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Dyslexia Doesn’t Stop Henry Winkler From Pursuing His Dreams “I want to read, I really do. But my eyes never seem to make friends with the words on the page. All those letters swim around like fish in a pond.”
That
is how character Hank Zipzer describes his dyslexia in the book Everybody is Somebody #12 (Here’s Hank), a series written by Lin Oliver and Henry Winkler. We recently spoke with Henry Winkler to discuss the challenges he faced as someone with dyslexia, and how he became a household name despite those challenges. Henry relayed that his parents could not understand why he struggled so much in school, calling him dummer Hund or “dumb dog” in German. His parents assumed he just wasn’t concentrating enough or was just plain lazy, he said. “I couldn’t watch TV. When my parents went out on the weekend, I had to study. And at that time, our television was a box with tubes, so if I didn’t turn it off in time, they could touch the top of the television and feel whether it was warm or not,” Henry recalls. Winkler was several years into his role on Happy Days as Arthur “The Fonz” Fonzarelli before he discovered that
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The Northern Light
