C orvallis man grows up in an institution, now lives on his own.
Months go by.
Almost twenty years after he was first institutionalized, he's given a hearing test, which indicates that he has a severe hearing impairment. More psychological tests follow, now taking into account his near-total deafness. After two decades in the facility, his doctors discovered that many of the problems that led to that 5 year-old boy's difficulties stemmed not from severe mental retardation, but the fact that he couldn't hear. Howard Lohan is, or was, that 5 year-old boy. He is now 53 and has been out of the institution since the mid-1970s.