He ate them Jones, Melvin (2010-03-09) >>JONES: You know it's funny. I had something initially that I was thinking about, and this feeds into it. Getting older, and during the time, during my birth and the time I came up, I've seen a lot. There's a lot of changes in technology and in availability of resources. And I was thinking there was something we were talking about reading on the cereal boxes that you guys were talking about, and it made me think of..we had a pretty big family and there were like 11 of us in the house together. And one of the things that you had to jockey for position was something to read, but back then you had the newspaper, you had whatever magazines mom might subscribe to. Most of us were boys. Who wants "Ladies' Own Journal"? But you really were looking for something to read. You had 3 television stations that went off at 11:30 and came on at about 6:45 to Farm Report. So when it was cold, when it was rainy, there was nothing else to do but to try to find something to read, so you literally would pour a bowl of cereal and prop the box up, grab the ketchup bottle. Now the big thing was when the Sunday paper came because it had the "Funnies" in it, but the only problem was my brothers. Once you got the paper, you got the whole paper. You didn't say, "Well, here's the Sports page. Here's the Comics." You had to wait until they finished every bit of that paper before it was your turn. And I was next to the youngest on the food chain, so "Please, sir. May I have some more?" [Narrator and Jones laugh] >>JONES: The things that you got to read were limited, but you really looked forward to that opportunity, for the chance to get something to read. My best gift when I was a kid, coming up for Christmas...We didn't get a lot of stuff. We had a lot of toys and things like that. My best gift: my mom had gone down on Town Street, there was a used book store, and she brought home about 5 books, old beat up books, and put my name on all of them. And I had my own books. I was flabbergasted. I didn't know what to do. "These are mine?" I must have read those books 10 times. It just developed from that over time. Now, you can read anything anywhere anytime. It's all at your fingertips. It's a given. But everything that you read back then because it was new to you, left an impact. I remember reading an article in the "Columbus Citizen's Journal." It was our morning paper that we used to have before "The Dispatch" took over. Well "Dispatch" wasn't even a paper at the time. We had the Journal in the morning. And something about this editorial looked interesting to me, and I'm a kid, so you don't really read the editorials but there's something about this man and candy. I started reading it. The guy's name was Albert Fish, and he was talking about this man. It was a kindly older gentleman that would go by the school yards and give candy to kids, and somewhere down in the article it said that he started to lure little kids back to his house. I had no idea where it was going. [Laughs] Stuff like this didn't happen, and I remember in the article it said that he'd lure them back to his house and there was one sentence sitting in the middle that to this day, I'll never forget when I read that, it said, he ate them. You just couldn't conceive of that. These things didn't happen. I had no experience. "He what?" But to me that gave me a sense of how powerful reading was, and how powerful written word was because you have no outside knowledge of any of this stuff as a kid. But the first time you actually read something, you can see it in print, and it was in the newspaper, God knows it's the Gospel. [Laughs] Nobody is making up anything you put in the newspaper. So thinking about reading as a kid, and that first time that I saw something that really shook me up, it just lends to the power of the written word and the effect that reading had on me as a kid. The guy's name was Albert Fish, and I don't know if he was one of the first acknowledged American serial killers, but he cut the kids in the bathroom and later I came back and finished the rest of the article because it talked about the things he did to the kids, and things he said when they executed him. "Am I going to get a shock out of this?" He was out of his head. The man was insane. But it's the first time you ever realize that people had this capacity for that type of dementia and that type of ultimate lack of humanity. >>NARRATOR: But you're absolutely right, though. Being able to read that.. >>JONES: Yeah, it's not part of your lexicon at all! It's just something that slaps you in the face. >>NARRATOR: Here's this medium about how you wondered about the world. You open up a book, and it's "Oh my god!" It's dialogue.. >>JONES: Yeah. And at that point everything you learned was spoon-fed to you from day 1. So you develop trust of older people, of father figures, and authority figures. And you just basically did what you were told because that's all you knew. When you found out that these other things were happening in the world, you world view just went [Click]. So anyway, on that happy note.. [Everyone laughs] >>JONES: If you want information on Albert Fish, I'll be happy to supply it. [Everyone laughs] >>NARRATOR: You've read all about it, huh? >>JONES: Oh boy! [Laughing] >>JONES: Of course now I love Stephen King. I'm reading a Stephen King novel now. I read of all his stuff. All of that is just, "Ugh! This is great!" >>NARRATOR: Which one are you reading? >>JONES: It's called "Under The Dome". It's 1,100 pages. I'm a 1000 pages in. [Makes an intense sound] >>JONES: Funny thing, people say is that, "Well, you stole that from 'The Simpsons' movie." "The Simpson Movie" surrounded Springfield with a dome, and that's what this is about. A small town gets surrounded with a dome and how the people tearing at each other. It's very bizarre, but I'm enjoying it. >>NARRATOR: My friend, Nicole... When we were 5 years old, she'd come over, she'd stay the night at my house. She's African American, and she completely read the whole cereal box. [Jones starts laughing] >>NARRATOR: And that blew my parents totally away. They will never forget that story. They were saying, "Nickie was reading off cereal boxes at age 5." You're exactly right. [Narrator starts laughing] >>JONES: Stuff like that is funny. When I knew my son could read. He would immediately identify all of his fast food places when you would drive. He knew all the signs. Which I figured, "Okay, he's got the shapes and colors, and all this". But I was standing in line at the bank with him one day, and he read the sign, "Please Wait For Next In Line" from the bottom up. "Okay now! I know you can read!" [Both laugh] >>JONES: It was startling because I wasn't expecting that. His favorite book was "Tikki Tikki Tembo", which has this character's name, they say it a bunch of times in the book, "Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sarimbo Hari Kari Bushkie Perry Pem Do." Well he just loved that and he wanted me to read the every night! Then he got to the point where he had the entire book memorized. >>NARRATOR: That's what the woman in the class was saying last night. She does Day Care over at Children's Hospital, and one of the boys in the Day Care has that book memorized because she said that same exact thing. >>JONES: Really?! >>NARRATOR: I don't think I've ever heard of it. >>JONES: It's a Chinese fairytale. I don't even know how I came across it. It might have been in the library discard that I bought.