McNaughton didn’t know anything about children with dis-abilities when she began teaching at the Ontario Crippled Children’s Centre (OCCC) in 1968. On her first day, as she was touring the center, she saw a little girl drop one of her crutches, and, she says, “I was about to run over and help her, but they held me back. ‘She has to learn how to get up,’ they told me.” After that McNaughton relied on the kids to tell her what to do—how to open leg braces, how to adjust a wheelchair—and she learned to focus on their capabilities and strengths.
But she wasn’t sure what to do with the children who couldn’t speak. “They had little boards with pictures on them—a picture of a toilet, a picture of some food, all needs-based pictures—I went through a year just asking them yes-or-no questions: ‘Would you like to do this? Would you like to do that?’ But they couldn’t initiate anything themselves.” They seemed to understand what was said to them, and, more important, they seemed to have something to say. “You could just tell with the twinkle in their eye or something.”
McNaughton started talking with some of the staff about trying to introduce reading to these kids. She and Margrit Beesley, an occupational therapist, went to the administration to ask for a half day to work just with the nonspeaking kids. “The administration agreed, and we were given a laundry room in the basement to try our experiment.” First, they needed to figure out what the kids knew and what they understood. They decided to try making up symbols that the kids could point to in order to express themselves (most of the kids, unlike Ann, were able to point), but it took them a long time to figure out how to symbolize more abstract concepts, so they decided to see whether someone already had a system of symbols they could use.
Their search led them to Semantography, Charles Bliss’s eight-hundred-page book. He claimed that with the small number of basic symbols in his book, thousands of ideas could be expressed through combination. For example, this was how the words for emotions were expressed:
A noun could be made into a verb with the addition of an “action” symboclass="underline"
And adjectives could be made with the addition of an “evaluation” symboclass="underline"
Other words were derived from more complex types of combination:
This type of combinatorial system seemed promising. The children could only point to what they could reach from a seated position in their wheelchairs; they couldn’t have a separate symbol for every word they might want to say. But if they could put two symbols together to create a third word, they could get more out of what fit in front of them.
Once McNaughton had taught the kids the meaning of a few symbols and showed them examples of how the symbols could be put together, she witnessed an explosion of self-expression. Kids whose communicative worlds had been defined by the options of pointing to a picture of a toilet, or waiting for someone to ask the right question, started talking about a car trip with a father, a brother’s new bicycle, a pet cat’s habit of hiding under the bed. Kids who were assumed to be severely retarded showed remarkable ingenuity in getting their messages across. When one little boy was asked what he wanted to be for Halloween, he pointed to the symbols “creature,” “drink,” “blood,” “night”—he wanted to be Dracula. One particularly bright little girl named Kari took to this new means of expression with so much gusto that she could barely stand to be away from her symbols. When her father picked her up from school, she would cry through the whole car ride home, and could not be consoled until she was on the living room floor with her symbols, telling her family about the exciting events of the day.
McNaughton and the team of therapists she was working with took a picture of Kari, sitting in her wheelchair, surrounded by an array of symbols. Her eyes are sparkling, her smile is huge, and her dimples are adorable. When they finally tracked down Bliss in Australia, they sent him the picture. Before he received it, he later wrote, “I was resigned to my fate that I shall not see the fruits of my labours before I die. And then this picture, sent by Shirley, floated onto my desk. I can’t describe the tumult of my thoughts. The heavens opened up and the golden sun broke through the darkened sky. I was delirious with joy.”
He immediately mortgaged his house in order to make the long trip to Toronto. Everyone was excited. When he arrived, there were meetings and talks and parties. Bliss told jokes and played the mandolin and showered everyone he met with over-the-top compliments. The children loved him; he juggled and sang and shouted his love for them at the top of his voice. When he found out that the speech therapist had recently lost her husband to diabetes, he shed tears of deep sorrow, raged at the injustice of her misfortune, professed his undying love for her, and proposed marriage.
The staff didn’t quite know what to make of that. It seemed kind of sweet and funny at the time. He was seventy-five years old. He was exotic, Old World, an Austrian Jew who had survived the war. He was effusive and emotional and not very Canadian. They stood back, amused but a little stunned. They had been hit by a personality tornado.
Near the end of his visit, Bliss gave McNaughton a copy of a book he had recently published, The Invention and Discovery That Will Change Our Lives. “We started to read it,” she told me, “and we all had a private meeting and we said the administration should never see this book. It was really something—about how the nuclear bomb is all a myth, how the Soviets killed Kennedy, and how teachers are to blame for the problems of the world, and how they are all cowards and sex perverts—we thought that if the administration sees this, they’ll never let him come back.”
The staff’s concern was for the children. They wanted to continue to develop the Blissymbols program, and they needed Bliss’s help. He was a bit strange, but wasn’t that often a mark of genius? They didn’t need to subscribe to all his theories; they just needed his symbols. And he wanted to help. He was so glad to be there. He cared about the children so much. Surely he would do everything he could to make the program succeed. He was a wonderful man.
McNaughton had originally discovered Blissymbolics in a book called Signs and Symbols Around the World, where it was briefly mentioned. There was a reference to Semantography. Shirley and her team couldn’t find the book anywhere. Eventually, they had the national library in Ottawa do a search across Canada, and one copy was found, at a university in Sudbury. They kept renewing the book as they searched for a copy they could buy. They wrote to the publisher but got no response. So they wrote to the book’s distributor, who said, “We want nothing to do with that man. We dropped his stuff years ago.” Their search led them to other distributors, who all said the same thing. At the time, Shirley was too preoccupied with finding the book to wonder about those comments. And in the whirlwind of Bliss’s visit, she failed to make any connection between those comments and the man who inspired them.
Those Queer and Mysterious Chinese Characters
Charles Bliss was born Karl Kasiel Blitz in 1897, in Czernowitz, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now part of Ukraine. His family was poor. “If you have seen the musical ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’” he wrote in one of his pamphlets, “you will know the story of my parents.” His father worked odd jobs as an optician, a mechanic, an electrician, and a wood turner, and as a boy Charles was fascinated by gadgets, circuits, and chemistry. In 1908 he attended a lecture about the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition, and he was enraptured by the tale of bravery in the face of extremes. He realized that “life has been given to me to conquer hardship in the quest for knowledge. I decided to become an engineer. I wanted to invent things for a better life.”