Story and Photos by Hannah Everman
The wooden desks creaked with the squirms of anxious first graders, waiting for their turn to use the microphone. They all had to stand up and introduce themselves to the class. One of the students, a girl with blonde, curly locks, asks if she could tell a joke instead of saying her name. Not knowing what kind of jokes a first grader might tell, her teacher agrees. When it comes her turn, the little girl stands up and says into the microphone:
“Why does the ocean roar?”
The students pause.
“Well, if you had crabs on your bottom, you’d roar, too.”
The students laugh, and the girl sits back down, breathing a slow sigh of relief. She had managed to conceal her secret once more. She didn’t know it then, but years later she would find herself attending speech therapy and walking around her college campus, stopping at fire hydrants, to practice saying, “Hello, my name is C-C-C-C-Candy, and I stutter.”
Talking to Candy Morasch today, you’d never be able to tell she was a stutterer from the time she could talk until she was 20. After years of training and patience, she is now able to control it, and turn it on and off. Morasch now runs Once Upon A Horse at Saddletime Farm in Grants Pass, Oregon.
The nonprofit, therapeutic riding lesson program serves the needs of communication-impaired individuals and typically developing individuals by helping build respect, responsibility and relationships. She says she’s always been “a champion of the underdog,” and relates to the children she works with because she has been there herself.
“I know what it’s like to be trapped by the spoken word, and I also know what it’s like to have control of the spoken word,” says Morasch. She says she still struggles with it today and catches herself blocking. Secondary stutterers, like herself, are forced to clap their hands, or do something to get through the “block.”
All of Morasch’s students share a love for animals—something Morasch says you couldn’t teach; it just has to be there. She has always found comfort in her relationships with animals. It started at the wee age of four on her grandmother’s ranch in Endicott, Washington, where she had a Welsh pony named Rocket. “Animals have always been my sanctuary,” Morasch says.
Her family moved from Washington to Grants Pass in 1952, and she entered fourth grade and promptly joined 4-H to continue her animal education. She had a particular interest in helping heal wounded animals. The local veterinarian would bring by abused or disadvantaged animals for her to nurture, but Morasch’s mother drew the line when a raccoon was suggested. Morasch chuckles, “I thought it would be fun. But I guess my mother thought otherwise.”
Morasch’s dream to start a program that combined speech therapy with her love of animals came at a young age. When she was nine years old, she told her mother, Dorothy, that someday she wanted to work with children like her and horses together.
She traces the origins of her stuttering back to parental conflict. Her father, Herman, was a policeman in Grants Pass. “He was what people called a street angel and a house devil,” says Morasch, “He would come through that door at night, and my blood would turn to ice water.”
In 1962, Morasch’s junior year of high school, a loud boom rang through her house. She slowly descended the stairs. Suddenly, her mother appears from the garage and says, “Do not go outside. Your father has killed himself.”
This was a shock to Morasch and her mother. However, as always, she retreated to the one thing she knew she loved. “I just lost myself in horses and my schoolwork,” Morasch says.
A year later Morasch enrolled at Washington State University. She studied Animal Science and had hopes of becoming a veterinarian. Still a severe stutterer, Morasch found consolation in alcohol.
“I was fluent when I drank,” she says, “or I just didn’t give a damn.”
Morasch says the pressure of the math and science coursework in the Animal Science program eventually became too much, and she transferred to Eastern Washington University to study speech therapy. The chairman of the department, a recovered stutterer himself, put Morasch on a course to conquer her inner demon.
She began speech therapy and overcame one of stutterers’ worst fears: advertising. Advertising is the practice of telling people, including complete strangers, that you’re a stutterer. This is where her communication with fire hydrants, and even rocks, she says, came into play. She would walk up to strangers, tap them on the shoulder and say, “Hi, my name is C-C-C-C-Candy, and I stutter.”
Stutterers can often substitute words if they are having trouble. “Pass the b-b-b-butt-margarine,” says Morasch, as she gives an example. However, there is no substitute for your name. Morasch says this “advertising” helped her control her stutter and become more confident.
Fresh out of speech therapy, Morasch boarded a plane in Spokane, Washington, headed for Anchorage, Alaska, for a job. She made her way down the narrow aisle and sat in her assigned seat. Once buckled in, as per her therapy and practice of advertising, she turns to the man next to her and says, “Hi, my name is Candy, and I stutter.”
Baffled by her candidness, the man turns towards her and says, “Hi, my name is J-J-J-J-Jerry.” They ended up spending the rest of the plane ride discussing speech therapy and what Morasch had done to control her stutter. “Of course, I would sit down next to the only un-rehabilitated stutterer,” says Morasch, laughing.
At 35, Morasch decided to go to graduate school for Speech Language Pathology at University of Cincinnati. By 1983, she had acquired her master’s degree, got a job and married. However, something still didn’t feel quite right. Returning to Grants Pass for her 20^th high school reunion, she realized she wanted to come home.
She worked for School District 7, the same district in which she’d attended school years before. “What was wonderful was to be able to repay, in kind, the community where I was reared and educated,” says Morasch.
In 1995, she started Once Upon a Horse as a way to fulfill her childhood dream and continue benefiting the community.
“Stutterers spend most of their waking hours trying to hide the fact that they stutter,” says Morasch. Fear, struggle and avoidance are the three main challenges for secondary stutterers.
In the Once Upon a Horse program, children aren’t just getting help for their impairments; they’re also learning life skills. The simplest task of shaking hands or making eye contact is a struggle for some of these children.
However, Morasch holds true to her motto of respect, responsibility and relationships. Every child in the program greets each other, and Morasch, with eye contact and a handshake.
Patti Sanford brings her foster daughter, Bella, for her lessons with Morasch every Saturday. Since she started, they’ve seen her confidence shoot through the roof and her speech articulation issues improve. But, that isn’t all that’s changed.
“They’re learning about themselves, about their own personal abilities and strengths and that’s really important,” says Sanford.
Bella gently hops out of the backseat of her foster parents’ car, and sees Morasch coming out of the barn across the gravel lot. She runs towards Morasch and greets her with a hug. Morasch extends her hand, and Bella promptly shakes it sternly while keeping eye contact. Then they walk off together in stride to the barn to visit the horses.
“I think it’s all right to be afraid, but it’s not okay to let fear keep you from doing anything,” says Morasch.