Surrounded By Readers

I wrote my first short story when I was in the first grade. It was about a boy playing football. It was not very long; it was not very good. I'm pretty sure it was written phonetically and without grammar, but I'm also pretty sure it was understandable. I don't have a copy, but I remember the gist of it. This boy wanted to play football, the team would not let him, and so he got mad about it.

Not exactly Rudy Ruettiger, who overcame lots of obstacles and persevered to dress with the Notre Dame Fighting Irish in 1975. My character, Johnny, walked off kicking a can.

I was never confused with the academically gifted. I was not a prodigy in the first grade. I was able to write that story - on ruled tablet-style paper - because I was surrounded by a family of readers, who loved reading to me and my brothers.

I bet I spent a hundred hours sitting on a sofa next to my granny, while she read books like "The Little Engine That Could" or read the notes inside Christmas cards sent to her by friends and relatives. (She may have started reading The Little Engine That Could after my rather dark tale of the sulking football player.) In my book, Brookwood Road, I write about Granny helping me pound out a letter to my mother, who was in the Forsyth County Hospital giving birth to my brother, Russ. That was June 1964. I was a few weeks short of being five years old. Granny was investing in me, and looking for every opportunity to do so.

My parents invested, too. They bought us a subscription to Dr. Seuss books, and a book arrived each month by mail. The first one in that series was Hop On Pop. My favorite was Look Out For Pirates! Early on, before we could read really well, Mama and Daddy tag-teamed every night, reading books to us. As we got a little older, we started receiving a subscription to Scholastic's Weekly Reader. Because book stores were not readily available to us, Scholastic made paperback books available for mail order through elementary schools. My parents bought 3-4 books every time and we read them.

(Here's a photograph of Piper's 1961 edition of The Little Engine That Could and a 1964 edition of Iris Vinton's Look Out For Pirates! I have both of these displayed in my office).

My Mema was a school teacher. You can only imagine. She bought us books by the set.

When you add my Papa R.C.'s story-telling over all of this reading, well, it wasn't a big jump for me to become a story-teller and to enjoy seeing those words on paper. As reading helped my vocabulary and sentence structure, my stories began to come easily. They weren't necessarily better quality, but they were legible and made my friends laugh. (I know some of them were laughing at me, but Papa R.C. used to say, 'Better they laugh at something than not laugh at anything.')

Then I discovered the school library under the direction of Mrs. Frances Mize, and later the Forsyth County Public Library. Mrs. Mize had me and my friend Lynn Raines (now McClure) reading 3-4 books every week. Mrs. Jean Potts, at the public library, encouraged me to read and write, read and write, and read and write. I spent hours at the library each summer with Mrs. Potts while my parents worked.

Then it happened. One day in the fourth grade, my teacher Mrs. Carolyn Hicks asked to read one of my stories (which I was probably writing during math). She asked me to read it during class. I did. And, she encouraged me to write and read my stories aloud all the way through seventh grade, when I became editor of the school's newspaper, FOCUS. My seventh-grade English teacher, Mrs.Teresa Day caught me drawing / designing / writing a one-page school newspaper. She encouraged me to make copies and sell them for a dime. I did that. Then, she encouraged me to pull together friends and put together a real school newspaper. We made enough profit that year to buy Mrs. Day a $20 wall clock.

The success of the newspaper led me to serve as editor of the school yearbook in eighth grade. Our yearbook sponsor, Mrs. Mary Daniel, pushed me to write and contribute to the local newspaper, The Forsyth County News. I ended up working there throughout high school; graduated and studied journalism at the University of Georgia. (I learned to type in the eighth grade, taking a summer school class at Forsyth County High School. Mrs. Wanda Bruce and Mrs. Gayle Martin (now Haight) taught me to type. I could not wait to type my stories, and I still have some of them.)

Fast-forward . . .

When our son Andrew was born in 1988, the late Bobby Gilbert was the Forsyth County tax commissioner. I ran into Bobby one day at the court house, and he congratulated me on being a new daddy. Then he said, "Never refuse to read a book to your children. Always make time to read to them."

I have never forgotten that. Every time my boys came to me with a book, I stopped whatever I was doing to read to them. And, I told them bedtime stories every night. I know that's what many people did for me. I was surrounded by readers . . . and a lot of encouragers, too.