Norman W. Freestone; Expert on Speech and Reading

Norman W. Freestone, 81, retired chairman of the speech and drama department at Occidental College and founder of the school’s speech and reading clinic, where he used his own phonics manual to teach hundreds of children to read. Freestone, who retired in 1971, joined Occidental in 1941 after receiving a doctorate in speech and psychology from USC. Outside the classroom he directed the language clinics at the Los Angeles Rehabilitation Center and headed the Hear Foundation in Pasadena, where hundreds of children were taught to speak and hear. He was a past president of the Western Speech Assn., a fellow of the Word Blind Institute in Denmark and a presidential delegate to the White House Conference on Children and Youth. After he retired he helped found an organization for stroke victims and other disabled fellow retirees in Leisure World, Laguna Hills. In Laguna Hills on Thursday of cancer.