Page 29 - Spring2020

Walt Jesteadt
Address:
Center for Hearing Research Boys Town National Research Hospital 555 North 30th Street Omaha, Nebraska 68131 USA
Email:
walt.jesteadt@boystown.org
From Father Flanagan to Hearing
Research: A History of Acoustics
Research at Boys Town
How Boys Town, an organization known for work with at-risk children, became an important contributor to hearing, speech, and language research.
Father Edward Flanagan, the actor Spencer Tracy, and the multibillionaire Warren Buffett all played a role in the creation of the Boys Town communication disorders research program. As a result, in the last 40 years, more than 300 articles published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) and many articles else- where, have been authored or coauthored by members of the faculty and staff at the Boys Town National Research Hospital (BTNRH). How did Boys Town, an organi- zation known for work with at-risk children, become an important contributor to hearing and speech research?
It all started with Father Flanagan (see acousticstoday.org/Flanagan), a young priest who started a program for homeless boys in Omaha, NE, in 1917. In 1921, Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home moved to a farm outside Omaha that he christened Boys Town. The program became famous during the depression. Spencer Tracy, the great American actor (see acousticstoday.org/tracy), received an Academy Award (Oscar) for playing Flanagan in the 1938 MGM movie Boys Town, where another famous actor, Mickey Rooney (see acousticstoday.org/Rooney), played the part of a homeless boy (see youtu.be/IgReY000HHE). The success of the movie enabled the organization to expand its already extensive national fundraising efforts. Father Flanagan died of a heart attack in 1948 while investigating the need for relief efforts for children in Europe on behalf of President Harry Truman.
Fundraising continued, but the expansion of Boys Town and its programs did not. In the early 1970s, the American financier Warren Buffett was building an invest- ment empire that would make him one of the world’s richest people. When Buffet found that nonprofit foundations were required to report financial information to the US government that was then available to anyone on request, he requested information for Boys Town and was surprised by what he learned. As a result, on March 30, 1972, the Omaha Sun, a weekly newspaper owned by Warren Buffett, used information provided by Buffett to publish a Pulitzer Prize-winning expose of Boys Town finances showing that the organization was sending out 50 million appeal letters per year while quietly amassing an endowment of $209 million that was growing annually. The reporters showed that Boys Town had developed one of the largest direct-mail fundraising programs in the country to raise money that it did not appear to need. In less than a year, this revelation resulted in new leadership, a new board of directors, and a search for new programs to expand the mission and serve additional children.
Dr. Patrick Brookhouser, the chief otolaryngology resident at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD) in 1972, had grown up near Omaha, still had family in the area,
©2020 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved. volume 16, issue 1 | Spring 2020 | Acoustics Today | 29 https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2020.16.1.29