Reading has been
one of my greatest joys all my life. From the moment I entered first grade
classroom at Harrison Elementary, I fell in love with words on a page in the
longest sentences I could find. Mother had read to me years before I went to
school, and she let me follow along with my finger, telling me words and their
meanings. Nobody, I mean, nobody in my world loved words like I did. My
Grandfather Becker died right after I started to school, and once he was gone,
he could no longer help me with my reading and tell me the meaning of words I
didn’t know.
So
I went to my teachers and ask for information. My second grade teacher
hesitated to get me some of the books I asked for from the library, as she
said, “I was jumping too far ahead of my class.” But Miss Goddard, my first and
third grade teacher, helped me find what she could from her own and the town
library, checking out books for me that she let me read during recess and extra
time after my lessons were finished.
One
day she called me to her desk during recess and told me she had called my
mother. I was terrified until she reassured me that she’d asked her if I could
participate in a special reading contest she was starting at school, one that
required each student selected for the activity to read a book every week until
the end of the school year. She hadn’t mentioned the contest in class, she told
Mother, because she was approaching the candidates one by one and getting
parental approval before she proceeded. I had been selected along with five
others to participate. She also informed me that any student who read more than
the required books on the list, could get extra points to advance their score.
Each contestant would be questioned by her and other teachers on the content of
the reading, not just to see if we’d read the book but how well we’d read it. My big worry was that Mother would keep me so
busy with my piano lessons, my flannel graph stories for Wednesday nights at
church once a month and my house chores, especially baby-sitting my two
brothers while she did housework that I wouldn’t have time to read. I actually
did that cliché sheet-tent with flashlight after lights out several times in
order to meet my weekly quota for the contest.
I thought of my
grandfather a lot during those weeks of reading. He could’ve cut straight to
word definitions that took so long for me to find in the dictionary. When I
asked Daddy—forget Mother and her madness for housecleaning—he didn’t know half
of what I was asking even with all his reading from his newspapers. He finished
high school, but a year late, and his reading was thorough but slow, his
writing abysmal. He actually wrote “duz” or “does,” but he had a remarkable
comprehension and memory for what he read. Mother went to grade school in a
country one-room schoolhouse and finished high school in her senior years with
a General Education Diploma and turned into a great reader. She even attended
one year at The University of Oklahoma. But in my growing up years, word definitions
weren’t my parents’ forte.
When I read at home
for the contest, I’d make a list of words I didn’t understand and after searching
in the dictionary without results, I asked Miss Goddard to tell me from the
larger one she had on a stand in the classroom.
My
major difficulty was the symbols for pronunciation and the ones in brackets for
the origin of words. Even so, I won the third grade reading award, given to me
in front of the whole school, at the end of the year, May, 1946. Mother came,
sitting on the front row, smiling proudly, but with worry on her face that I
might make a mistake. I gave a two sentence speech that Mother helped me write.
My voice shook a little, but Miss Goddard stood by my side while my eyes never
left Mother’s face, her mouthing the words as I spoke them.
“My
Grandfather Becker told me that reading was the backbone of education, but Miss
Goddard taught me that reading is
education. Thank you, Miss Goddard.” Everybody applauded and Miss Goddard
handed me my framed copy of the award, written in dark black letters on a gilt
background with my full name in what she explained later was an Old English
style.
My name was
lettered on the line under the insignia of an open book with a torch and the
large words forming an archway over the top of the page read, “Excellence in
Reading.” I have no idea where that certificate is, lost, no doubt, during one
of over a dozen moves my family and I made during my childhood until I
graduated from high school.
I
read thirty books that school year, even though there were thirty-six weeks in
our school calendar. The next candidate read twenty-three. I kept the list of
books for a long time—there were fifty—and checked those I read. We had to read
them in sequence, skipping ahead only if we read first the one assigned for
each week.
My
favorites were: Alice in Wonderland and
Through the Looking Glass, The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Secret Garden, Heidi, and The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. And
I read a lot of the Nancy Drew series which weren’t on the list. Mother checked
out books for me from the library without hesitation after Miss Goddard talked
to her, so I asked for some that she never would’ve let me read if I hadn’t
been a participant in the reading contest. Two of these were Perrault’s Complete Fairy Tales and The Book of
Fables. Mennonites don’t read fairy tales, at least not when I was a kid.
When the year
ended, I knew we were moving once again so I stayed after school the last day
to say good-bye to Miss Goddard, crying on her shoulder, while she gave me a
long hug. It felt a little like losing Grandad again. She had shown me how to
love words like he had, but now I could read, truly read. After Miss Goddard
had hugged me good-bye, she held me out a little from her and through her thick
gold-rimmed glasses, she told me that I read on a fifth-grade level, well above
my peers, and I shouldn’t ever use my reading ability to make others feel
beneath me, but I should remain proud of my love to comprehend what I read and
always keep my passion for reading and for new words.
When I went to
college, four years later than most high school students in my hometown, I
chose to study art studio and art history. I couldn’t simply get a degree in
the making of art. I had too much love for the words that described what I was
doing.
Note: In all of my
fiction, when a first or third grade teacher’s name is needed, I use the name
Miss Goddard. It’s my way of paying homage to a woman who encouraged me in my
reading when I was alone in my pursuit of word knowledge.
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