Courtesy of Marion Downs

Here’s a unique way to come up with an area of study for graduate school. You show up at the university to register and are greeted by long lines snaking away from each department’s table. Then your eye catches a short line. Aha! The kids will be home from school in an hour . . . okay, I’ll major in this subject.

And the subject? Speech pathology and audiology. Never mind that your bachelor’s degree was in political science and English. Or that you’d never heard of this major before.

“I was impatient and had other things to do [besides stand in line],” Marion Downs says now, with a chuckle. “I just thought it was an interesting profession, but I had no business getting into it.”

As it turns out, she was a natural for audiology. Not only did she end up loving the subject, she went on to pioneer the first hearing screening project for newborns, then spent more than 30 years trying to convince her peers to adopt the testing in hospitals. As a result of her efforts, 90% of all newborns in America today are screened for hearing loss.

A hearing center in Aurora, Colorado, was named in her honor and opened in 2005. She was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame in 2006, and in 2007 received the Secretary’s Highest Recognition Award at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for her groundbreaking work and lifetime dedication promoting the early identification of hearing problems in children. These are only some of her many awards and honors.

All that from a chance short line at college registration.

Born 94 years ago in New Ulm, Minnesota, Downs grew up in the small town and went to the University of Minnesota. She married after her junior year, in 1934, and did what she said women did back then: “married young and had babies.” Before she could graduate, the couple moved to Montana, where her husband worked as a petroleum geologist with Standard Oil.

By the time she was 35, they were living in Denver, and her three children were old enough that she could think about going back to school. She finished her undergraduate degree by correspondence and then made that fateful decision. After getting her master's degree at the University of Denver, she started teaching at her alma mater. “There was a scarcity of teachers for audiology, and teachers were in such demand that they’d stay a year and then leave. It was just serendipity. I was in the right place at the right time.” She taught there from 1951 to 1959 and “was the only audiologist in Colorado for many years,” she said.

She started work on a doctorate but was advised against it. “At that time, women were still considered second-class citizens,” she said. “You had to do twice as much and be (two times) better in order to keep up with salaries.” A man she worked with at the Veterans Administration—where she had a contract to do speech and hearing testing—discouraged her from pursuing the advanced degree, saying, “This is a science, and it’s for men.” So she stopped, but decades later, she would receive two honorary doctorates: one from the University of Northern Colorado and the other from the University of Colorado.  

In 1959, a new ear-nose-and-throat clinic was opening up at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and an audiologist was needed. “I was the only one available, so I was recruited,” she said. And that’s where she spent the rest of her career, retiring in 1982.

At the medical school, she would visit the nursery and see how newborns responded to sounds. She developed the first observational test in 1962 and published a report in 1964. “It was the first newborn hearing screening in the country,” she said. Because “observations could be faulty,” she started a “high-risk register,” setting up categories of illnesses or genetic backgrounds that put babies at risk for hearing loss. Once computers and better instruments arrived on the scene in around 1980, the testing became foolproof.  

Meanwhile, though, her theory that infants needed their hearing tested right away—and hearing aids right away if the results were poor—was assailed by other professionals. “Physicians thought it was awful to bother newborn babies and disrupt their lives, so I had a lot of opposition,” she said. Still, she and Doreen Pollack, who had been doing the same work in England before coming to Colorado, began fitting hearing aids on infants by the age of six months—at a time when three years was more the norm. Downs’ feeling was that the younger the babies were when they got hearing aids, the better their speech and language would eventually be.

Other professionals continued to be unconvinced, until two things happened. In the late 1980s, pediatric neurologists reported that babies’ senses had to be stimulated at birth. “We are born with billions of neurons, but they aren’t functional until they are stimulated through all the senses,” Downs said. If those senses aren’t all working, the neurons—in the case of hearing, the auditory neurons—won’t connect properly. The brain’s ability to do this work decreases after birth, which affects learning and memory. So testing hearing in infants and then placing hearing aids in those with hearing loss would indeed aid in stimulating their brains.

Then, in 1997, “a wonderful thing happened,” she said. A scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder followed a lot of the babies Downs had tested and found that those who had received hearing aids as infants had far better speech and language than those who had been identified later, even at 18 months old. This validated Downs’ call for early intervention. “In the past, when children were identified as deaf at age two or three, the problem was they would go to signing school but never get beyond third grade in language level. So they were limited.”

It had taken more than 30 years, but she had won the battle.  

“You can always tell a pioneer,” she said cheerfully. “They’re the ones with arrows in their backs. And I’ll tell you, I had plenty of arrows in my back.”

She credits her perseverance to the fact that she believed deeply that she was right. “I saw it in these kids, and I believed it. When you believe in something, you stick with it forever.”

Downs traveled to almost every country in the world, speaking to others about newborn screening. “People wanted to hear that you could test babies at birth and put hearing aids on them at birth,” she said. Over her career, she published around 100 articles in professional journals as well as books on the subject. And even though she’s been retired for more than 20 years, “I really haven’t retired,” she said.

She has stayed active not only with her work but also in her athletic life, but life fired a few curveballs along the way. Problems started around the time she turned 80. “I was ambushed by all this unexpected stuff,” she said. The two big ones were chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, thanks to 40 years of smoking two packs a day, and benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, which she controls by doing specific head movements. “Then there were my eyes and nose and ears,” she said. Arthritis and bursitis had to be addressed. She had a squamous cell carcinoma. “I’ve really had a lot of illnesses. Some people hit the jackpot, others don’t.” On top of that, both of her husbands succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease, making for very painful periods in her life.

Downs decided to be proactive about her health—and to keep an upbeat attitude. That gritty, can-do spirit permeates her recent book, Shut Up and Live! (You Know How): A 93-Year-Old’s Guide to Living to a Ripe Old Age. She tells you that to live long, you need to laugh, get off your duff and exercise, love and enjoy sex, rebel against your aches and pains, and live out your passions. Read, research, ask questions, find the right doctors—lots of do-this and don’t-do-that, but with nine decades of experience, much of it in the medical profession, she’s just a bit of an expert.

Exercise for her is stretching, strengthening, and aerobics. She swims and is a huge fan of tennis—even competing in the Senior Olympics and winning gold medals into her 90s. (“At 95,” she laughs, “I’m going to get a gold medal just for standing!”) Since she injured her back in a chairlift accident last year, she thinks her skiing days are over. She ran for more than 20 years, starting at age 59, competing in 10K marathons; now she’ll enter a marathon but walk it. In the book, she talks about keeping yourself mentally active as well.

“Writing is something I really enjoy,” she said of her inspiration for the book. “So when I had nothing else to write about, I wrote about myself. Then I realized people should really know this when they get older. You shouldn’t be in a wheelchair. Getting old isn’t at all bad if you can keep active doing things you love to do.” She wants the 50- to 80-year-old crowd to know this.  

At almost 95, she says, “I don’t feel any different. None of these ages have made me feel any different.” In fact, she says, “I now have a partner—he’s a youngster at 90, an old family friend from way back. I was worried I wouldn’t have someone to walk into the sunset with. Now I do."

Enjoy this video tribute to Marion!
 

Click Silver Star Marion Downs to view a photo gallery of her extraordinary life.