Sent to an Institute Because of Her Stutter

Mary Clifton was born on November 18, 1900 somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin, the third child of four.  Her parents were of English and Irish descent.  Her mother, Alice Burk, worked in a tailor’s shop, and her father, Edwin Cooley, worked in a flour mill.  There was nothing exceptional about Mary’s birth except that she was breech.  As she began to walk and talk, however, it was discovered that she had a speech impediment – a stutter – which everyone said was because she had been a breech baby. 

Mary did the best she could with her affliction, and when she was four, the family moved to Nebraska.  Mary grew up there and began high school, but her speech impediment was so bad that Alice and Edwin decided to send her back to Wisconsin to a special institute in Milwaukee to help her overcome it. 

The institute, it turned out, was mostly a school for deaf students, but it was there that Mary met a man who took an interest in her case.  He felt Mary was in the wrong place and recommended that she complete high school in Chicago.  After contacting her parents, he enrolled Mary in a school there and made arrangements for her to stay with a family he knew.  Mary says that though the family was kind to her, she missed home very much.

So it was that when she graduated, Mary returned to Nebraska and there attended one year of business school in hopes of getting a job as a secretary.  Her stay in Milwaukee and then in Chicago had helped her stuttering a bit, but not much, and after completing the year of business training, she decided to repeat it in hopes that her speech would improve. 

As the second year came to a close, she struck up her courage and attempted to finally go out and find a secretarial position.  No one, however, would hire the stuttering secretary.  Depressed, Mary eventually gave up her dream and decided to go back to Chicago, where she spent the next fifteen or twenty years working a variety of odd jobs and making her own way.  She had a small group of friends, but she believed the possibility of romance and love hopelessly beyond her reach. 

In her late thirties, however, some friends introduced her to one Clarence Clifton, a machine shop operator.  Clarence was the same age as Mary, but he was a widower with three children.  Clarence and Mary began dating, Clarence obviously overlooking Mary’s stutter, though the more she got to know him, the less pronounced it became.  Eventually Clarence proposed to Mary, who was head-over-heels for him, and they married shortly after. 

It was at this point in her life that Mary, perhaps because she was surrounded now by Clarence’s unconditional love, began to blossom.  She tried to be a good mother to Clarence’s children, and, at Clarence’s encouragement, decided to try again to get a job as a secretary – her dream.  She was absolutely thrilled, then, when she was hired by a law firm as the staff secretary.  She worked there for several years before she quit to take a similar secretarial position at a building products company.  It was a place she thoroughly loved, and she stayed there until she was 65, though she continued on working as a temp for many years even after that.

So in love with Clarence was Mary that she seems to have adopted all of his hobbies.  The two of them enjoyed watching wrestling on television as well as fixing up old cars.  If pressed to name something she likes for herself, she will say reading or needlework, but not with much enthusiasm.  Mary and Clarence had many happy years together until 1959 when Clarence died of a heart attack.  Mary was devastated by his death, but continued on her own until age 90 when she felt she couldn’t live alone any longer.  She then asked her niece to help her find a nursing home, which she seems to have adjusted to pretty well. 

Her speech impediment still lingers a bit as she tells stories of the past, and though she is able to recall them very clearly, she has difficulty in placing them in order.  Mary says she has always been a nervous person, though she has tried all her life to hide it.

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