I Love to Read – Do You?
How did I fall in love with reading?
I’m wondering, what made me fall in love with reading? It’s become a lifelong habit.
In our family, reading started early. Before I went to kindergarten, Dad taught me to read. I sat in his lap as he read the comics out loud from the daily newspaper.
Fortunately, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran two full pages of black-and-white comics plus a full page of color comics every day. With three pages of cartoons every day – Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, B.C. and more – I was in heaven.
I still love cartoons.
By the time I started kindergarten, I could already read. So, the teachers sent me upstairs to 1st grade for reading classes. In grade school, teachers decided I could skip 1st grade and go on to 2nd grade – as long as I caught up with 2nd grade math.
So, when every other kid went home at 3 p.m., I was the one who had to stay after school every day, for weeks and weeks. (The roots of my math resentment run deep.)
My hometown of Madison, Illinois, had a public library with two rooms – a children’s room and the adult room. The library’s front door opened into the children’s room.
My cousin John and I would ride our bicycles across town to the library every day. We’d each take the limit of books – four per person.
We’d ride home, read our four books, then trade books and read the other four. The next day, we’d ride back to the library.
At the rate of eight books a day, six days a week, it took us a couple of years to read all the books in the children’s room. Inevitably, the day came when we had read every single children’s book.
However, the library rules said we weren’t old enough to enter the adult room.
It was a sanctuary for grown-ups.
As preteen boys, we argued with the librarian about the rules. “You know from your records that we’ve read every book in this room,” we’d say. “We don’t want to read the same books over and over again. Why can’t we go into the adult room?” But it was a fruitless argument.
So, I read all the books in our elementary school’s tiny library.
And Mom joined a book club that sent me one book a month. She subscribed me to the Science Program from Nelson Doubleday, which sent paperback books about science along with stickers of color photos you’d paste into the book yourself.
My parents and grandparents provided complete freedom to read whatever we wanted. They even backed us up in our battle to get into the adult room at the library.
My Grandma started to subsidize a serious comic book habit.
She’d give us a dollar. We’d hightail over to the local drug store, where you could buy eight comic books for $1, including tax.
We fell in love with all the new comics that came out … the Fantastic Four, the Justice League, the X-Men. Our ritual was to read the comics silently with Grandma in her room. We’d each read a comic, then pass it along until all of us had read all eight.
Then we’d wait a week for the next dollar.
To subsidize my reading habit, I got a paper route, delivering the daily newspaper from East St. Louis, the Metro-East Journal, so I could buy more books.
Back at the library, we persisted in making the case that we should be allowed into the adult room. We started to wear down the library ladies.
Finally, they asked what books from the adult room we wanted to read. Who knows what they’d imagined … Lady Chatterley’s Lover?
Given our comic book habit, of course all we wanted to read was science fiction. We were 100% ready for Jules Verne, Isacc Asimov, and Ray Bradbury. Eventually we gained access to the science-fiction shelves only … and we were in heaven.
In summertime, my Abuelito (little grandfather) spent his vacation taking us home to Michoacan, in Mexico. The train trip from St. Louis to Queretaro took two and a half days each way … which gave us lots of time to read.
Of course, most of the publications for sale in Mexico were in Spanish. So, John and I spent our money on anything we could find to read in English. We’d take buses to bigger towns like Zamora or Guadalajara to find magazines or books in English.
Of all the stuff we read in Mexico, I most vividly recall Mad magazine. It was hilarious, the perfect material for preteen boys – not to be found in any public library. We loved Spy vs. Spy comics and the lavish folding covers with optical illusions.
We wrote letters home to our parents every day and sent them by postal mail. We wrote in longhand, usually asking for money to buy more books.
My love of reading meant a lot to Abuelito. He’d never been to school a day in his life, since his family needed the children to work. Yet he could read, write and speak Spanish and English. He worked for the railroad and gained U.S. citizenship.
Now, our family’s love of reading has come full circle. My daughter Jody and son JJ are avid readers. And I find great joy in reading out loud to my granddaughters, Gloria, Miriam and Adelaide. Now Gloria is big enough read books to me and to her sisters.
I love the way they love to read.
I’m grateful that parents and grandparents taught me to love reading and writing. They paved the way to my career in journalism, marketing and public relations.
Abuelito always said, “The most important thing is to get an education.” He cheered me on when I became the first in our family to graduate from college.
After college, I moved back to my hometown and started work as a newspaper reporter and photographer at the Granite City Journal. Later I edited four weeklies, including the Alton Citizen. My love of reading turned into a lifelong career.
How did you learn to read? I’d love to hear your story. Write me at george@crystalclearcomms.com.
Decades later, I’ve got to say that I still love readers and reading. Thanks for reading!