Chula
Vista library Literacy Team volunteer was his angel after injury
By Leslie Wolf Branscomb Union Tribune STAFF WRITER August 20, 1999
One minute he was a successful business executive,
standing to address a large audience of fellow managers at a meeting.
The next moment he was lying on the ground unconscious, felled by a brain
aneurysm. In that instant, Don Strom totally lost his ability to speak, read and
write. A year of speech therapy
didn't accomplish enough. But five years of intensive work with a volunteer
literacy tutor from the South Chula Vista Library finally turned Strom into a
man who can confidently express himself once more.
In gratitude to the program, Strom's wife, an artist, will hold an art
show at the library , and has pledged to donate some of the proceeds from sales
of her artwork to the library Literacy Team.
The fact that Jane LaFazio even has artwork to sell is a direct result of
her husband's brain injury seven years ago, for it turned out to be one of those
completely life-altering events for both of them.
Strom, 53, had worked for
20 years at Hewlett-Packard Co., where he was a personnel manager. LaFazio, 48,
once a flight attendant, was doing marketing and graphic design for an
architectural firm. There was
little warning prior to the sudden illness that befell Strom in June 1992. He
remembers feeling a headache while in Spain on a business trip.
A couple of days later, on a Monday, he had just introduced himself to a
group of 60 Hewlett-Packard managers at a quarterly review meeting.
Suddenly he fell straight down, he recalled. Strom needed brain surgery
and was in the hospital for 33 days. From
that point on, he couldn't even begin to express himself. "I think I knew
what was going on," Strom said recently. "But I just couldn't say the
words." After a frustrating
six months as Strom's full-time caretaker, LaFazio felt the need to get out of
the house, so she signed up for an art class at Poway Adult School. "You start to lose yourself, and it was a really good
way to find Jane again," she said. Sue
Hyatt, another art student, spotted LaFazio on the first day of class.
"When she first came in, I thought, oh my, that's just really a beautiful
girl. Why is she so unhappy?" Hyatt recalled. Hyatt, a 64-year-old retired teacher from Poway, formerly
lived in Bonita and had been a volunteer tutor with the Literacy Team at the
South Chula Vista Library, where she taught illiterate adults to read.
"We were in class six months before Jane ever mentioned anything
about her husband," said Hyatt. "She said, 'He's lost everything.
He'll never be able to read or write.' "I
told her if she was interested, I would try it."
Strom had been through one
year of speech therapy, until his insurance ran out, but had made little
progress. Other literacy tutors had checked him over and said there was nothing
they could do to help. Even Hyatt
had her doubts. "We made a
commitment to six months (of tutoring)," said Hyatt. "But at three
months I thought I just can't do this anymore. He just wasn't getting anywhere.
"I wondered what the heck I'd gotten myself into."
Then, one day, Strom showed up for their session with a cup of coffee in
his hand, and Hyatt asked where he'd bought it. Strom couldn't say the word, but
he managed to spit out the sound of the letter "x."
Hyatt immediately understood that he was referring to a San Diego
coffeehouse called Xprezzo's. Right then, she said, she knew that he would make
it.
Hyatt used a method of
phonics instruction called the Wilson Reading System after its originator,
Barbara Wilson. Often used for people with dyslexia or acute language learning
disabilities, the method focuses on the nuts and bolts of basic pronunciation,
teaching the student how to piece words together one sound at a time.
Hyatt found she was unable to teach Strom the Wilson system in the way it
was designed to be used, with a lot of student-teacher interaction. "Most
of what I did was teach him the sound and then I would sit for 15 or so minutes
waiting for him to do it," she said. "There
were days when as soon as he left I would just sit in the recliner and
collapse." After five years of
twice-weekly volunteer tutoring sessions, Hyatt had brought Strom from a man who
could barely introduce himself to one who converses like any normal, intelligent
human being.
Strom kept all his literacy
course work, to remind himself how far he has come.
On his very first work sheet is the phrase, impossible for him to say at
the time: "Tip, the cat, is fat."
His last piece of homework, from the end of the 12th book of the Wilson
program, is a full-page treatise on the state of nuclear energy research in the
former Soviet Union.
Besides having the patience
to tutor Strom for half a decade for no pay, Hyatt also supported LaFazio's new
career by buying a watercolor painting of a rooster in June 1993. It was the
first piece of art LaFazio sold.
The couple's home is filled
with Oriental art -- a legacy of a time when they lived in South Korea and
traveled throughout Asia. The
Oriental theme surfaces in many of LaFazio's works, most recently in the
silhouettes of kimonos she incorporates into her pieces.
LaFazio does collages too, sometimes sewing beads into an artwork, or
weaving two pictures together. She also paints murals in people's homes and in
public, including one at the Osteopathy Center for Children in San Diego.
LaFazio revels in her ability to make a living as a full-time artist -- a
frightening leap she was forced to make one year ago after being laid off from
her job as a graphic designer. "It's
a really good life," she said. "I now recognize it was better to take
that risk, to be home with the husband I love."
Strom never returned to the
corporate world. He has found a new life as president
of the San Diego Brain Injury Foundation. He also volunteers at the
Villa Pomerado Skilled Nursing Facility in Poway, giving encouragement to
patients. Though he still sometimes struggles to find the right words
to express himself, or occasionally drops a word out of the middle of a
sentence, he doesn't hesitate to speak about his experience before large
audiences.
Despite having gone through
an enormous upheaval that forever altered their marriage of 22 years, the most
striking thing about Strom and LaFazio is their warmth and happiness.
"It's been so wonderful for us to come together, helping each
other," said Strom. "The beautiful thing is, Jane's art is getting
much better and my words are coming along, too."
"It hasn't been easy," added LaFazio. "For the first two
years I did nothing but cry. They
say the one thing that has remained constant is their love for each other, as
evidenced by a diary that Strom began keeping as soon as he could write.
The first entry, dated May 15, 1993, states simply: "I am Don. I
love Jane."
Copyright 1999 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
