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00:25:18
00:28:10
00:25:18
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Transcription: {SPEAKER name="Don Pettingill"}
[00:25:18]
Every time I started feeling sorry for myself, my brother was, "poor you." Kids are picking on me because I'm deaf. My brothers and sisters would say, "you're deaf, so what? So is dad." And I think that's real good, I grew up with a healthy attitude about my deafness.

[00:25:39]
That's alright, but my mother worried about me being deaf and she kept looking for ways to get my hearing back.

{SILENCE}


[00:25:52]
She took me to an Indian reservation, Indian medicine man, and had them put snake oil in my ears.

[00:26:03]
And I'm six years old [[laughter]] I didn't know what was going on. The took me to a chiropractor for one year. And they pushed my head back.

[00:26:19]
[[laughter]]

[00:26:23]

That didn't help either, finally a man in Los Angeles convinced my mother that faith healing would do the trick. So they took me to Los Angeles to spend the summer and go to the Aimee Semple McPherson Foursquare Church in Los Angeles.
[00:26:43]
And the first day I went there, on a Sunday, 5 different people, I couldn't ask questions, I was afraid to. I wasn't sure what was going on. And then the next Monday I had to get up early in the morning and go to church by myself and sit in a room with a group of people. I couldn't understand anything.
[00:27:09]
Then all of a sudden some man got up and got down on the floor and started squirming around.
[00:27:16]
I became a believer. What's the injury, what's the matter with him? He said, "oh, he's filled with the holy spirit." I decided I didn't want any of that holy spirit.
[00:27:30]
So the next morning, I got up at the same time and dressed properly, but I didn't go to church. I began to roam the whole city of Los Angeles. Me, eight years old and deaf.
[00:27:44]
I got lost a lot of times. I learned a lot about people. Nice people, mean people, and SOB ones. [[laughter]]
[00:27:56]
Now, I always managed to get home because you can always find nice people. But toward the fall, that church had a huge revival