Ozark Profile : Shadden is ‘the male version of the Unsinkable Molly Brown’
Posted on Monday, June 16, 2008
In Fayetteville, there lives a man who met with Martin Luther King Jr. secretly at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion to search for a strategy to convince Chicago Mayor Richard Daley to light the streets and fill the potholes in the poorer parts of town.
That man is Harry Shadden.
“ He’s the male version of the ‘ Unsinkable Molly Brown, ’” said his friend the Rev. Lowell Grisham of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.
The point of the story about Shadden’s secret meeting with King is not who Shadden knew or where he was, but that he was there to help.
That’s what he did — and does still — despite a stroke that left him nearly helpless. He helps anybody anyway he can, and like the unsinkable, and also Irish, heroine, he does it with heart and a smile.
In Chicago, Shadden wanted to help the people in the neighborhoods get what they wanted while helping Daley feel good about himself for doing it.
“ When I deal with strategy, I don’t think Daley or anybody else is a bad person, ” Shadden said. “ The minute you start that you’re defeating the purpose. You have to help that person feel worth something to fix those potholes. And sermons don’t do that. ”
The Fayetteville man’s suggestion — that would have combined purposely busy O’Hare International Airport bathrooms with important, but unrelieved, airplane passengers — to convince Daley won’t be found in the history books.
King, instead, turned to a plan proposed by one of Shadden’s students, Jesse Jackson.
Shadden downplays his activist role in the civil rights movement.
“ I dodged a few bricks, went to jail and so forth, ” he said, waving his hand as if to put the topic behind him.
Those who know Shadden say helping is, in fact, the point of his life. It is his joy, his strength, his purpose — along with a little laughter on the side.
Shadden said of King, “ How tall do you think he was ? Because when I first met him, I’d been in a lot of marches and he was up there. I thought he was about 7 feet tall. Great sense of humor. Liked several of my Irish jokes, which made him an OK guy. ”
Grisham said of Shadden, “ He has passion, a desire to reach out and connect with other people and help facilitate that process of conversation that can lead to healing and wholeness.
“ That he is able to do that after a severe stroke as he had is, to me, an incredible symbol of his own congruity, his own spirit. He has a charisma that is absolutely enchanting. I just find him compelling. ”
Shadden’s helpful nature first attracted his wife, Barbara, to him.
“ It was his intelligence and his intensity and his incredible commitment to making things better for people, ” she said.
As a boy, Shadden learned the importance of asking for help — and for giving it.
His grandmother primarily raised him.
“ I didn’t have a mother or father, and my grandmother was fairly crazy and only had a fourth-grade education in the Great Smoky Mountains where she lived, so, I was very much aware, growing up, that I had to go find resources, ” Shadden said. “ If I wanted to learn to fish, I had to find somebody. A priest, my minister, or whoever. I had to learn to fish by myself. And hunt. Use a sailboat. ”
He remembers, too, as an 11-year-old, wanting to get a job so he could buy a bicycle so he could get a newspaper route to pay for his clothes.
“ You learn to adjust your behavior, ” he said.
Those lessons learned in a low-income neighborhood of Chattanooga, Tenn., where people took care of each other, stayed with him through his life.
“ I think I grew up with a sense of responsibility for family, neighbors, in that old world that we lived in then, ” he said.
He paused, then added, “ I guess I’m unusually aware of the need for the poor and afflicted in some way. I tell people I like to help. ”
He’s very good at it, according to Dr. David Williams, Shadden’s friend and former boss as the former director of the Ozark Guidance Center, where Shadden worked as counselor and therapist from the 1970 s to the 1990 s.
“ He was really able to help people take a good look at what they needed to do and did it with such good humor, ” Williams said. “ Probably more laughter per client than anybody I ever worked with. ”
People found him genuinely interested in them and trustworthy about his counsel, said Williams, who further described Shadden as an “ earnest, sincere guy always interested in what was best for other people. ”
His very intentional goodwill toward people was universally respected, Williams said. Teacher and counselor
Shadden prefers the practical teach-a-personto-fish approach to helping.
“ Helping is a little more complicated if you know what you’re talking about, ” he said.
Shadden taught many area police officers about being sensitive to AIDS in the early years of awareness. He taught classes and workshops about communication, divorce, stress management, assertiveness and “ Getting to Know Yourself. ”
He’s also the guy who taught police officers to wear seat belts.
“ They didn’t want to wear the damn things either, ” he said. “ People are people. You name it and we turn out to be people, every time. ”
Shadden decided it was time to show, not tell.
“ I got some video work, that I think was done by state police somewhere, that showed what happens by hiring prisoners to drive with the cameras running when they were wearing and not wearing belts, ” he said. “ Some of those crashes were pretty educational. ”
His work with the mentally ill was also of a practical nature.
“ When I work with mentally ill persons, I don’t shower them with gifts, ” he said. “ I’m not there to help them in a general way; I’m wanting to provide some services with the goal of helping that mentally ill person function better in life. ”
To do that he worked on finding solutions related to specific behaviors and applied a theater perspective.
“ I often think in terms of, ‘ What is the play we’re playing ?’” he said. “ I’ve done a lot of theater, and I use those experiences from theater in helping people organize the play (of their life ). ”
His objective is to help people understand better what’s going on in their play.
Many, perhaps most, of those he helped were women.
“ Men are not healthy enough individually to help themselves, ” he said. “ They live in the myth of being taught, ‘ I can do it myself. ’”
His job was to set an example, Shadden said, but also to expect mentally ill people to work with him to get beyond their illness.
Another aspect of his helping nature when he was working, and now, is his attention to helping people find worth and value in themselves. Learning behavior that shows respect to others helps people become aware of their own worth, he said.
“ I experienced this, ” he said. “ When I was growing up, my grandmother was an expert at spotting things I did wrong.
“ We become very good at spotting our failures and putting the spotlight on it to make sure we’re not worth very much. ”
As a teacher and counselor, he worked to change that view for his clients, to point out their strengths and values to them.
“ People, if they’re lucky, find a way to control their fears and insecurity about who they are, and I can teach them how to reduce their stress levels so they have better lives and are more healthy, ” he said. “ It’s not voodoo. So much has to do with learning how … we can adjust behaviors. ”
Stroke His own life is an example of adjusting behaviors. A stroke changed his life instantly. “ The fact that you and I can stand here and talk, and I’ve learned how to tell time again, and I’m not blind any longer, and I’m able to make a garden, is because I worked my butt off, knowing that even a crippled brain can teach that leg to move again, ” he said. “ And learn how to grasp things. That used to make me crazy, dropping everything. I’d pick up something and drop it; then I couldn’t find where it was. ” “ What a wonderful, gracious humility that he has when he knows that he may not be remembering, or he may not have the context, but he just walks in with arms wide open to encounter and relate, ” Grisham said. “ And then the pieces begin to fall back into place again. What a great example of courage that is. ” Through that experience of relearning how to be himself, helping was on Shadden’s mind. “ One of the common things with stroke is we become so frustrated in our sudden inability to perform that it takes us years to find out if we’re worth anything, ” he said. “ That old thing. And how to help other people feel like they’re worth something, too. ” Coincidentally, Barbara Shadden, professor and director of the University of Arkansas Speech and Hearing Clinic, is an expert on how a stroke can steal a person’s identity when it takes away speech. Of her husband’s improvement, she said, “ He has a strong will and a determination to gain control of his life, to be independent. A pretty fierce will. Just a strong person. He just never quit working on things that were deficits after the stroke. He was just determined to get past them and find new ways to be productive and engaged. ” Barbara Shadden has written a book to teach professionals about speech and stroke. Harry Shadden described it as teaching people how to get past the stumps. “ Picture a meadow, and there’s one stump in there, ” he said. “ You’re trying to go a straight line from A to B, and the damn stump is in the way. Finding the ways to get past that stump is one of my successes. “ I was the stump. I couldn’t speak; I couldn’t walk. Not just overnight. It’s taken me 10 or 11 years to climb that ladder to get up there where I can function again and help other people function. ” There’s that word help again. “ I feel very wealthy, despite my stroke and my history, to help people succeed and feel good about who they are, ” Shadden said.
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