ST. LOUIS — If you tune into radio station KTRS “The Big 500” on weekdays, you will hear the voice of McGraw Milhaven. He does a show with 5 On Your Side anchor Kelly Jackson.
He enjoys being in front of the microphone.
“I like to talk. I like to talk to people. I have a gift of gab,” Milhaven said.
But gabbing is not a simple thing for him to do.
“Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it’s really hard,” he said.
Believe or not, Milhaven stutters. He used ways in the past to get through the stumbles.
“I would raise my eyebrows. Every time I couldn’t get a word out, I’d raise my eyebrows,” he recalled.
The stuttering isn’t something that people pick up on when he’s on the air.
“If you trick the listener into thinking it’s normal disfluency, you’d never know,” he explained.
Although early in his broadcasting career it was very noticeable.
“I was in Omaha doing traffic. And Interstate 80 runs through Omaha. Well, I couldn’t say eastbound I-80 cause it’s a bunch of vowel sounds. So, I’d say east, east, eastbound, in, inter, interstate 80,” he said.
He eventually sought help.
“I didn’t get help for my stutter till I was in my twenties,” he said.
He couldn’t cure his stuttering.
“Stuttering isn’t like a broken arm. You don’t get it fixed and then you’re fine. You will always have a stutter,” he said.
What he learned to do was to control his stutter and figured out how to live with it.
“They don’t know why you stutter. But they fix it physically. Every stutterer will tell you that you could be saying a sentence and you know the word you’re going to stutter on. What they teach you is how to work through the blocks,” Milhaven explained.
He is transparent about his disfluency.
“The audience, if you’re honest with them, will accept it,” he said.
He will even joke about it.
“If you own it and you make fun of yourself first, nobody else can make fun of you because you’ve already done it yourself,” he said.
Milhaven does take stuttering seriously and he takes it to heart.
“It’s who I am. It’s not, it’s not all that I am. But it’s just what I deal with," he explained.
He hopes to serve as an inspiration for kids who are like him.
“It’s OK to not speak perfectly,” he said.
Milhaven hopes his confidence, disclosure and his career can serve as an example that they too can overcome stuttering.
“I’ve been given a great gift in a weird way,” he said.