SATURDAY MEMORY

January 18, 2025

From 1961 through 1963, while in graduate school, I worked at the John Tracy Clinic. This was a clinic started by Louise Treadwell Tracy, the wife of Spencer Tracy, in 1942, to do research and establish treatment and educational programs for young children suffering various forms of deafness, in honor of their son, John, who developed nerve deafness at a young age. My work involved using the galvanic skin response (GSR) as a means of testing the hearing of the young patients brought to the clinic. My work illustrated how the GSR was a very sensitive indicator of hearing and could be used in developing approaches to dealing with deafness, particularly in relation to learning language through various means.

I enjoyed working with the kids. I also enjoyed meeting Louise Treadwell Tracy a number of times as well as Katherine Hepburn on two occasions. My conversations with them focused entirely on the research I was doing. They did not mention, nor did I ask anything, about Spencer Tracy.