This month’s Spotlight of the Month honors Lee Reeves!
Let’s just say he’s younger than Russ Hicks but older than most everyone else in the Dallas Chapter. While he is an Austin native, he grew up as an “Air Force brat” which means he moved around a bit but he spent most of his formative years in San Antonio. He attended Texas A&M University and graduated with a degree in Veterinary Medicine. In 1978, he opened the Lancers Square Animal Clinic and continues to practice there part time in semi-retirement. When not working at the practice you can find him on a golf course, managing the finances for his small publishing company, or spending time working or traveling with his beautiful bride, Nina.
Lee has stuttered since early childhood and while his stuttering is relatively mild today that was not the case for the first 22 years of his life. He had speech therapy in both primary and secondary school to no avail but still learned something from each therapist that would serve him well in future years. After graduating high school, Lee’s stuttering was at an all time high and his self-esteem was at an all time low.
Already at Texas A&M, he found a therapist who was not only interested in stuttering but understood that there was much more to the disorder than the mechanics of speech production. It was during this time (1972) that together with his therapist he started his first self-help group. While his time in therapy was helpful, he began a slow and steady decline in the ability to manage his speech once again, it was a vicious cycle that eventually led to his seeking of another therapist to help him navigate back out of the forest he had found himself in. That search was futile and he became more and more frustrated as he began to learn that there were no speech pathologists in the Dallas area that knew anything about stuttering. In 1982, he saw an article in the paper about a researcher at UTD who was presenting a seminar on the neurology of stuttering. He attended the presentation and afterwards waited to speak to the presenter, Dr. Frances Freeman. As he shared with her some of his history, he mentioned the self-help group he had started at A&M. She immediately stated that THAT was what we needed in Dallas, and the Dallas Council of Adult Stutterers was born.
In the next few years, he began to hear about an organization out of California called the National Stuttering Project. Somewhere around 1986-7, the Dallas Chapter of the National Stuttering Project (now the NSA) was created. “The Dallas Chapter was and continues to be one of the most active and influential chapters within the NSA and the larger stuttering community”, Lee says. He has gone on to become more active at the national level both within the NSA and as an advocate within the speech-language pathology profession. He says “I have been blessed in my life to have been able to work every day in a profession I love (veterinary medicine) and to spend much of my spare time doing what I have a passion for, working with and for those affected by stuttering.”
Next time you see Lee thank him for his contribution to the stuttering community!