FULLERTON : Ex-Smokers Tell Why They Quit

Their voices amplified by microphone, two senior citizens on Monday told Troy High School students what it was like when they were young. Just like students today, they said, they wanted to to fit in, act grown up. So they started to smoke cigarettes.

The decision has cost them. Both Art Leach and Francis (Russ) Rusbult lost their vocal chords because of smoking, and now each breathes through a hole in his neck and talks by creating a froglike burping noise. It is a sound as alarming as the words they preach to hundreds of students across Orange County every year.

“We’re killing ourselves with cigarettes,” said Leach, 79, of Anaheim, speaking as if he had a very bad case of laryngitis. “We don’t love ourselves if we are smoking.”

Leach and Rusbult are among 70 members of the Orange County chapter of the American Cancer Society’s Lost Chord Club, a weekly support group for those who have lost their larynxes to cancer. The group is marking Thursday’s Great American Smokeout by urging students to quit or urge other smokers they know to quit.

“Everybody that is smoking is saturating your air, your clothes, your car,” Leach said. “It’s a stinkin’ habit, like a slow suicide.”

The students, all from health and physical education classes, appeared alarmed, even hesitant to laugh when Leach cracked a joke about his condition.

“It has its advantages,” he quipped. “Should we some night have an intruder come in our house, he could hold a pillow over my mouth and nose and nothing would happen. . . . So it’s not all bad.”

Monday marked 25 years to the day that Leach lost his vocal chords. Thirty years of smoking caught up to him when he began to experience a bad cough. Then his voice changed, and his throat became sore. Finally he saw a doctor, who performed a biopsy on his throat. Tests for cancer were positive.

“I thought, ‘This guy’s crazy,’ ” Leach said. “He thinks I got cancer because I smoke. I didn’t believe him.”

Then he got a second opinion from another doctor. The results of the tests were even worse.

Rusbult, also of Anaheim, began to lose his voice in 1986, when he was teaching in the Anaheim Union High School District. Doctors discovered he had throat cancer, and he underwent radiation treatment. For a while it appeared he was getting better, but he lost his voice again in 1989. This time it was for good--his vocal chords were removed.

“It cost $50,000, just for the surgery,” Rusbult, 69, told the students. “For that you could buy some pretty nice wheels.”

After the operation, Rusbult took speech therapy courses and learned to talk by making his neck muscles vibrate, a way of talking called “esophageal speech.” To master the technique requires at least eight hours of practice a day.

For a while, Rusbult had an artificial larynx, which amplified his speech but sounded electronically altered, like a robot talking. He quit using it when he called a man on the telephone and the person who answered thought it was a telemarketing device.

“He thought I was a robot, so he hung up on me,” Rusbult said.

When both men asked their audience if anyone smoked, none of the students answered. Still, some of them said they would take the message to their friends who have not quit.

“I want them to listen to them,” said Jennifer Stichter, 16, a junior. “Seriously, it’s scary. It’s kind of a reality hitter.”