A childhood seen through books - my earliest books

Recently over on that other place (FB) we had a brief but interesting discussion that started as the question "What did you read in Middle School/Junior High?" I posted some answers and started doing some thinking. What hit me most strongly was that many of the books that I read in my late teens and 20s were books that other friends had read middle school. First, of course, is that I'm older than many of my friends and quite a few of those books hadn't been written or published when I was in junior high. Then, what age are we talking about? Junior high seems to be a forgotten concept in education these days - but back in the early 60s, I attended one for 7th grade. Then I moved and attended two middle schools for 8th grade. So when I was thinking about what I read at this age I was thinking about ages 11-12. If you look at middle school as the now standard 7th through 8th grades that would be ages 12-13. So there's a little discontinuity there as well. I don't know what you read (but I hope you will tell me) but here are some of the things I read.

My earliest memory of reading is of not reading. Someone gave me a EASY READER book the Christmas that I was three and told me that because it was easy, I should be able to read it with no problem. I distinctly remember taking it up to my attic bedroom and opening it and waiting for the magic ability to come to me. There were pictures. I could read the letters. But I couldn't read the words. I was deeply, deeply disappointed. Here's the book - The Big Jump. I remember it clearly, and I remember reading it frequently over the next few years, but my most vivid memory is opening the book and NOT being able to read it. Of course, my copy didn't have the "Cat in the Hat" logo on it because The Cat in the Hat hadn't been written yet.

My only other memory of not being able to read was the day my mother (a teacher and child psychologist) sat me down with her to teach me to read. She had purchased the Alice and Jerry primer series and we opened to the first page. There was Alice sitting on a swing and her brother Jerry had taken her hand and was pulling at her. "What does he want her to do?", my mother asked. "Dance?" I replied questioningly. "No, he is asking her to come with him. See, the word? 'Come!'". I saw the word then and knew what it meant, and it is the last time in my life I ever remember NOT being able to read something.




But this leads me to a digression about starting school. I was absolutely thrilled to start Kindergarten the month after I turned 5. I was sure that school would be wonderful and that there would be lots of books to read. I was immediately disillusioned and spent a whole year playing, eating milk and cookies, watching other children learn numbers and letters, and listening to story time. I did learn to say The Lord's Prayer, which we recited every day, and The Pledge of Allegiance (with the then recently added words "under God"). By the time first grade came around I was hopeful, but not overly so. As I sat at the front of the class in my first reading circle, Mrs. Whitman said crossly, "I hope none of you think you know how to read. It's very bad when parents try to teach children to read. They don't know how and it makes a lot of trouble." Thoroughly cowed, I hunkered down and opened the by-now-familiar Alice and Jerry reader. I was a little excited because it was one I hadn't seen before. My hopes were soon dashed. It was the pre-primer, which my mother hadn't bothered with, and which was all pictures and no words so we could learn to be familiar with the characters and their family and pets. First grade was a disappointment, and we had grown past milk and cookies.

So what else did I read by myself in those first years? I read To Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street and The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. I read the Bumper Book and The Tall Book of Elves and Fairies and The Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies and issue after issue of "Jack and Jill" magazine. I read the first three volumes of My Book House, and looked through the others sampling bits and pieces. And, of course, I read dozens of Little Golden Books.



But more than what I read myself was what my mother read to me. I was the youngest of six, and at the time I'm remembering I had three older brothers at home. Mostly, Mother read to me along with my older brothers, and we read books that they would like - not picture books but real, long stories - a chapter a day, or (if we begged enough and there were time) two chapters. I remember being read all of the Oz books, and various stories from My Book House. There were fairy tales (the real kind, not the Disney kind) and science fiction (Heinlein and Clarke) and there was Edgar Rice Burroughs - mostly Tarzan but some of the Mars and Venus stories as well. There were standard children's books like The Five Little Peppers and there was Michael O'Halloran. Mother read us Michael O'Halloran at least once a year (or so it seems in memory) and edited out the romance and politics parts so it was just the story of Michael and Peaches in their tenament home. There was never a time when we weren't reading a book, although there were certainly times when the book didn't get read because other things were going on.

There were picture books in those early years. But Dr. Suess mostly wasn't around, and the picture books I liked best were those with lavish painted pictures, not cartoonish characters. I adored the Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka books (and their companion Snip, Snap, Snurr books) and took them out of the library time and time again. And all the Cowboy Sam books were favorites as well.


I was lucky to have the Takoma Park Public Library very close to home. I vaguely remember going to the "old" library (in a big house on Cedar Street) but I clearly remember the new library being built on Philadelphia Avenue just below my elementary school. I remember walking about the foundations after they had been laid, and before the walls went up. It was a small, flat-topped brick building that looked like something dropped from Mars in the midst of all the old Victorian houses that made up Takoma Park, but it was wonderful beyond words. I could go there myself from the time I was five and walked to school on my own. I certainly had my own library card by the time I was five. And by the time I left Takoma Park at twelve there wasn't a shelf in the children's section that didn't have books I knew and loved.