Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, December 25, 1993 TAG: 9312250021
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Bill Bayes traces the determining moment of his life to the fumbling fingers of the West Virginia doctor who delivered him.
It was a slip of the forceps on a blustery day in a mountain mining town, Bayes believes, that damaged his brain and brought him a lifetime of cerebral palsy.
For 73 years, he has dealt with its effects: The trembling hands, the reeling gait, the frequently slurred speech and all the misunderstanding they bring.
He hopes to find a publisher for a book he's written about it. Bayes, retired now and living in Roanoke, calls it "Don't Say I Can't."
He has been saying that all his life, and he has:
Gone to military school, graduated from Hampden-Sydney College, gotten himself drafted and been promoted to Army sergeant in World War II.
Danced, swum, won ribbons in horseback riding, canoed, hiked, played tennis, fallen in love, married.
Run two businesses.
And reared two children, who gave him three grandsons.
Bayes begins his story at the beginning - the day in 1920 when his mother, a nurse, went into labor at their home in Boomer, W.Va.
His father was a coal company doctor. Back then, doctors seldom delivered their own children - it wasn't considered right. So his father persuaded a physician in Charleston - 27 miles away - to drive his Model T over a narrow, winding road to deliver the child.
Bayes says it was a normal birth. Maybe it was the doctor's fatigue or his ineptitude, but Bayes says the tong-like forceps cracked his head as the doctor pulled him from his mother's womb.
"The forceps crushed my skull," Bayes says in his book. "And by that one act, the me-that-was-to-be totally changed. An otherwise healthy 7 1/2-pound baby boy entered the world, head broken and bloody."
Seeing that, his father bundled him into a car and drove him to Charleston General Hospital. Surgeons relieved pressure from the baby's compressed skull.
But Bill Bayes was lucky in several respects.
His parents were educated, medically trained and with social connections. Though knowledge of cerebral palsy was scant, they learned all they could. Their son had a mild form of the nervous-system disorder that is caused by damage to the brain, often before, during or shortly after birth.
What his parents observed of their little boy told them he was an able child. They decided to have high expectations of him and not let cerebral palsy limit his future.
"The main thing was, they didn't allow me to use it as a crutch or an excuse," he said.
"You can do it, Bill," they urged.
His handwriting was shaky, so he took a typewriter to school. He hunched over his marbles in the front yard, trying to make them go in the right direction.
He clambered behind his best friends up a small mountain. He rode horses, accompanying his dad on house calls. He went to summer camp and learned tennis. He swam and canoed the Greenbrier River. He won a blue ribbon for horseback riding.
At 12, he begged his parents to enroll him in a West Virginia military school. It suited him just fine, until the day a kid called him "Jitters." The name stuck.
In the book, Bayes describes his condition squarely.
"It took both hands to steady a glass of water sufficiently to reach my lips. And there was the strenuous effort required to write legibly. Worst of all, there was the incessant falling down when I lost my balance in excitement or haste. I hated myself for all this."
With the nickname, he knew how visible his problems were and how cruel people could be. "I was sick at heart. The disillusionment was to last for years. I can still feel it."
He walked the back streets to avoid name-calling.
He returned home and to the local high school. The "Jitters" nickname followed him.
He transferred to a Kentucky military school to boost his grades before applying to college. He made friends; but this time, somebody started calling him "Jerky."
He graduated and earned the award for cadet who had made the most progress. He majored in psychology and philosophy at Hampden-Sydney College. He danced with dates at Sweet Briar and other women's colleges.
But he was no dandy. Back home, Bayes worked on a summer crew digging toilet pits and replacing rotten wood under coal-company houses.
When his college buddies enlisted in the military at the start of World War II, Bayes insisted on doing the same. He flunked Army, Navy and Merchant Marine physicals. Finally, he passed a second Army exam.
"I was determined to be a good soldier, see it through, give my country the best I had to give." Bayes made sergeant and stayed stateside.
After the war, he took law courses and had many jobs. Landing one was seldom easy.
"Was it because I was a spastic? I believed then, as I did later in other situations, that there was often this stereotype in the employer's mind, perhaps subconsciously, of the spastic's not being able to produce or `keep up.' "
You seldom hear the word "spastic" anymore. Bayes does not find it offensive. Literature on the disorder defines "spastic" as a type of cerebral palsy characterized by stiff and difficult movement.
Some handicaps are understood on sight: The blind woman with her cane. The deaf man's hands lively with sign language. The double-amputee in her wheelchair.
But strangers don't automatically know why people with cerebral palsy walk and talk the way they do. They assume they're drunk.
On job interviews, employers would tell Bayes, "People wouldn't understand."
When he was a directory assistance operator, some callers interpreted his speech as a drunkard's drawl.
Bayes understood. "Let's be objective about Bill Bayes," he says. Sometimes his speech and movements appear to match those of someone intoxicated.
He had many romances anyway. One fiancee's parents forbade her marriage to Bayes, fearing their children would be handicapped. Cerebral palsy is not hereditary.
Listen to him a while, and you find that Bayes is something of an orator, a literate, courtly Southern gentleman who chooses his words with precision. His voice will be a steady baritone one minute, then slow and slur the next. His larger movements are somewhat disjointed, but not as dramatically so as those of many people with cerebral palsy. Sometimes he can conceal it.
"He's a very kind, caring person," says his friend Dorothy Rapp in Northern Virginia. "I have tremendous admiration for this guy."
As a young man, Bayes ran a laundry and dry cleaners in West Virginia. One day, an attractive nurse brought in her uniforms. "From the first time we made eye contact, I sensed there was something special about her." He and Joetta married and had two healthy children, a daughter and a son.
They lived in Fairfax County many years. He ran Bill Bayes' Sandwich Shop in Alexandria, serving kosher corned beef, imported ham, deluxe hamburgers, pizza and beer.
Joetta died in her 50s, and Bayes gave up the restaurant.
He began his book in 1981, after a hard day at that phone company job. Sitting under a tree in his back yard, "I said, `Well, Bill, what have you gone through all this for? Why don't you capture some of this? You have a story to tell.' "
He set his typewriter on his dining room table and stayed at it all summer.
He retired to Roanoke a few years ago, even though this city delivered one of the greatest humiliations of his life.
On a summer night nearly 50 years ago, Bayes and his brother-in-law were here on business. After a movie, Bayes said, they bought cigars and strolled back to the Patrick Henry Hotel. A young police officer, mistakenly believing Bayes was drunk, handcuffed him and threw him in jail.
Bayes has forgiven Roanoke. He likes it here. He lives on Carefree Lane. From his hilltop apartment, he watches planes ascend from the airport. When the air pollution permits, he gazes at the mountains.
Heavy antiques from his Scotch-Irish Presbyterian ancestors furnish his apartment.
He plays bridge twice a week at the Elks Lodge, wherefriends patiently warn him to hold his cards high and out of sight. "He's a marvelous person. After reading the book, you think even more of him," says bridge partner Bill Childers.
Bayes recently took his manuscript to Sally Weiss, information/publications coordinator for the United Cerebral Palsy Associations' national office in Washington.
She gets lots of manuscripts. "His, I found most compelling," Weiss said. "What is remarkable about his story is that it is unremarkable. He led a normal life. This is a very good story of a well-lived life."
She can't publish it, but she hopes someone will.
Bayes says he isn't aiming to get rich or famous from the bound, 115-page manuscript. He just wants people to understand.
"I hope my life is not a lamentation, and I hope my manuscript isn't," he says.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB