We don’t know where the original Miss Gordon is now, but we hope this message will reach the many Miss (and Mr.) Gordons who have given the gift of their craft to hundreds of children, and who have made those children’s life better.

My daughter — now a middle-age woman — had speech therapy as a child, from kindergarten to fifth-grade, to correct a prominent lisp. Amazingly, we, her parents, did not even recognize her speech problem, but the public school she attended did recognize it.

As an adult, my daughter, who lives in California, had acquired a lovely, velvety voice that made her a minor celebrity in her community.

She became an announcer at a country-western radio station and recently began a new career as a dispatcher for a police department in her small northern California town.

We talked recently, following her first over-night shift as a dispatcher, and she told me about her gratitude to that therapist — Miss Gordon — and to the school system that invested in the correction of her defect.

When she was a child, she had never shared with us, her parents, how agonizing it was for her, to be taunted and made fun of, as a lisper. Now, as an old man, I am hearing the full extent of what she lived with, and how hard she and Miss Gordon worked.

We don’t know where she is now, but I want to express my appreciation for what Miss Gordon did for my daughter, and countless others more than 40 years ago.

For other individuals and schools who provide their thoughtful and talented services to children, like my daughter, then and now, and for the years in between, my deepest thanks to you.

We are beholden to you.

Dan Sorensen

Mount Vernon

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