Let's Hear It for Stutterers' Lib!

Remember Moses, Darwin and Maugham

Is Porky Pig a menace? Bob Goldman, a San Francisco food-service consultant, thinks so. Says Goldman, a stutterer: "The message of Porky Pig is that we are ridiculous and dull, and can't get a sentence out right."

Offing the pig is only a minor goal of Goldman's National Stuttering Project, which was organized last year and has already expanded into 15 chapters in California, Oregon and Washington. The fledgling N.S.P. regards the nation's 2.6 million stutterers as another oppressed minority and hopes to weld them into a potent lobbying group. "We don't want special treatment, we just want neutrality," says Goldman. "This is what blacks and women have been insisting on, and we want it too."

To help stutterers, each project chapter holds weekly meetings to discuss various therapies,* as well as plans for dealing with job discrimination and social ridicule. Members also take the opportunity to unload their pain and resentment. Says Goldman: "These are people who never, never before participated in any group. Many just don't interact with people outside their immediate families. The shame runs very deep."

Project leaders raise the consciousness of members by citing famous stutterers, among them Moses, Demosthenes, Darwin and Maugham. Members also learn about well-known "closet cases" who go through elaborate rituals and word substitutions in public to conceal their affliction. To the N.S.P., trying to cover up a stammer is bad; the handicap must be announced frankly and faced.

Stutterers speak well of the new organization. Says John Albach, clerk at a San Mateo bookstore: "I've been much more fluent since I joined the project. To become part of a national group, it's just very self-enhancing." Still, the ridicule goes on. A few days ago, Albach began stammering while quoting the price of a book; to the customers, it sounded as if it cost hundreds of dollars. "These kids had a good time laughing and mimicking me," says Albach. "Afterwards you think of all the things you could have said, but then you don't know if your rejoinders will come out right either."

Stutterers claim that the public has little idea of the burden of a stammer. Michael Sugarman, a graduate student at San Francisco State University, says that as a teen-ager he always ordered french fries when eating out because "french fries" were the only words on the menu he could pronounce fluently. Says he: "So I wound up with acne as well as a stutter. That was my boyhood."

Goldman's project may be unable to do anything about that, but it has already scored its first notable success. Following a protest from N.S.P., Oakland television station KTVU stopped showing Porky Pig cartoons. That's all, folks.

*Though several psychological and physiological theories have been advanced, researchers are still uncertain about the cause of stuttering.

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