Dyslexics Dig Henry Winkler’s Journey

Happy Days’ Henry Winkler’s biop shares a life-long struggle & learning to live with dyslexia, the cursed involuntary twisting of words, numbers, memories. Once tagged a dunce, Henry’s true brilliance came to light after portraying … a dunce.

As the Fox News report notes, the Emmy Award-winning ‘Barry’ star has written a new memoir, ‘Being Henry: The Fonz … and Beyond. He humbly, compellingly relates how he fell in love with the love of his life, his wife, precisely at the moment he became wildly famous as the Fonz, then, was too scared to be as supportive when he should have been as his Soulmate came down with cancer. “Not my finest hour,” he readily admits. But, it was in that falling short of what Winkler wanted to BE as a man, that he also got the counseling (and support from his cancer surviving wife) needed to help him also sort out his humiliating life as a dyslexic.

Says Fox: “Throughout his life, Winkler struggled with the learning disorder. He recalled stumbling during table reads for ‘Happy Days.’ Growing up in the 50s & 60s, a time when little was known about dyslexia, he was often shamed both in the classroom & at home. Those feelings stayed with him over the years. ‘I remember when my stepson … was tested. Everything they said about him was true about me,’ Winkler reflected. ‘I thought, “Oh my God, I’m not stupid. I have something with a name.”’ At first, Henry was “angry” about all the humiliation he suffered. “All that punishment, all the yelling, all the disrespect I endured was for naught. And then I said, ‘OK, how do I negotiate this?’ It’s not going away. It stays with you. And then I think if I didn’t fight through that struggle, maybe I wouldn’t be as tenacious as I am today.” Thank you, Henry, from all us dyslexics.

Davd Soul