Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 3, 1990 TAG: 9005040178
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: W-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BOB TEITLEBAUM SPORTSWRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Wills, a former all-state and all-Timesland football player, tells of gaining a diploma from Salem High School without being able to read. He went public with his story to help others and he is getting aid so that he can attend college and lead a normal life.
Mike McCall graduated from Notre Dame, was sports information director at Roanoke College and worked as a stringer covering high school games for the Roanoke Times & World-News.
Last month, he accepted a job as the director of public relations of the Washington Redskins. He has dyslexia, cannot read street signs and has trouble making proper change. Yet his problem was caught in the first grade and he avoided the pitfalls that have made Wills' life almost a living hell.
"I took an IQ test after first grade and found out that while I knew some words, I was missing ones I should know. Maybe dog became god. I was inverting numbers a lot," said McCall.
"What I used to do is read the first part of a word. If I understood that, I'd read for content of the second. I'd skim and I'd get it wrong. I got in the habit of skimming, but I assumed it was reading."
That was in 1966, before anyone realized how many people had serious reading disorders.
"As I got older, I'd catch myself doing that two or three sentences ahead, so I had to slow down. Being dyslexic is a reading problem. A normal person's selection process goes a-b-c-d. My problem is that the b might come before the a," said McCall.
Patty Watts, a Roanoke schoolteacher who specializes in helping children with reading problems and who is tutoring Larry Wills, says his problem is a bit different from McCall's.
"Dyslexia takes many forms. It's a catch-all phrase for reading disabilities," said Watts. "They discovered Larry had a problem in the fifth grade. He had a hard time with backward lettering, reading b's instead of d's.
"Larry also has a hard time discriminating vowel sounds. When he looked at a word, he didn't know how to pronounce the vowel sound. He'd give up, afraid he'd be wrong. So he could read a little bit. Probably about fourth grade level."
Watts is working with Wills so that he will become familiar with vowel sounds. Then they'll work on groups of letters such as a-k-e in words like make, take, quake, etc.
Wills admits taking short cuts to make his way through Salem while hiding how serious his problem was. "What we find mostly with adult readers who have not been able to read for a long time is that they are able to use short cuts and they are able to fool a lot of people," said Watts.
Wills fooled his closest friends. He was close friends with Watts' daughters, Kelly and Kim, when they attended Salem. Yet the Watts family, for all the time they spent with Wills, never realized the magnitude of his problem.
"They [Kim and Kelly] were flabbergasted when I told them about his story. Larry told me that when I was reading things and showing Kim and Kelly how to do it, he wanted to say, `Help me.' But he was too scared that we'd be ashamed of him."
McCall says this is common. When he went to work for the Times & World-News, he never told anyone he was dyslexic. A colleague, reading his stories, noticed that McCall misspelled the simplest of words - words a graduate of Notre Dame shouldn't miss.
Confronted by this, McCall confessed he was dyslexic and had told only Roanoke College athletic director Ed Green about his problem.
Now McCall routinely tells prospective employers. He held jobs with the University of Florida and Tampa Bay Buccaneers before going to the Redskins.
"All three [employers] were surprised because the quality of my work didn't reflect the problem," said McCall. "It just so happens my line of work deals with words and numbers, which is unusual for dyslexic people.
"Charlie Dayton [vice president of communications for the Redskins] was talking about Dexter Manley, who confessed last year to having reading problems. I told him I grew up dyslexic."
McCall and other directors of sports publicity always have their work proofread. Only McCall warns the people checking his work to be sure and look for the simplest of words to be misspelled.
McCall was even afraid to tell his wife Beth about his problem when they were dating.
"I felt like I didn't want anyone to know. I didn't want to tell anyone," said McCall, who now has no problem telling people.
by CNB