Page 30 - Spring2020

Boys Town Acoustics Research
and was closely following the Boys Town events. Pat’s mentor, John Bordley, had hoped to develop an institute devoted to communication disorders in children in Baltimore but was unable to raise the necessary funds. Shortly after the scandal broke and with Bordley’s encouragement, Brookhouser spent a weekend putting together a proposal for a Boys Town Insti- tute for Communication Disorders in Children. In December 1972, the Boys Town Board of Directors agreed to fund the project, with $14 million for a building and an annual budget of $2.2 million. The name was changed in 1989 to the Boys Town National Research Hospital (BTNRH). To avoid confu- sion, that name is used for the remainder of this article.
The First Ten Years
Brookhouser was named director of the new program at the age of 32. He had no staff or administrative experience, and the Boys Town organization had no experience in the provision of medical services, research, or obtaining federal funding. In retrospect, it is remarkable that the new venture was successful. The BTNRH succeeded, however, because it was able to recruit people for key positions who were inter- ested in a mix of basic and clinical research, wanted to escape the administrative complexity found in universities, were attracted by the opportunity that the BTNRH afforded to build a new research-oriented institution from scratch, and were drawn to the overall mission. Many of these people were recent PhDs willing to take the risk of moving to a new insti- tution, with many remaining at the BTNRH for their entire careers. With no history, no fixed administrative structure, no specific teaching responsibilities, and financial support from Boys Town, they were free to develop programs that maximized impact.
Brookhouser’s proposal called for development of a center for the diagnosis and treatment of children with communication disorders at no cost to their families. Like all Boys Town pro- grams, it would be nondenominational. It also included an interdisciplinary research program, with seven laboratories with an emphasis on what is now called translational research and supported by institutional funds. Most clinically oriented research programs at that time, such as the one at the Central Institute for the Deaf (St. Louis, MO), had grown out of suc- cessful clinical programs. The plan for the new center was to develop clinical and research programs in parallel with one another. The clinical programs would include otolaryngology and pediatrics, but the emphasis was on audiology, speech lan- guage pathology, learning disabilities, and clinical psychology.
Figure 1. Boys Town National Research Hospital (BTNRH) in 2015. Left: original building. Right: a second building, the Lied Learning and Technology Center, was added in 2004 to provide space for outreach and continuing education functions and a preschool for deaf and hard-of-hearing children as well as clinical and research space for cochlear implant and speech-language programs.
While Brookhouser completed his military service, Bordley helped assemble advisory committees and develop more detailed plans.
Senior people were recruited to organize clinical programs in audiology and speech and language disorders, including Donald Worthington from his position as Director of the Army Audiology and Speech Center at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (Washington, DC; now Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, MD), Noel and Arlene Matkin from Northwestern University (Evanston, IL), and Betty Jane Phillips from Kent State University (Kent, OH). The first research advi- sory committee included Joseph Hind, an auditory physiologist at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), Merle Lawrence, an authority on speech production and founding director of the Kresge Hearing Research Institute at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and Catherine Smith, a noted audi- tory anatomist.
Murray Sachs, a member of the Johns Hopkins faculty in bio- medical engineering and otolaryngology, was instrumental in the development of early plans for the research program but decided to stay in Baltimore rather than move to Omaha as director of research at the new institution. Joe Hind then recommended one of his postdoctoral fellows, Eric Javel as interim director of research. Like Sachs, Javel was a physiolo- gist but his undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins may
30 | Acoustics Today | Spring 2020