Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 27, 1994 TAG: 9401270101
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: LAURA WILLIAMSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"N-n-New Jersey."
For 29 years, Sabo has been fighting a muscle defect that makes him stutter. Wednesday, he talked - haltingly - about his hopes for overcoming the problem.
"Basically I hope to work with the p-p-program here, master all of the" - his lips contort into a twisted, uncontrollable smile - " techniques, so I can use them in the real world when I leave this clinic."
Sabo may take heart from others who have gone before him. The program he just entered - at the Hollins Communications Research Institute - will be featured tonight as a success story on the CBS television show "How'd They Do That?"
The institute - which has helped 3,400 people in its 20 years of operation - will share air time with a segment about 16 women who try to set a world record by parachuting out of an airplane and stacking themselves in mid-air. Another segment will show how engineers cleaned and rebuilt the World Trade Center after last year's terrorist bombing.
Hollins' nationally acclaimed stuttering-treatment program earned its spot on the show because it works, said David Johnson, coordinating producer for "How'd They Do That?"
"We don't do anything negative," he said. "Never have, never will."
Johnson said the six-minute segment tested "through the roof" with sample viewers in Los Angeles.
"This turned out to be a really good story," he said.
And a pretty good deal for Hollins, too.
But it will not be the first time the Hollins program has gained national recognition. It counts among its alumni Annie Glenn, wife of Sen. John Glenn, and John Stossel of the ABC news program "20/20."
In 1982, Philip Morris bankrolled a movie about the institute called "Talk to Me," starring another famous graduate, actor/director Austin Pendleton. It premiered in New York and was entered in the New York Film Festival. The film also was shown locally but not in theaters nationwide.
Tonight, CBS expects more than 15 million people to tune in.
Catherine Wohlberg, the institute's assistant director, hopes many of them are local.
"People don't know about us, even in Roanoke," she said. "We're Roanoke's best-kept secret."
Somebody must know about the institute. Wohlberg said people who call now to sign up for the $2,695 course will not get in for eight months.
What makes Hollins' program unique, she said, is its intensity and its patented computer therapy. Clients work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. for 19 consecutive days, taking frequent short breaks and time out for lunch and dinner.
Wohlberg said the program was developed in the late 1960s by Ronald Webster, the institute's director.
"Stuttering was traditionally thought of to be an emotional or psychological disorder," Wohlberg said.
Webster believed it was a motor-skill problem that was passed on genetically, an idea that did not gain widespread recognition until the past decade.
So how'd they fix that?
Clients begin by speaking in an exaggeratedly slow manner, holding each syllable for two seconds, Wohlberg said. The exercise helps them to feel how the muscles in their vocal chords vibrate, so they can learn to control them better.
The computer helps them practice controling those muscles by flashing when clients speak too abruptly and by giving positive feedback when they make sounds correctly, staff psychologist Jennifer Kelly said.
After they master the computer lessons, clients practice making speeches to each other and then venture into the local community, she said.
The institute has treated people from all 50 states and 23 foreign countries, Wohlberg said. It claims a 90 percent success rate, with 75 percent of its former clients retaining fluent speech two years later.
"Once we have it under c-c-control, that's the key," Sabo said. "That's why we're all here."
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.