Retired Dallas man with dyslexia finally conquers reading

From The Dallas Morning News:

With his flattop and handlebar mustache, his meerschaum pipe and sleeveless shirts, Arnie Clark (pictured) cuts a vivid figure in northern Collin County. He's a man of interests, everything from gunsmithing to keeping peacocks on his eight-acre spread near Anna.

But when Clark retired in 2007 – after a half-century as a mechanic and welder – a spiritual funk settled over him. He even quit attending his small Catholic church in Van Alstyne, feeling he was going through the motions. "Cheating God" is how he describes it.

His wife, Elaine, spoke to church lay leader Arthur Atteberry.

He thought his struggling friend might find new purpose as a lector, reading the Bible from the pulpit.

But when the two men talked, Clark made a confession.

"He said, 'I can't read,' " Atteberry recalled. "He said, 'I've faked it my whole life.' "

The lay leader didn't know if a 67-year-old had a shot at becoming a reader. But he figured he'd make a call.

With that, Arnie Clark's troubled retirement began to turn around.

Growing up in Illinois, Clark found that mechanical tasks came easily. But school was torture. He couldn't sound out words on a page.

"Everyone thought I was a dummy," he said. "My parents, they had teacher meetings. And the teacher just come out and told 'em, 'You know, he's not learnable.'"
Clark learned to sign his name, read some basic words, and count. That was about it.

He recalls getting promoted anyway, considered too big to hold back. In ninth grade, a teacher told him to read an article aloud and kept the whole class after school because he couldn't.

"I went home and told my mother, 'I'm quitting,' " he recalled. "She said, 'You'll be sorry.' "

But Clark wasn't, quickly finding his way into blue-collar work. Within a few years, he began to date Elaine.

"One night, she give me a birthday card," Clark said. "I opened it up, and done my usual thing – just looked at it. She said, 'Read it aloud.' "

Cornered, he shared his secret – and hoped she wouldn't bolt.

Elaine said, "I was all of 16, 17. I thought I could teach him. Optimistic teenager."

The teaching didn't work, but they married. Arnie was the breadwinner, and Elaine filled out his paperwork and read him instruction manuals. They kept quiet about his illiteracy.

The pattern held for decades, through the birth of two sons and a move to North Texas in 1975. He did mechanical work and welding for the Plano public schools, the Allen public schools and the city of Allen.

It was not lost on Clark that someone who couldn't read was depended on to keep school buses running. Nor did it escape him that he was missing opportunities.

"I had one guy tell me when I was working at Plano, 'Why don't you go take the test so you can be a boiler welder?' " Clark said. "I found out there was book reading. I backed out."

Clark and his wife say he tried a few times to get help with reading, but his shift would change, or there would be some other problem.

Wherever he worked, Clark made an impression.

"A first-class welder, and one of my favorite people," said Steve Hanner, Allen ISD maintenance supervisor.

Hanner said Clark led the way in their shop by donating five sick days to a co-worker who needed time with a critically ill spouse.

He also recalled when Clark's duties changed, requiring reading and writing.

"He came to me and said he couldn't read. I said OK, we'd work it out."

Had Hanner suspected?

"If I'd been looking for it, I would have known it. But he did a good job of hiding it."

Atteberry called Collin County Justice of the Peace Johnny Lewis, who was moved by Clark's story. Lewis phoned Beverly Dooley, who runs Southwest Academy in Allen, a private school for kids with learning problems.

"Judge Johnny said, 'Hey, can you teach this guy to read?' " Dooley recalled.

She had Clark come for a test, which verified low verbal skills and issues with "perceptual organization." But the diagnostician concluded he had the intelligence to learn to read, if he got the right method and a patient therapist.

To Dooley, Clark clearly had dyslexia – a condition that can affect even bright people, making it hard to process words.

"Back in his day, they didn't know what was wrong," Dooley said.

She approached Carol Stoner, a veteran teacher studying to become a certified academic language therapist, and needing to put in 820 hours of tutoring.

Would she take on Clark – for free?

"I was kind of scared. I didn't have confidence with an adult," Stoner said. "I thought about it, prayed about it, talked to my husband. I finally said, 'I'll do it for the Lord.' Of course, when you give of yourself, you're usually more blessed than the person you're giving to. That's what happened."

Clark had one request when they began their tutorials in late 2007: No Dick and Jane. Stoner found another primer, Mac and Tab, and he was OK with that.

But reading didn't start for two months. Before that – even after – it was phonics boot camp, day after day. Stoner used lip pictures and other tools for kids to help him sound out letters and words.

"I was amazed at how humble he was," Stoner said. "He was willing to go back to the very beginning."

For two school years, Stoner and Clark met four days a week, for an hour and a half. She'd hear his old Dodge truck pull up at her house 15 minutes early. He stayed outside, smoking his pipe, until she finished tutoring the little boy ahead of him.

Clark and Stoner worked through all seven books of "Take Flight," a reading program the Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children developed for children with dyslexia.

They agree there were no "aha!" moments, just slow, steady building on the fundamentals, which they reviewed every day.

Stoner gradually gave him more challenging reading. He advanced enough to handle easy adult-level material and became fond of the stories in Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul.

Last Christmas, he managed to read an instruction book and program the remote control on a new TV.

"I got ahead of Elaine on that one," he said.

Clark's public reading debut occurred last February, at a Southwest Academy fundraiser. Flanked by Stoner and Dooley, he read a short, two-part essay he and Elaine wrote together.

One part was about learning to read. The other was about his hero John Wayne.

Why John Wayne?

"There are no gray areas. It's either right or wrong," said Clark, who had the gray area of hidden illiteracy most of his life.

Clark's reading brought the crowd to its feet. Dooley calls that night the highlight of her 40 years in education. Lewis – who helped him get to her school – still chokes up describing it.

"I've got grandkids, two wonderful boys," Lewis said, "but there's one picture on my refrigerator, and it's of Arnie, Dr. Dooley and myself, from last February."

Clark is the first to say he's a work in progress and after the summer break will resume tutorials with Stoner, who still has some certification hours to go.

Active again in church, Clark would like to be a lector.

"There's still a lot of stuff out there I can't read," he said. "but I'm gonna get it."