The Miracle Of Arthur Wold -- Typing Unlocks A Trapped Mind: `I Can Talk And Tell Mom I Love Her'

merry christmas from arthur to all my friends and family.

i am able to wish you all a happy christmas fore the first time

in my life.

i wish you all will be as happy as i am.

- from the Wold family Christmas card -----------------------------------

Miracles still happen. Arthur Wold is one.

For most of his 29 years the experts have said Wold had the mind of a 3-year-old. Teachers showed him a few words and a little sign language, but said he'd never learn.

Then someone thought to put a computer keyboard in front of him and see if that was true.

"My name is . . .," his helper typed.

"Art . . .," he typed back.

It was the first inkling anyone ever had that trapped inside a lanky body that wouldn't cooperate was a young man waiting for a wake-up call. A young man who wanted desperately to come out of the speechless limbo he'd lived in since birth.

"Typing is teaching me to talk," he told his mother last Sept. 26, the first time she knew her son was anything but mentally retarded.

He felt "happy," he told the helper in understatement that same miraculous morning. "I can talk and tell Mom that I love her."

Wold is using "facilitated communication," a technique introduced to this country from Australia two years ago to help disabled people say the things they'd never been able to say. All it involves is a standard computer keyboard and the assistance of a second person who holds and steadies the forearm of the typist.

The method was pioneered by Rosemary Crossley, an educator and hospital worker who used the technique on people with cerebral palsy and, later, autism.

Wold "doesn't have that label," says Carole Crane, the facilitator who first typed with him. "We're just finding out we don't know what's going on with lots of people. We've said their cognitive skills are low, but sometimes we don't know that. They just aren't able to tell us what they know."

Experts say some people with speech impairments, like Wold, also have problems coordinating their movements to their thoughts. They want to move their hands, for instance, or speak, but cannot turn thought to action.

Wold hunts and pecks with one forefinger to type out all that is bottled up inside him. His parents or Crane grip his forearm to hold it steady while he focuses on each letter. When he gets excited and goes too fast, his long finger misses the target and he keeps jabbing to get the word out.

Crane picked up the typing technique last summer at a conference in Salem, Ore., and decided to try it on some of the people she works with at Olympus Electronics, a sheltered workshop.

She was astounded by how eagerly Wold took to the keyboard.

After so many years in silence, there is much to say.

"Can you read script?" Phoebe Wold asked her son on Nov. 21.

"No."

"OK. I am sorry. I was not fully aware."

"I want to learn."

"You will eventually. You have already learned more than we ever thought you would."

"I was observing."

"Your father (and I) are in awe."

Phoebe and Sid Wold didn't question their youngest child's inability to speak until he was 4. They thought he was just slow. Sid remembers that he never cried. Phoebe says he did, sometimes, but he was on the whole a happy child.

The Wolds took Arthur to doctors who tested him. When the tests showed he was severely retarded, the Wolds took him home to raise as well as they could. They put him in special-education classes and took him to church.

Arthur spoke every now and then. Still does. But the words are involuntary and rarely make sense. Sometimes he simply echoes the last word or two someone says to him.

"He's very friendly," Phoebe says. "We'd be shopping and he'd go running across the store and start shaking hands with someone. I'd be embarrassed and say, `Now, Arthur, you can't go walking up to people like that when you don't know them.' And they'd say, `Oh, I remember Arthur. I used to teach him.' "

Sid remembers asking the minister of Woodland Park Presbyterian Church if Arthur could come to services. Sid was worried that his son's occasional outbursts of mostly unintelligible words might bother worshipers. "There's been a lot of people like Arthur who've been asked not to go to church, but he didn't make a nuisance of himself."

Phoebe remembers a teacher once showed Arthur eight written words. He let them know by pointing that he understood three of them. In about the fifth grade, another teacher taught him a few words of sign language. But they soon gave up on the smiling boy.

Somehow, the Wolds know now, Arthur was learning to read.

"You did not know I was needing to type," Arthur wrote Nov. 21.

"No one knew," Phoebe answered.

"I was in limbo. I was in a state of unconsciousness."

Wold has all the memories of childhood and all the pain of an unrequited youth.

"I think you love him and I wish I had someone to love me," he wrote to Phoebe about his father on Nov. 30.

"That is something I can't answer, Arthur," Phoebe typed back. "It makes me sad, too, to think you may never have that. You will always have many friends, but I know you still miss something."

Phoebe wondered if her son's disabilities extended to his hearing.

"Do you hear and understand Dad or me when we just talk to you during the day?" Phoebe asked. "I'm trying to learn what tone of voice you can hear."

"Healing tone of voice. Good tone of voice," Wold answered.

"You have some interesting concepts of sound," Phoebe said. "I want to explore the healing tone some more. What do you think makes a voice sound like that?"

"I think it is soft and loving and that it is like God's voice."

Arthur ended the conversation that evening, ". . . We have to go to bed now. Goodnight, goodnight and don't let the bedbugs bite."

Wold was there, behind his clear blue eyes, even when everyone thought he wasn't.

He was always included in his family's life. He took the trip of a lifetime with them to England when he was a boy. He was a member of the wedding parties when his older sister and brother were married.

The same photo hangs on the walls of the family living room and Wold's bedroom at Lincoln Park Group Home in West Seattle. Sid and Arthur, standing together outdoors, both wearing jaunty Irish caps, looking at one another.

"We always tried to include him as much as we could, even though we didn't know if he knew he was being included," Phoebe said recently. "Thank goodness we treated him as normally as we could. What if we hadn't?"

Others weren't so careful. Crane once asked if she had sometimes treated him without respect when she was working with him. Sometimes, he said. She apologized and said she always tried to treat people nicely.

"Yes, but trying to be nice isn't always being nice," he typed.

"He's got a depth of understanding there that nobody ever realized he had," Crane said. "We're just beginning to find out how he thinks."

"It felt terrible when people treated me like I was mentally retarded," Wold typed recently. "I wanted to watch what I did."

Wold wants above all to be treated normally. He asks tentatively to go home. Phoebe and Sid are hesitant because the physical disabilities are still there.

Wold wants to tell others who have been kept silent by their disabilities "about typing."

"Everyone should know about it," he typed. "When people know they will treat people with respect. When everyone realizes that we are smart, they will try to understand. Will people realize that everyone should be treated with respect even if they are not smart? Tell them . . . we are important to the world just like everyone else."

"I would like you to think about typing a Christmas note that we can put in cards for our friends and family," Phoebe told her son on Thanksgiving.

"I will do that," Wold answered. "I want to tell them about typing. I will wish them a merry Christmas."

"Why do we celebrate Christmas?" Phoebe probed.

"It is the birthday of Jesus," Wold answered. "It is the new beginning. It is just like God coming to us. Just like we feel this day."