In May of 1977, two short months after I was born, George Lucas released his science fiction epic Star Wars upon the masses.
To say I’m a child of Star Wars is an understatement. If you were to call me a Star Wars geek, I’d pick that insult up, and carry it like a badge of honor.
I can still remember the first time I saw that movie. It was at the Tara Cinemas in Savannah on what was at the time the largest theatre screen in the entire state of Georgia.
My parents took my younger sister Shannon and I to see it. A few scenes into the movie, we were greeted to the greatest villain to ever grace the silver screen: Darth Vader.
Vader, like his all black suit and mask, was evil personified, and as he boarded a rebel starship with a platoon of stormtroopers killing everything in sight he commanded your attention.
For Shannon, Darth Vader was more than she could handle. The moment he appeared on screen, my sister began screaming bloody murder and would not stop.
It got so bad, that my old man had to take her completely out of the theatre, and take her home. Luckily, I lived less than a mile from the theatre.
I’ll admit, as a youngster, the first time I saw Darth Vader I was scared too. However, the movie had me enthralled.
Several years later, I began to see Vader in a different light.
As many of you know, acclaimed actor James Earl Jones, lent his voice to the role of Darth Vader. Jones passed away Monday afternoon at the age of 93.
If you’ve met me in person, then you know that I’m one of the three million Americans suffering from a stutter.
An individual who stutters exactly knows what he or she would like to say but has trouble producing a normal flow of speech. It’s sometimes debilitating, and can be horrifyingly embarrassing for the person who suffers from it.
When he was running for President four years ago, Joe Biden, himself a fellow stutterer, stated the best line I’ve ever heard regarding our condition.
“Stuttering is the only disability which is still acceptable to laugh at,” Biden said. Regardless of what I think about his politics, that statement was one of the truest he’s ever uttered.
Back to my childhood, around the time I was six, I learned that Jones grew up with severe stutter.
In an interview, Jones said of his childhood, “Stuttering is painful.”
“In Sunday school, I’d try to read my lessons and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter… by the time I got to school, my stuttering was so bad that I gave up trying to speak properly,” Jones said.
Jones said he got over his stutter after a speech therapist suggested he try and speak in an octave lower than his normal voice. That “Jedi mind trick” would go on to produce the iconic voice of Vader in Star Wars.
While schools nowadays are very sensitive towards bullying and mental health, as a child going to school in the 1980s it wasn’t that way. Jones’ experiences were very similar to my own.
In that moment, James Earl Jones, replaced Herschel Walker as my hero. He spoke exactly as I did, and grew up to be the greatest voice in show business.
As a stutterer, if Jones’s story didn’t light your fire, your wood’s wet.
All of my life, people have always told me what my stuttering wouldn’t allow me to do. For example, they’d say I couldn’t be a reporter, or work in radio because I couldn’t speak.
Spoiler alert: I could, and I did.
The courage to do those things came in large part because Darth Vader paved the way, and opened my eyes to a world not dragged down by my disability.
As Jones has now passed on to a galaxy far, far away, I’m sad I’ll never get to thank him for the confidence he instilled in me.
However, if I could tell him, I’m sure he’d say in his deepest Vader voice, “Most impressive! Your skills are now complete.”
Patrick Fargason is the Editor/Publisher of The Hartwell Sun and writes a weekly column.