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Four Days With Kenny Tedford
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Behler Publications
Four Days With Kenny Tedford
A Behler Publications Book
Copyright © 2020 by Paul Smith
Cover design by Yvonne Parks - www.pearcreative.ca
Front cover photography by Sean F. L. Read
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Some names have been changed to protect their privacy.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
FIRST PRINTING
ISBN 13: 9781941887028
e-book ISBN 9781941887035
Published by Behler Publications, LLC, USA
www.behlerpublications.com
Manufactured in the United States of America
To my wife, Lisa,
for her unwavering love and support
as I follow my dreams.
~ Paul Smith
To my mom and dad,
for treating me like a son, not a disabled son.
And to disabled people everywhere.
I hope the story of my journey helps you with yours.
~ Kenny Lee Tedford, Jr.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Meeting Kenny
Chapter 1: “Blue Baby”
Chapter 2: Dealing with Bullies
Chapter 3: The Magical Crayon
Chapter 4: Back of the Bus
Chapter 5: Learning to Talk
Chapter 6: “When I grow up”
Chapter 7: First Love
Chapter 8: The Red Cross
Chapter 9: Going to College
Chapter 10: Angela
Chapter 11: Putting the Pieces Together
Chapter 12: Marty
Chapter 13: Moving On
Chapter 14: Graduation
Chapter 15: Your Own Box of Magic Crayons
Acknowledgments
We’d first like to thank all the wonderful people in Kenny’s life who helped make him who he is today. Most of your names are already mentioned in the book, so we won’t repeat them here. But you know who you are. Without you, there wouldn’t be a story to tell.
Thanks to our editor at Behler Publications, Lynn Price, for seeing even more in this project than we did, and pushing us to make it happen. Thanks to our literary agent, Maryann Karinch, as well as Lisa Smith, Ben Smith, Jon Christiansen, and James Kevin for reviewing early manuscripts and providing wonderful guidance.
We’d also like to thank all the other people who contributed to the making of this book in some way, by contributing their time, talent, or even their home where we met for our interviews. That list includes David Greene, Judy Greene, Debbie Gregg, Joe Honeycutt, Valerie Menard, Carol and Paul Meyer, Jeff Meyer, Rita Needham, Sean Read, and Bryan and Danielle Upshaw.
Lastly, we’d like to extend a special thank you to the National Storytelling Network and David Hutchens for inviting us both to speak at the National Storytelling Conference in 2012, where we first met. The rest, as they say, is history.
Meeting Kenny
I was sitting in the front row waiting for the next performance to start when I saw him. He was a large man. Sixty-ish. With grey hair encircling a bald head, and glasses thick enough to start a fire on a sunny day.
He walked slowly and deliberately, with a slight list to one side. He made his way down the aisle and sat in the chair next to me.
Following quickly behind him was a twenty-something man with dark hair. The young man pulled one of the empty chairs out of the row, turned it around backwards, placed it directly in front of the older man, and sat down with his back to the stage.
I was intrigued, to say the least.
A few minutes later, the next speaker walked on stage and started her performance. The young man, who’d been staring at the older man, silent and motionless since sitting down, suddenly sprang into action. He lifted his hands in front of his chest and began a flurry of cryptic motions that identified him immediately as a sign language interpreter, and the older man as deaf.
I thought that was pretty ballsy, a deaf guy at a three-day storytelling festival. 1
I knew immediately I wanted to meet him. So at the next break, I introduced myself. We exchanged a few pleasantries, enough to know that he was an affable sort of guy. But we both had to go to our next set of workshops.
An hour later, I was walking with a tray of food, looking for an empty table, and that same affable fellow walked up to me and asked if I wanted to have lunch with him. I quickly accepted.
We sat at a table by ourselves, his interpreter having been given time off for lunch.
For the next hour, I listened to Kenny Tedford tell his story.
I listened while he spoke with impressive diction, but with the muted tones of a deaf person. And he read my lips, seemingly, as easily as I spoke with them.
But, underneath the telltale tone of his voice, I noticed something else telling. His vocabulary and sentence structure were both charmingly juvenile. As his story unfolded, I started to understand why. His deafness turned out to be only one of many challenges life dealt Kenny Tedford. He was almost blind in one eye, and had poor vision in the other, partially paralyzed on his left side, unable to speak well until the age of ten, and had somewhat limited cognitive abilities, all of which were a result of brain damage suffered at birth. And as if that weren’t enough, in the years since, he’d endured a string of near-fatal illnesses that should have left him dead many times over.
Despite it all, the man sitting in front of me seemed to be the most delightful individual one could ever meet. His temperament and outlook on life and humanity were unquestionably positive in a way I can only describe as childlike. In fact, he struck me as a remarkable combination of Helen Keller and Forrest Gump. Keller, of course, was deaf, blind, and mute. But she was a brilliant thinker and accomplished writer. The fictional Forrest Gump, on the other hand, was a model of physical health once he shook off the leg braces. But he suffered a diminished mental capacity that gave him his childlike charm.
Kenny Tedford, however, had both sets of challenges.
So there I sat, watching this somewhat goofy-looking, old, bald, roly-poly man, smiling at me with enormously distorted bug eyes through his impossibly thick glasses, telling me almost unbelievable stories in the words of a child, but with the voice of a grown man, who’d never properly heard the sound of his own voice.
I was mesmerized.
The hour ended way too quickly. I’d only scratched the surface of Kenny’s life. But it was enough to be fascinated by what I’d heard, and to be frustrated that I didn’t know more.
I wondered how a man in his circumstances could have such a positive disposition. Why isn’t he bitter at life for dealing him such a crappy hand, I wondered. I was pretty sure I would be.
I had so many questions. But it was time for the next session. My chance encounter was over. I didn’t know if or when I would ever see or speak to Kenny Tedford again. But what I did know was that I felt strangely blessed having met him.
The following year turned out to be one of the most important turning points in my life, and unquestionably, the single most important in my work.
I was in my mid-forties and two decades into a successful, yet, uninspiring corporate career. I was a walking cliché of the “Decade of Greed” that was the 1980s. Not quite Gordon Gekko, but perhaps his tame
r, less ambitious younger brother: business undergraduate degree, two years as a consultant, Ivy League MBA from the same school that produced junk-bond billionaire Michael Milken and real-estate mogul turned President Donald Trump, followed by a constant march up the corporate ladder at a Fortune 50 company.
Don’t get me wrong. I liked my job. But I was in a place that I think most people find themselves at work. They love a small part of their job, the part that made them choose that career to begin with. They hate a small part of their job, office politics or filling out their expense report. And, in the middle, is the large swath of responsibilities they like well enough, but nothing they’d do without getting paid for. Not bad work, in other words, just nothing that makes you jump out of bed in the morning.
I wanted a career filled with only that first part, the part I loved. And after fifteen or so years, I finally figured out what that was. I loved the few days a year I got to deliver a keynote address at the division meeting, or teach a leadership class for the newly-promoted managers.
In short, I wanted to be a full-time speaker and trainer.
I loved the work.
I felt like I was better at doing that than I was my regular job.
And, as trite as it might sound, those were the days that I was convinced I was making a real difference in people’s lives. After all, nobody ever stood up and applauded at the end of one of my staff meetings.
But most companies don’t have full-time jobs like that. The only people who seemed to get to do that were people who’d written a bestselling book and got invited to speak and train for a different company every week.
So, that’s what I’d spent the last two-and-a-half years working on, writing a book on a topic I was passionate about: the power of storytelling as a leadership tool.
And along the way I learned something important about myself. I learned that I love writing! And that’s important, because it turns out there are generally two types of people in that new career I wanted: People who love being on stage, but hate writing; and people who love writing, but are terrified of public speaking. Fortunately, I found I loved both. I’d definitely found my calling.
My first book2 was published in August of that year, two months after I met Kenny Tedford at the National Storytelling Conference.
I waited to see what would happen.
Within a few weeks, the book went into its second printing, and then a third. It even started showing up on a few bestseller lists.
I was ecstatic! But the phone wasn’t ringing yet.
Then, after about six months and a couple of more print runs, I got my first request to speak at a corporate event. I took a vacation day from my company and went.
After a few more weeks, I got another request. And then another.
Within three months I’d spent all of my vacation time for the year attending speaking engagements. About the same time I’d gotten an offer from my publisher to write another book.
My plan was working! I was absolutely thrilled!
But, how long would it last? There was just no guarantee. Plus, being an author and speaker comes with no regular monthly salary. No benefits. No retirement plan.
And there I was, too young to retire, and the only bread-winner in a family with two boys to put through college.
I spent the next several weeks struggling with the decision. I eventually got to the point that quitting my cushy corporate job made sense in every logical way except for one; I just didn’t have the courage to go through with it.
I figured I wasn’t too old to benefit from someone older and wiser. So I decided to ask my dad for advice. But at eighty years old, he was hard of hearing. And even with his hearing aids, phone calls could be frustrating, and therefore, short. So I wrote him a letter and asked him what I should do.
I assumed he’d write back and tell me one of two things. He’d either say, “You can do it, son, I’ve got faith in you. Follow your dreams.” Or, he’d say, “Are you nuts? Just keep your head down for the next few years till you can retire comfortably. Then go play around with this writing and speaking stuff.”
But he didn’t tell me either of those things. In fact, he didn’t really give me advice at all. He just told me a story about himself that I’d never heard before, and neither had any of my siblings.
His letter explained that when he was in the first grade, he knew exactly what he wanted to do when he grew up. He wanted to be a singer, like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, or Tony Bennett.
Then, about the second or third week of school, his teacher asked the class if any of them had any special talents, like dancing or magic tricks. Well, apparently my dad raised his hand and announced that he could sing! This, despite the fact that he’d never sung in front of anyone other than his mom in the kitchen. Apparently, she listened to the radio while she cooked. And since he’d been listening and singing along with her, he fancied himself something of a crooner.
So the teacher did what any self-respecting teacher would do. She invited young Bobby Smith to stand up and sing a song.
And he did! He stood up and belted out his favorite song right there, acapella, in front of the entire class. He said, “I still remember the song. It was ‘I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire’ by the Ink Spots.”
Well, apparently, he nailed it. He got all the words and melody just right. When he was finished, the teacher and the students stood up and applauded him. He’d gotten a standing ovation on his first public performance. And he said, “That’s when I knew what I was destined to do with my life.”
His letter went on to say, “Unfortunately, that turned out to not just be the first time I ever sang in front of an audience. It turned out to be the last time I ever sang in front of an audience.”
Life had gotten in the way. School. Jobs. Marriage. Kids. Despite that, he admitted that the real reason was that he just never had the courage to go through with it. “One day,” he said, “you’ll wake up and be eighty years old like me, and it’ll be too late.”
And as if that weren’t enough, and it certainly was, he closed the letter with these words:
“I’d love to see you pursue your dream. But that doesn’t mean in your lifetime, son, that means in mine. Love, Dad”
And that’s when everything stopped.
The sound of the television in the background. The squabbling conversation between my kids in the next room. The noise from cars driving by the house. The uncomfortable spot in the chair I was sitting in. The nagging thought of the lingering project I hadn’t yet completed at work.
All. Gone.
The only thing I could feel or hear was my heart which was now beating out of my chest.
Did he say what I think he just said?
Yes, he did.
My father had laid down the gauntlet in front of me and challenged me to pick it up. Not sometime in the future, years down the road. But right now!
My dream was no longer just my dream. It was now my father’s dream, too. At this point, I thought, he’ll never achieve his dream of being a professional singer. But through me, if I had the courage to go through with it, he could enjoy the closure he never had with his own dream.
Two days later, I walked into my boss’s office and I resigned from a twenty-year career to pursue my dream.
The next morning, with a renewed sense of courage and purpose, I started the planning for my next book. But this one wouldn’t be another business book. Of course, if I was going to make a successful speaking career out of this, I’d definitely need to write other business books.
But not yet.
I wanted this book to be about purpose. If making a difference in people’s lives was really one of the reasons I made this change, then I should put my money, and my time, where my mouth was. Instead of capturing leadership lessons in the form of stories, I wanted this book to capture life lessons. I wanted to write an entire book filled with incredible stories of people who’d faced unusual cha
llenges and overcome them. People who learned remarkable life lessons, probably the hard way. I wanted to produce a book that parents could use to teach their kids character traits like creativity, curiosity, kindness, integrity, self-reliance, hard work and struggles, fairness, humility, friendship, a positive mental attitude, and respect for others.3
I knew from experience with my first book I’d probably need to interview a hundred fascinating people to find enough to fill the book. But where to start?
It didn’t take me long to decide.
The first call I made was to Kenny Tedford.
Two weeks later, Kenny and I had our interview, which we conducted over Skype so he could read my lips. It was a little awkward at first. But once I learned to keep my hands and my coffee mug away from my mouth, it worked out pretty smoothly.
I was only looking for one short, compelling story from each person to fill a page or two of the book, so I’d only need about an hour for the interview. Just enough time to hear a few stories and pick the best one. And my plan was to make a recording, so I wouldn’t have to slow the flow of the conversation for my note taking to keep up.
Having had my fascinating lunchtime conversation with Kenny a year earlier, I already had a pretty good idea of the kind of questions to ask to get at the handful of stories I was most interested in hearing. And Kenny did a masterful job of telling them. They were even more compelling and engaging than I remembered. Or, maybe he just had more time to tell them properly.
Either way, at precisely 39 minutes into the conversation, I asked Kenny, “Have you ever written any of these stories down?”
He said that he’d been asked that question a lot. Apparently, people at his performances request books or transcripts or videos of his stories so they can relive them.