was a shy boy, but a lot of that shyness came from the fact that I couldn’t hear a goddamn thing they were saying. Then later, in 1936, I had a bad dive in a Northrop Gamma, the plane I used to break the transcontinental speed record, and it aggravated my condition. Six or seven airplane crashes over the years didn’t help.
I have various types of amplifying equipment which make things easier for me, not only because I don’t like to wear a hearing aid, but also because it’s not really very effective. The condition of my inner ear is special. I have sensitive skin, and the hearing aid irritates the back of my ear. Besides, the electronic gear attracts germs and infection. Several operations have been considered, but the risk was always that I’d lose my hearing completely and go stone-deaf. So I prefer to hear what I can hear and to hell with the rest of it. Most of it isn’t worth listening to.
I never made any bones about my deafness. When I went before a congressional witch-hunting investigation committee in 1947 I had an amplifier, but no equipment is really good enough to give a man perfect hearing. I sat there in the Senate, and sometimes I couldn’t hear a word of what the inquisitors were saying.
I told the senators: ‘Speak up, please, I’m deaf.’
I didn’t say, ‘I’m hard of hearing,’ and I didn’t say, ‘I have a hearing problem.’ I said, ‘I’m deaf.’ I don’t mince words.
Some doctors, including Verne Mason, who used to be my private doctor until he tried to have me put away in a mental institution, said that the deafness might be in part psychological. They may have been right, because there are times when I hear better and times when I hear worse. When I’m depressed or preoccupied, it’s true I don’t hear as well. Make of that what you will.
But it wasn’t only because I had poor hearing as a child, or because I played the saxophone, or because I was shy, that the kids in school thought of me as a sissy. The problem was really that they and theirparents were always comparing me to my father, and Big Howard was about as far removed from a sissy as you could get.
You couldn’t challenge my father – he would beat you at anything. He owned one of the first fine automobiles in Houston, a Peerless 35-horsepower . He rebuilt it himself down at Wally Sharp’s garage and he used to race in it. Some colonel in Dallas claimed he had the fastest car in Texas and could beat anything on wheels, and that’s all my father had to hear – he roared up to Dallas and bet this man $500 he’d beat him in his Peerless, and he did, at sixty miles an hour over a dirt track in the year 1920. He loved speed, and I came to love it too.
He used to keep a cash fund down at the police station in Houston, locked up in the chief’s safe. He was haring around Houston then in the Peerless, and in a Stanley Steamer, and when he got picked up for exceeding the speed limits he’d tell the cop, ‘Take it out of my bank account down at the station house.’ They loved that. Texans loved my father. He was a man’s man.
He was happy to pay off the law but he hated paying taxes. (I certainly share his views on that.) The income tax law came in around 1911, and some of my earliest memories are of my father yelling about ‘the goddamn government squeezing me out of my hard-earned money.’ He would back me into a corner and lecture me on how the country was going to the dogs, going to turn socialist. I couldn’t have been more than nine years old, but he tried his best to convince me that the income-tax law was going to ruin him and every other businessman in the country.
‘Sonny, am I right or wrong? Are these taxes fair or is it the beginning of the end?’
‘You’re right, Daddy,’ I’d say, ‘they’re not fair’ – because that’s what my mother told me to say when he got hold of me like that.
In 1919 the whole family visited California for the first time. My father was starting a
I have various types of amplifying equipment which make things easier for me, not only because I don’t like to wear a hearing aid, but also because it’s not really very effective. The condition of my inner ear is special. I have sensitive skin, and the hearing aid irritates the back of my ear. Besides, the electronic gear attracts germs and infection. Several operations have been considered, but the risk was always that I’d lose my hearing completely and go stone-deaf. So I prefer to hear what I can hear and to hell with the rest of it. Most of it isn’t worth listening to.
I never made any bones about my deafness. When I went before a congressional witch-hunting investigation committee in 1947 I had an amplifier, but no equipment is really good enough to give a man perfect hearing. I sat there in the Senate, and sometimes I couldn’t hear a word of what the inquisitors were saying.
I told the senators: ‘Speak up, please, I’m deaf.’
I didn’t say, ‘I’m hard of hearing,’ and I didn’t say, ‘I have a hearing problem.’ I said, ‘I’m deaf.’ I don’t mince words.
Some doctors, including Verne Mason, who used to be my private doctor until he tried to have me put away in a mental institution, said that the deafness might be in part psychological. They may have been right, because there are times when I hear better and times when I hear worse. When I’m depressed or preoccupied, it’s true I don’t hear as well. Make of that what you will.
But it wasn’t only because I had poor hearing as a child, or because I played the saxophone, or because I was shy, that the kids in school thought of me as a sissy. The problem was really that they and theirparents were always comparing me to my father, and Big Howard was about as far removed from a sissy as you could get.
You couldn’t challenge my father – he would beat you at anything. He owned one of the first fine automobiles in Houston, a Peerless 35-horsepower . He rebuilt it himself down at Wally Sharp’s garage and he used to race in it. Some colonel in Dallas claimed he had the fastest car in Texas and could beat anything on wheels, and that’s all my father had to hear – he roared up to Dallas and bet this man $500 he’d beat him in his Peerless, and he did, at sixty miles an hour over a dirt track in the year 1920. He loved speed, and I came to love it too.
He used to keep a cash fund down at the police station in Houston, locked up in the chief’s safe. He was haring around Houston then in the Peerless, and in a Stanley Steamer, and when he got picked up for exceeding the speed limits he’d tell the cop, ‘Take it out of my bank account down at the station house.’ They loved that. Texans loved my father. He was a man’s man.
He was happy to pay off the law but he hated paying taxes. (I certainly share his views on that.) The income tax law came in around 1911, and some of my earliest memories are of my father yelling about ‘the goddamn government squeezing me out of my hard-earned money.’ He would back me into a corner and lecture me on how the country was going to the dogs, going to turn socialist. I couldn’t have been more than nine years old, but he tried his best to convince me that the income-tax law was going to ruin him and every other businessman in the country.
‘Sonny, am I right or wrong? Are these taxes fair or is it the beginning of the end?’
‘You’re right, Daddy,’ I’d say, ‘they’re not fair’ – because that’s what my mother told me to say when he got hold of me like that.
In 1919 the whole family visited California for the first time. My father was starting a
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