THE WORDS OF YOUTH 
UNDER A RUG OR IN A SHED, WORDS, BOOKS
ARE GLORIOUS TO KIDS 
Subhead:  
Byline/Affiliation: NEAL SHINE  
PubDate: Sunday, 12/6/1992
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I got home one night last week to find the carpet a bit damp underfoot.

Turns out the carpet cleaners had been at work and suggested stockinged feet until the rugs had dried properly.

Sitting there later in my wet socks, I wondered how much better off my brothers and I would have been if we could have shampooed our rugs instead ofhanging them over a backyard clothesline and beating the dust out of them until our arms grew weary.

Actually, I never really minded rug-beating duties because the chore included a reward factor of sorts; when the carpet was rolled up, it exposed the collection of old newspapers on which the rug had lain, an inexpensive padding not uncommon in some Detroit households during those years. So before I took the first swing with the carpet beater, I needed to read the old papers first.

Crawling about on all fours I would read every page -- comic strips, movie ads, sports news, Detroit news, world news -- before descending to the backyard to hammer the daylights out of the rug.

Since my mother could never be described as a housekeeping fanatic, carpet cleaning took place whenever she was moved to order it done, which was about every three or four years. So the papers were always old enough to turn the adventure of re- reading them into a kind of archival experience. Thinking about all that last week, I decided that since the daily newspaper was the most readily available literature in our house in those years, it probably had a lot to do with my ability to read at an early age. Newspapers were not, of course, where I learned to read -- that happened in school -- but they were certainly an important supplement to my daily reading.

Not so with Derek Jameson.

Jameson is a widely known British journalist, editor, author and broadcaster. He was the illegitimate son of a laundry girl and grew up in Hackney, in east London, streets he describes as " . . . always a battlefield, mud and dirt, people fighting, poverty everywhere, the streets ruled by bullies and bigots . . . By the age of 7, I knew people were prepared to kill for a cigarette."

In a column he wrote for a London newspaper last year, Jameson also talked about learning to read.

"I taught myself to read," he wrote, "not at school but on comic strips in the Daily Mirror. The paper cost a penny and took the drabness out of our lives. For me that was the start of a lifelong love of newspapers.

"Most of the people I went to school with became lorry drivers' mates, so how did I become a newspaper editor? I owe it mostly to Ernie Hare, my form master, who became my substitute father. He got me a season ticket to the public library, and I devoured five or six books a week, mainly American literature. Writers such as John Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis helped me grow up. From books such as 'Cannery Row' and 'Of Mice and Men' I learnt that it was not a crime to be poor or illegitimate.

"The tragedy of our television age is that the young hardly read . . . I took an intense cramming course, reading Dickens, Hemingway and Graham Greene by natural light in the garden shed." Jameson describes himself as a difficult and moody child, and wrote that one of the last foster homes in which he lived allowed him inside only to sleep.

"When I won a national essay contest competition for 12- to 14-year-olds . . . I was determined to make a career in words. Collecting that prize was one of the blackest days of my life, because it was given out by the local bishop and I had no shoes. The Red Cross came to my aid -- with a pair of bright yellow girls' shoes." He left school at 15 and when he expressed his interest in writing, his headmaster wrote on his testimonial: "Should do well in a shop. How can youever be a journalist? You haven't even read the works of Shakespeare." But leaving the school and the form master who had done so much for himwas difficult.

"Parting from Ernie Hare was a great sadness," he wrote. "I wept for days. 'You'll make it, Derek,' he said. 'You have a great gift for words.' "I never come away from a story like that without believing that it is a story capable of being played out in our lives day after day. There are, all around us, the Derek Jamesons of our own world; children in the Detroit area whose lives, if not painful, are certainly far from glorious. They are children who would rejoice in the gift of words much the same way Jameson did.

That is why the Free Press Gift of Reading program has been so important to me -- and to many of you -- for the past several years now. It is why I amasking you again this year to help. The program distributes new books to children 7 and younger, children whose access to books is limited by the circumstances of their lives. It's a way for you to make a difference in the life of a child. Recall for a minute the importance of books in your life and then sit down and write a check to the Gift of Reading.  
 

FROM A MARBLE ANGEL TO AN ANGEL OF READING
NEAL SHINE
PubDate:  Sunday, 10/21/1990
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The season is upon us and the letters should start arriving any day now,

filled with reassuringly predictable messages about the importance of the Free Press Gift of Reading project.

The letters will speak to the wonders of the printed word, the magic of books, and the exquisite treasure of this gift we call reading.

The people here will begin to collect, wrap and distribute the 65,000 children's books, part of a program that has provided 200,000 new books to needy children since 1987.

And between now and Christmas, when the bright paper wrapping is torn from the last book by an excited child, I will think about books and reading and about the day Jude Cotter asked God to turn him into a marble angel.

The Cotters lived on Lemay, on Detroit's east side, around the corner from Galen's Bar, a fact incidental to the story except for those who fondly recall Galen's and are always pleased to see it remembered. They had 12 children which did not, in a neighborhood of large families, make them unique.

Last year, Jude Cotter sent along a sizable contribution to the Gift of Reading, in response to my plea on behalf of a project that has quickly become my favorite undertaking.  

In his letter, Cotter, who later became a teacher and now is a psychologist in Farmington Hills, talked about the pain of not being able to read. He especially remembered the summer of 1942, which he spent in Hamilton, Ontario, where his grandmother lived.

That entire summer, he said, "was filled with the overpowering fear of returning to school because I had failed the fifth grade and would have to be held back as a failure . . ."

He had received failing grades in every subject except music, mostly because of his inability to read. The previous spring at Annunciation School, he knew what was coming with the final report card of the year. He would not be passed into the sixth grade. He pleaded sickness on report card day and one of his brothers or sisters brought home the bad news.

When, during that summer of his failure, he confided his fears to his mother, she suggested a visit to St. Lawrence Church, in Hamilton, might provide some comfort.

"The church was always cool, quiet and empty during the day," he wrote. "I usually had a talk with the Blessed Mother and let her know how afraid I was to go back to school . . . I prayed as hard as I could to keep from going back as a failure. I was the first Cotter in the history of my family to fail. My brothers and sisters were always on the honor roll and most skipped grades.

"It was then I noticed, really saw, the white stone marble angels on each side of the altar. Each statue was on one knee, genuflecting toward the altar, and each held a light in its hands.

"That's it! I thought. I prayed that God would turn me into a marble statue and I could stay and worship Him in church forever . . . I asked St. Jude and all my friends in heaven to help out, then I waited . . .

"I felt my arms getting stiff and my legs getting cold and wondered if I should pose in a certain way . . . I tried not to move, but I wanted to see if my leg was marble yet. When I could move my toes . . . I knew God had some mission for me other than being a statue."

Cotter returned to Annunciation and tried to slip into the sixth-grade classroom on the chance someone might have forgotten he had not been promoted.

They remembered.

"With my humiliation complete," he wrote, "my total failure recognized by myself and all my classmates, I went into the fifth grade and took my usual seat at the back of the room because I was one of the biggest boys in the room.

"I wished I was a white marble statue at St. Lawrence Church."

But what was finally discovered that year was that Jude Cotter did not have a problem reading, he had a problem seeing. An eye examination showed that his sight was so bad that he could have been considered legally blind.

After he got glasses, he told me recently, "it was like a whole new world had been opened to me. I could see the bricks in buildings, the cracks in the sidewalks, the leaves on the trees. But more importantly, " he said, "I could see the words on the blackboard from my seat in the back of the room."

I know I will hear from Cotter again this year with his contribution to the Gift of Reading. I hope to hear from many of you as well.

And don't worry about deferring any child's angelic ambitions by turning his or her thoughts to books.

God is patient. He will wait.

THE MAGIC OF WORDS
IN A CHILD'S HANDS, EVERY PAGE OF A BOOK
HOLDS AN ADVENTURE
Byline/Affiliation: NEAL SHINE
PubDate: Sunday, 10/23/1994
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He is remembered by most as the man who wrote "Treasure Island" and "Kidnapped." To me he will always be the sickly child whose simple verse extended the limits of my tiny world.

"A Child's Garden of Verses" was my first book. It was the book from which I learned to read. It is the book I still have and which has become, over the years, a place to which I still retreat in search of happier worlds.

Robert Louis Stevenson was 35 when his book of children's verses was published, but it so strongly reflects his childhood that I suspect it was all formed in his mind when he was a little boy and all he had to do as an adult was commit it to paper.

The edition I have was published in 1929, the year before I was born. And before I started first grade, I could read most of it with only a little help with the long words.

The woman who bought me the book and lovingly taught me to read it was a family friend I remember only as Mrs. Lafortune. She disappeared from our lives while I was still in grade school, and I no longer remember what became of her, if indeed I ever knew.

What I do remember is how warm and comfortable I felt pressed against her on our sofa while she read to me of places I had never dreamed of. Along with the joy of discovery this new world of words had brought me, there was this inescapable sadness that it was not always a happy little boy who lived in these verses.

He was tended regularly by a nurse, and when he was sick in bed, the bedclothes became whatever he wanted them to be.

"And sometimes sent my ships in fleets

All up and down among the sheets;

Or brought my trees and houses out,

And planted cities all about."

He seemed to have few playmates and created his own fantasy worlds with lead soldiers, building blocks, toy sailboats, and even turned his bed into a boat and every night sailed off into adventure that lay beyond the darkness.

And in his back garden found a world that only he knew existed there.

"Here is the sea, here is the sand,

Here is the simple Shepherd's Land,

Here are the fairy hollyhocks,

And there are Ali Baba's rocks.

"But yonder, see! apart and high,

Frozen Siberia lies; where I,

With Robert Bruce and William Tell,

Was bound by an enchanter's spell."

What I was given by this book and the wonderful woman who made it part of my life was a gift as precious as any I have ever received, and nothing makes me happier than to be able to pass along to others this same gift.

It's the reason the Free Press originated the Gift of Reading in 1987. Since its inception, Gift of Reading has supplied nearly a half million books to needy Michigan children.

The program provides new storybooks to children served by homeless shelters, foster care agencies, Head Start programs, churches, community centers and other children's agencies. Gift of Reading also has financed scores of child literacy programs run by various schools and child service agencies.

So as you read this and think about what you might want to do for Gift of Reading, reflect for a moment about a little boy, crouched behind the sofa in an English cottage, a place that has become his special hiding place, a place to read.

"There, in the night, where none can spy,

All in my hunter's camp I lie,

And play at books that I have read

Till it is time to go to bed.

"So, when my nurse comes in for me,

Home I return across the sea,

And go to bed with backward looks

At my dear land of Story-books." 

BOOKS HELP OPEN THE DOORS OF IMAGINATION
Byline/Affiliation:  NEAL SHINE
PubDate:  Sunday, 11/25/1990
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I understand second-graders.

Maybe it's because more than 50 years later I still have unobstructed memories of the second grade. The year of the great awakening of childhood's imagination.

Last Tuesday afternoon the second-graders in Celestia Jones' class at Howe Elementary School were drawing pictures when we arrived.

In response to an imperceptible signal from Ms. Jones, crayons were returned to boxes, the pictures quietly folded and put away. Another valuable lesson of the second grade is prompt reaction to the unspoken command of authority figures.

I had not been back to Howe, located Charlevoix and Garland on the east side, since I had the honor of being the speaker last spring at ceremonies marking the passage of Howe's fifth-graders from elementary to middle school.

So I showed up Tuesday, along with Louise Reid Ritchie from the Free Press, lugging a large box of children's books, a kind of personal head start on the Free Press Gift of Reading program.

Ritchie is the person who started the program at the Free Press three years ago and who still runs it. I decided it would be thoughtless of me to go running off to Howe and the delights of passing out books to kids without asking her if she'd like to come along.

We talked about books that day, the kids and I. About dinosaurs that aren't around anymore and bears that are; about other wild things, green eggs and ham, a strange fellow named Curious George, a cat with a funny hat, a wooden puppet with an adjustable nose and a rabbit made of cotton cloth that looked like real velvet but wasn't.

We talked about the places none of us had been except through the pages of books, make-believe places beyond the dusty streets of the east side, where genies slide from old lamps, elves spin straw into strands of golden thread and and beautiful maidens sing sad songs from castle towers.

They told us about the books in their lives and we agreed the world would be a desperately unhappy place without books to read. It went without saying that in a world that can often be a desperately unhappy place anyway, books have the power to bring the hope of something better.

Ritchie proposed for general classroom discussion a recent literary theory that perhaps the Big Bad Wolf wasn't as bad as originally believed. She said there are current published accounts attesting to the wolf's good character and that instead of being a villain, he was merely misunderstood, the innocent victim of three unpleasant porkers.

The theory was soundly rejected by voice vote after a brief, spirited discussion of wolfish villainy and porcine innocence. For the record, these second-graders remain solidly in the camp of the Three Little Pigs.

Before we left, Celestia Jones distributed to the children the books we had brought with us.

The children opened the books and began to read, moving small fingers along the printed lines, whispering the words to themselves, a kind of reassurance that they were, indeed, really reading these words.

When they went home that day, they took the books with them, to be read and re-read. And then dreamed about.

Books that came with their own measure of love from Free Press readers who had made contributions to the Gift of Reading program.

Since its beginning, the Gift of Reading has distributed 200,000 new story books to needy Michigan children. This year the goal is to provide 65,000 more books to these children.

We still need your help.