with and without learning disabilities that education is available in many fields," but overall, it's nice to see a young woman so open to breaking all kinds of stereotypes; and nice to see her recognized with a big scholarship, too.