I wrote this literacy narrative, about my own experience learning to read, as a model for my students in a first-year writing course.
When I was little, my grandmother and grandfather lived with us in a big house on a busy street in Willough by, Ohio. My grandmother spent a lot of time reading to me. She mostly read the standards, like The Little Engine That Could, over and over and over again. She also let me help her plant African violets (I stood on a chair in her kitchen, carefully placing fuzzy violet leaves into small pots of soil) and taught me to tell time (again in her kitchen, where I watched the minute hand move slowly around the dial and tried in vain to see the hour hand move). All that attention and time spent studying the pages as Grandma read them again and again led me to start reading when I was around three years old.
My family was blue-collar, working-class, and — my grandmother excepted — not very interested in books or reading. But my parents took pride in my achievement and told stories about my precocious literacy, such as the time at a restaurant when the waitress bent over as I sat in my booster chair and asked, “What would you like, little boy?” I’m told I gave her a withering look and said, “I’d like to see a menu.”
There was a more serious aspect to reading so young, however.At that time the murder trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard, a physician whose wife had been bludgeoned to death in their house, was the focus of lurid coverage in the Cleveland newspapers. Daily news stories recounted the grisly details of both the murder and the trial testimony,in which Sheppard maintained his innocence. (The story would serve as the inspiration for both The Fugitive TV series and the Harrison Ford movie of the same name.) Apparently I would get up early in the morning, climb over the side of my crib, go downstairs and fetch the paper, take it back upstairs to my crib, and be found reading about the trial when my parents got up. They learned that they had to beat me to the paper in the morning and remove the offending sections before my youthful eyes could see them.
The story of the Sheppard murder had a profound effect on me: it demonstrated the power of writing, for if my parents were so concerned that I not see certain things in print, those things must have had great importance. At the same time, adults’ amazement that I could read was itself an inducement to continue: like any three-year old, I liked attention, and if reading menus and the Plain Dealer would do it, well then, I’d keep reading.
As I got older, I also came to realize the great gift my grandmother had given me. While part of her motivation for spending so much time with me was undoubtedly to keep me entertained in a house isolated from other children at a time when I was too young for nursery school, another part of her motivation was a desire to shape me in a certain way. As the middle child in a large family in rural West Virginia, my grandmother had received a formal education only through the eighth grade, after which she had come alone to Cleveland to make a life for herself, working as a seamstress while reading the ancient Greeks and Etruscans on her own. She had had hopes that her daughter (my mother) would continue her education as she herself hadn’t been able to, but Mom chose instead to marry Dad shortly after graduating from high school, and Dad hadn’t even gotten that far — he had dropped out of school three days before graduation. So Grandma decided that I was going to be different, and she took over much of my preschool life to promote the love of learning that she herself had always had. It worked, and at ninety she got to see me graduate from college, the first in our family to do so.