The teacher was calling the roll. I waited silently, apparently so focused on listening for my name that I didn't notice that something unusual was going on. Finally the teacher called me, and I responded the way I had been taught to respond in my previous school, in the second grade in Dallas.
I rose to my feet and said, in a southern accent nurtured in Virginia, where I was born, and Texas, where I had started school, "Present, ma'am."
Immediately the class broke into hysterics. I broke into tears.
This was not an auspicious start to what would prove to be a wonderful childhood in Pasadena. Moving to Southern California was an adventure for the entire family because my dad, a career sailor, was retiring. He had gone ahead of us to San Diego to finish the last months of his career, had bought a house in Pasadena, and we had followed. Mother had driven her two boys, my younger brother sick in the back seat with a fever, across the Mojave desert all alone, a journey that would take on heroic proportions in our family stories.
Pasadena in 1948 was a little piece of paradise. Our house in East Pasadena was filled with fruit trees: apricot and avocado and lemon. Our view of the San Gabriel mountains was spectacular and usually clear. We were only a few blocks from the end of the Rose Parade route.
But I'd left all my friends behind in Dallas, of course, and as I stood up alone in the third grade to the laughter of my classmates, Pasadena didn't feel very friendly.
Apparently, quite unrelated to this incident since it involved other southern children, too, the school called in my parents to suggest that I take a special class after school: speech therapy. Childhood engineering is not a recent fad. The prevailing wisdom at the time, at least in Southern California, was that a kid growing up with a southern accent was burdened with great disadvantages in the pursuit of a productive life. Whatever the argument, my parents signed me up, and a couple times a week I stayed after school with half-a-dozen other southern kids to play verbal games with a Speech Therapist.
One game we played was fish, with varied rules. The objects for which we fished were specially chosen for their pronunciations, and we didn't catch our fish unless we asked for them in the correct speech of Middle America.
I don't recall how long I took speech therapy at school. Several years, I believe. It worked. I lost my southern accent. (Well, mostly: now and again I'll say something that will cause someone, especially a native southerner, to ask if I ever lived in the south.)
More than a change of accent was taught to me by the Speech Therapist. I developed a prejudice against southern accents that was revealed years later when I was a freshman at Cal. Tech. One of my physics professors had a deep southern accent, and when he said things like, "Y'all pay attention now, this here iddy biddy ee-LEK-tron..." -- well, somehow his words had far less authority than the words of, say, Linus Pauling, another one of my teachers.
A part of me regrets losing my southern accent. Other parts of an early southern upbringing remain with me, no doubt only because the Californians were too ignorant to be aware of them. My breakfast of preference includes grits and scrapple, almost impossible to find in the west. Now and again I habitually pronounce a word that causes others to do a double-take: "Bee-you-tee-ful," for example. I still say "ma'am" more frequently than is politically correct.
Losing my southern accent was actually the second onslaught of childhood engineering to which I was victim. In Virginia, a Navy doctor convinced my mother than I would grow up to be an imbecile if I was allowed to be left-handed, my natural inclination. So I was changed.
A left-handed southern boy became a right-handed Yankee.
There ended up being one unexpected advantage to these changes. They gave several ex-wives of mine an explanation for what they considered ... well, you get the picture.
But once again, the social scientists weren't perfect. I'm still left-eyed. I kick with my left foot.
Between you and me, it's the little imperfections that make life "bee-you-tee-ful."
END