A Kid With a Speech Impediment Can Become a Radio Host

BUCK: Some of you listening may know this; a lot of you listening across the country won’t. But for the parents out there I tell this story ’cause I hope that it’s one of those things that will, for some of you, give you just a little bit of reassurance and just to stay on it and when it comes to education and making sure that, you know, that believing in your kid is so critical, right?

Believing in them in an educational way. I mean, of course you love your children, will do anything for them, but, you know, believing in them and pushing them and giving them every opportunity to succeed in an academic environment. So I sit here with you now, and obviously Clay is out today on vacation, but this platform that we share that Rush built on the EIB is the biggest single talk radio show in the country. What you may not know, some of you might, is that I was somebody who actually had a speech impediment as a kid. I had an enunciation disorder. So I was falling behind in class. I could not pronounce my own name when I was in the second grade. I would mispronounce my own name. And I won’t even tell you how I pronounced it, but it was not good. And you can image when you’re a kid and you say your name to people and they laugh at you, that’s not particularly confidence boosting or inspiring.

And I also, because of this, I think, was falling behind in school as well. So going into second grade, third grade I was a kid who was at the bottom of the class, they thought about, they told my parents, I was at a Catholic school here in New York. They told my parents that I might have to go to a special school and that I needed speech therapy.

Now, the head of the lower, they called it the lower school at the time, so the part of the schools that goes up to, I guess, third or fourth grade was a great woman named Jane Warwick who is well known here in New York City education circles, and she, with my parents, backed me. She said, no, no, no, we’re gonna actually, we’re gonna fix this. We’re gonna get him speech therapy and we’re going to encourage him and maybe give him some extra, extra tutoring, right, for academics. So I went from being a kid who couldn’t pronounce his own name, literally could not do it. I mean, I would miss — enunciation disorders are tough.

You hear some people just say a consonant wrong or something, but if you do that enough, it sounds weird, and people, when you’re a kid, make fun of you. Right? That was what was happening to me.

So I’m a kid with a speech impediment at the bottom of the class. But my parents, my mom and my dad say, “We’re with you no matter what on this one, and we’re gonna keep him in normal school,” you know, the school that I was in, I should say, not a special education program outside of it. And within about 18 months it two years the speech thing was totally fixed and within three years I wasn’t at the bottom of the class, I was number one in my class. By the time I got to the eighth grade I got a hundred thousand-dollar scholarship to a private high school in New York called Regis and was a standout on the debate team.

And I will tell you a quick, fun story about that. Of course now I’m here on the Clay and Buck show, the biggest talk radio program in the country. So you can imagine quite a storyline arc here, from speech impediment to biggest radio show in America. I always remember that I had just won, it may have been my second, but I think my second, I think. I wish I could tell you it was my first, speech and debate tournament as a high school freshman. And I got to run up to — I thought she was so pretty, a couple years older than me, my speech therapist’s daughter was at a party. She was a year or two older than me the time. I always thought she was, you know, I had a, like a, kind of a crush on her. And I remember I went up to her and I was like, hey, you know, I was a patient of your mom’s, and I just won my debate tournament. And I can tell you she did not care at all. She’s like, who is this younger guy who’s talking to me at a party, like, where’s the captain of the football team? Get out of here, speech nerd.

But point being for me it was a big moment. It was a big moment. And I really appreciated that. So to all the parents out there, look. I think especially now given how much a lot of kids have had to, you know, step away from the classroom, they’ve been forced to be masked up away from their friends, away from normal learning, away from their favorite teachers, you know, you might require a little extra, you know, you might have to do more at home than you have in the past and maybe some of the test scores that you’re gonna see in the next year or two aren’t what they, aren’t what they, you know, were before or maybe you’re a little concerned about it. Stay on it. Stay with it. I think the single most important thing that parents can do — and this is just for my own experience for a kid.

Especially a kid who’s struggling a little bit, whether it’s with a speech issue or just school in general or behavioral issue, is stay with them, stay on it, and believe in them. If you do that, it’ll be fine. You know. Will it turn, will the person turn into a talk radio host? I don’t know. Maybe. Will your son or daughter go that route? I mean, I wouldn’t, it’s not an easy life, by the way. I wouldn’t recommend it, necessarily. But stay with them, stay on it, believe in them, and it will all be fine. That’s all you gotta do. That’s what my parents did ’cause I got great parents. Very lucky.