Charles Van Riper - Biography

Biography

Charles Van Riper, known to his family as Cully, grew up in Champion Township, Michigan. He was the son of Champion's physician, known as "Dr. Van". Charles began to stutter at two years of age, and had a "miserable childhood" growing up in the midst of local superstition about stutterers. Even though he stuttered throughout his schooling years, he did very well academically, reading voraciously and showing great talent for writing. He subsequently attended the Northern Michigan Normal School, and then the University of Michigan where he won honors for creative writing and graduated with a Master of Arts in English. After graduation, he taught high school English in Saline, Michigan, developing many techniques for dealing with his stuttering while teaching. Although he was regarded as a proficient and innovative teacher, the stress of his stuttering and his fear of speaking in many situations, made him unhappy at teaching.

A severe stutterer, Charles attended two institutes for stutterers, the Bogue Institute of Stammerers in Indianapolis and the Millard School in Milwaukee, but these institutions did little good; at the time, "nobody had actually taken the trouble to learn about stuttering, so nobody knew how to cure it". He subsequently joined a graduate program in speech pathology at Iowa, where he and other graduate students tried to develop "practical techniques" of a treatment for stuttering. These attempts proved successful, and after several years in Iowa, Charles received his Ph.D. in speech pathology.

In 1936, Charles was hired by the Western Michigan State Normal School in Kalamazoo. He founded and headed its speech clinic, and was the first chair of its speech pathology and audiology department. During his subsequent career he became internationally known as a pioneer in the development of the science of speech pathology; he worked with thousands of stutterers, did research, and published a large number of books, articles and films on the subject. Under the pseudonym "Cully Gage", Charles also wrote The Northwoods Reader, a series of books based on life in Champion.

Charles stuttered throughout his career despite trying almost every sort of stuttering therapy, ranging from rhythmic control, relaxation, slow speech, and breathing exercises, to psychoanalysis and hypnosis. He eventually managed to become very fluent even though he continued to stutter. Charles wrote in a letter to a newsletter that he had lived a "very successful and happy life", a result of an idea that came to him while hitch-hiking his way home from Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where he had spent a month as the hired man on a farm, pretending to be a deaf mute because his stuttering was so severe that he could not get any other employment: he met an old stutterer who said that he was "too old and tired to fight myself now so I just let the words leak out"; Charles realised that he should have been seeking a way of stuttering that would be tolerable both to others and himself, instead of avoiding and hiding his stutter.

Charles died in his home in Kalamazoo, after a long illness.