When Jim Kelly speaks, he puts a thumb over the hole in his throat.
Mr. Kelly, 86, possesses vigor belying the ravages of the throat cancer that took away his voice. When he speaks in a froggy voice, pressing his thumb over the vinyl valve in his neck, the class of sophomores at Menlo-Atherton High School listen.
Mr. Kelly and his colleague John Ready are part of the Lost Chord, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the rehabilitation of laryngectomees — people who have had their vocal cords removed. Thirty clubs in California, including chapters in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, help people learn to speak again and deal with the psychosocial aspects of the surgery.
Lost Chord members such as Jim Kelly and John Ready give voice to the perils of smoking by lecturing to students in both counties. Mr. Kelly has appeared at M-A High for the last decade, at the invitation of safety education teacher Ken Gradiska. Last year alone, he and his longtime speaking partner, Jack Armas, spoke to 1,600 students, Mr. Kelly said.
The eye-opening presentation is a graphic window into the harm smoking causes.
On a Friday last spring, the two men spent the afternoon talking to classes of sophomores, juniors and seniors at M-A.
Mr. Kelly started smoking at age 23 during World War II, when the Army passed out thousands of cartons of cigarettes to GIs. “America had a smoking culture then. More than half of the men in my army outfit were smokers,” he told the students.
He stopped smoking in 1985.
“Four years later, bingo — cancer,” he said.
“Why did I smoke? I smoked pipes. I thought they were extra-cool,” he said, honing in on the mind-set of teens.
“Men who did creative things smoked pipes — men who were writers,” said Mr. Kelly, a journalist for 40 years.
The “cool” wore off for him as the years went by; and when cancer struck, he had to do some serious re-evaluation, he said.
“I will never forget waking up after the operation. I had a spaghetti of tubes coming out of me. I opened my mouth and I couldn’t make a sound. That’s when it hit me — what I did to myself with smoking,” he said.
Mr. Kelly said he felt guilty, too. He had exposed his wife and children to 40 years of second-hand smoke.
When he got home, he looked at the headliner of the family’s Volkswagen van, a tangible measure of the effects of tobacco smoke.
“Over the years, it turned from cream-color to brown from the tobacco,” he said.
Mr. Ready began smoking at age 15 and enjoyed cigarettes for 16 years, burning through a half-pack a day. When his cancer appeared 10 years ago, he was 41 years old with a wife and four children, ages 12, 9, 27 months and 13 months.
His cancer diagnosis had come 10 years after he quit smoking.
“I thought quitting smoking meant I was done,” he said.
Mr. Ready has been cancer-free for 10 years — a miraculous number in his estimation, since he had a mere 30 percent chance of surviving.
“There’s really no reason for us to be around,” he said.
Asked by a student what he would do if he caught one of his children smoking, Mr. Ready said his daughter had already been caught in the act.
“I said, ‘Why don’t you keep this up, and we can be a father-daughter laryngectomee team and go on the road?’
“She burst out crying and stopped smoking. When she caught her brother, she got all over his case,” he said.
Mr. Ready wears an extra valve that acts like the thumb and opens and closes, allowing him to speak without holding a hand to his neck. He volunteers at Stanford Hospital, helping people who have just undergone laryngectomies learn to cope with the changes and to speak through their stoma — the name for the hole in the throat.
He pointed to a paper Stanford visitor badge on his chest. Earlier that day, he visited a 16-year-old boy at the hospital who had a laryngectomy, the result of his father’s second-hand smoke.
“He should be sitting in an empty chair in his sophomore class,” Mr. Ready said, pointing to a vacant space in the classroom, “instead of sitting in Stanford hospital getting radiation therapy.”
The youngest person to have a laryngectomy is a 10-day-old infant, Mr. Ready said.
“His mom smoked through the entire pregnancy. That baby never had a chance,” he said.
The baby survived and grew up to speak almost flawlessly through his stoma, Mr. Kelly added.
As the class bell buzzed, several students stopped to shake hands with the two speakers.
Did their talk persuade the students to shun or give up smoking?
Matt, a junior, smokes a couple of cigarettes a day. He’s working on quitting now, and said that the presentation persuaded him not to smoke.
Yuly, 16, said she doesn’t smoke. After experiencing the Lost Chord presentation, she isn’t likely to start, she added.
How do the men know they’ve been effective?
“You can see it in their eyes,” Mr. Ready said.
“When they come up and shake our hands afterwards,” Mr. Kelly added, “then we know.”
Sue Dremann is a staff writer for the Almanac’s sister newspaper, the Palo Alto Weekly.
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