A Love Affair with Words
Howard, Marilyn

>>MARILYN: I'm very fortunate that I learned to read when I was very young. I was four. I have two older siblings - my one sister who taught me to read is five year older than me. So under the guise of playing school and babysitting she was actually teaching me to read. And I can remember, I'm 53 now and I have a very clear memory of the house we lived in when I was that age, which would have been four. We had this kind of metal desk and it had a drop lid so you could open up the lid and it was red and it had kind of a pebbly surface and you open up the lid and there was a chalkboard inside of there. And there were little, there was a little drawer where you could keep pencils and chalk and things. Then under the guise of babysitting with me or playing school I was really learning how to read. What I find amusing or funny or odd about this is that she has no memory of that but I have a very clear memory of that desk - I can see where it's sitting in the room, I can think of different lessons and how she wrote words on the chalkboard for me. That was a big, I really think it is the greatest gift that you can give a child because it opens up you whole worlds even if you never step off your porch or you never leave your little Podunk town or whatever, certainly that was the case for me, I grew up in Columbus. It just opens up a while world for you and it's an activity that you can do at any age, by yourself, and it's something you can get really lost in. Reading has always been to me sort of probably right underneath breathing. [laughing] 

>>SPEAKER: Now is there a book that really hit you as a child that made you, that inspired you to become a professor and instructor or...

>MARILYN: I remember when I was, particularly when I was in the third grade, I had this wonderful teacher and I have not seen her since third grade, so that would have been 1964-65, but I'm sure if she walked in the door I would know who she was. In fact I thought I saw her at the mall several years ago and I went racing after and it wasn't her [laughing] so I'm sure the lady thought I was some kind of crazy stalker or something. But, umm, I can remember, I can still see the classroom in my mind. I went to Alter Columbus public schools here so I went to Highland Avenue Elementary and I had a teacher - she started out as Ms. Brunk and then somewhere around Easter break of something she got married so she finished out the year as Mrs. Cowler. But we had a book in there that had short stories in it and I can remember some Halloween poems that I read over and over again. I can also remember a short story called "Creamed Angle Worms on Toast" and it was about a boy who had a typical mythologized family of the early 60's, you know mom, dad, two kids, picket fence, dog, that kind of thing. So there was a family there was a son and a daughter and the son was fond of whenever his mother or someone would say, "what would you like to eat?" And he would say, "Angel Worms. Creamed. On toast." and so they decided to fix his wagon so to speak and he was sick and he was in bed and his mother asked him what he wanted to eat and that's what he said and so they went out in the yard and dug up all these worms and she creamed them and served, put them on toast and put a plate over them, like a big dome that you get at an expensive restaurant and presented it to him. It sort of broke him of that habit, so I remember that story like it was yesterday. And you have to remember to, in 1964-65 when I was in third grade, I didn't know anything about black books - I'm sure there were some books that existed but I had never seen them and it was probably not until I got to the sixth or seventh grade, so the sixth grade was over for me at the end of June, 1968. It was probably not until I went to Junior High School that I found books that were written by black people. But regardless of that I read, I read everything, I read everything I could get my hands on. My parents got the paper, they got magazines; I had two older siblings - one five years older, one eight years older so I saw them bring home books and homework, so I got very early the importance of reading, that was an important act. Somehow or other I learned very early, I'm not sure how, that just the act of reading itself was worthy, and it didn't necessarily have to mean that if you're black you're reading black books or if you're Mexican, or Chicana you're reading that - it's just the act of reading itself is worthy. Both for the ability to increase your knowledge to be introduced to a world that's larger than your own, to relax, to advance yourself on whatever level - I figured that out whether it was a message I got from my family or my teachers, that was a worthy kind of thing to do. I always did very well in school. I loved school from the time I went to kindergarten, you know we always say we teach because it's the only way we can keep going to school. [laughing] And someone will pay us for that! So I did really well and I was always in an advanced reading group in school, that how they used to do that. I don't really remember, you know, now they have all these terms for how you learn how to read and they may very well have had them then, I don't know. You know, phonetics, and this and that, I just read, I don't know how - I just did.

>>SPEAKER: Ok, with your writing skills, when did that become an influence on your life for... was it high school or junior high where you really started to uh...

>>MARILYN: Umm, one of the things that really surprises me being a professor at Columbus State is that things I learned how to do maybe in the sixth grade or in - we had junior high school in the Columbus system, I went all through the Columbus public school system, things I learned how to do in junior high, seventh, eighth and ninth grade that our students come to college and they don't know how to do and that includes students who go to so called "good schools" whose parents more to Arlington or Bexley or Dublin or Worthington and live sometimes way above their means so their kids are in good schools. So I went to school at a time when you had to diagram sentences and there were reading groups and the teacher had you split up into groups and you read in class, that there was quiet time and that quiet time was not filled with television or electronic gadgets, I mean people read I mean [laughing] there was nothing else to do, you either read or you watched television and you certainly didn't watch television at school, and we didn't watch a lot of it at home and so I came up at a time when that was still very important in terms of the educational system where everything wasn't so casual and so maybe you spoke slang with your friends - kids have their own patois but you understood the importance of speaking and learning the king's English and you're expected to be able to write in standard English and my mother reinforced that at home, I mean there was none of this - or if you did say something like, "I ain't got none," she immediately corrected you as did aunts and uncles and she, my mother had an uncle who I think died before I was born or died when I was so little I don't remember that person. But he was a teacher and she always likes to say, "oh that's where you got it, you got it from the Grandy side of your family," or something, I don't know. So I learned how to do those mechanical things and the more you read, the better you write. In some sense it does matter if you're reading good things or if you're pushing yourself and because I was good in school, teachers always pushed me. Even if you're in the fourth grade and they hand you a book that's maybe sixth or seventh grade level I was always told you can do this and so I often read things that were probably too old for me. I can remember, because I have two older sisters and I had a cousin who was about six years older than us who lived with us for a couple years to finish high school - I can remember sneaking in and reading "Peyton Place" the novel, which when it came out in 1967 was quite scandalous because it talked about incest and having babies out of wed-lock and, you know, a woman living with a man who's married - but not to her. So I can remember one of my older sisters or my cousin or something had that and I can remember kind of sneaking it out down the basement. So I often, I sometimes read things that were kind of too old for me but the more you read, the more you get a feel for language - what it sounds like, what it's supposed to sound like and so I probably was in that last generation, maybe another one came behind me, where that was important to learn and differentiate between your patois amongst your friends and the kinds of work that you do in school or for anything else. I think it was a combination of things; the more you read, the more you recognize good writing, the more you can train your ear. You know, I often tell students, as you know in my class grammar counts and while I may not be able to say, "you know what, you split your infinitive," I know it's wrong. So I grew up at a time when that was still important when you were doing things like diagraming sentences and conjugating verbs and that sort of thing. And I think that's important, I think it's something that in the rush to technology or to get kids attention or you know, "Hooked on Phonics" or whatever kind of program they have, I think the kids have lost that and so they often get - even if they go to so called "good schools" often lack those basic skills and so it's difficult for them to know when they're reading things of quality or how to translate that into their own writing and things. So I got that and I think those are helpful. 

>>SPEAKER: ok.

[Media cuts off question]

>>MARILYN: Umm, I'll answer the second question first, when I was in junior high school there wasn't this thing called "mainstreaming" so now students if they have dyslexia - of course we didn't know what those things were - dyslexia, and we just thought, people just said you were slow and they're actually in my junior high school, there actually was a group of kids who were slow - whatever that was - I think in those days they called it EMR, Educationally Mentally Retarded, who took all their classes together, weren't mainstream with other students and things like that. So you knew that, so you knew that was a group apart but you also accepted in K-6, you knew that you were in different reading groups and I don't think that children knew exactly what - they knew they were in the blue group or the brownie group or the cardinal group or the dove group or something. I just heard from the time I was very little that I was very, very smart. People told me from the time I was four, five, six years old that I was very smart and that I could, you know, and people often bragged about my ability to read, "she's always got her nose in a book." So that was just something that happened to me, I'm not sure - I don't think I so much thought that I was ahead of other students or students were behind me, I guess I just assumed because I loved to read and people recognize that and so they put me in these groups. But that's an interesting question because that's what sociologists call sifting and sorting, you know, and what happens to kids, that sort of idea about symbolic interactionism - you are what people say you are and so people always said I was smart so I'm smart. 

>>SPEAKER: What did your sister do for you?

>>MARILYN: Umm, one of the things I do for my students is if we're talking about something I always say, "and if you're interested in that, here's a great book to read," and I'll write the title of the book on the board and maybe the author if I can remember him, if I can't remember I go to the computer and I pull up Barnes and Noble and I do that. This is a really great book and this is why. In some instances, obviously teaching methods and assignments have changed but one of the things I did for years was in my American Government class was the paper, the written assignment was a book review - not a book report - I read this book and I liked it, like my little nephew read a book about the Pope and he liked it. It was a review so you had to critique it, and you had some special criteria to measure that by. So I'm always suggesting books for students. Often in the Power Point presentations, we'll finish a section in the book and then the next few slides will be about several books that you could read about that. We read aloud in class sometimes so last week we talked about African American culture and so we looked at "Invisible Man" and a couple other novels and we read about those and I actually sort of did little voices and characters. I encouraged students to read and I'm like read, nobody ever died because they read something so I'm always pushing that. I didn't know how much though until about four or five years ago I had a young man in one of my classes who did very, very well. What struck me about him first was that he looked like Prince Harry and I said as much to him. He went on and went to Ohio State and he had a couple of the professors I had; he got his bachelor's and then he would come back and see me and went to law school and one of the things he told me later was that he likes to read but he never did it partly because guys usually don't but he said they had moved here to Columbus and they didn't know a lot of people and I would always say, "if you want to read something about this or if you're interested in this, here's a good book to read," so he started doing that. I have had students come back and say I read this or you suggested I read this and I got it, what did you think and stuff; apparently I do it somewhat consciously but also somewhat unconsciously. 

>>SPEAKER: Now when did your career start for being the editor at Columbus Dispatch?

>>MARILYN: Umm, I was in graduate school and I always looked at the book reviews and Jim Upton, who's a professor at Ohio State, he's in the black studies department - he's a political scientist by training - he had done a review and I had seen it and he said, "you know you can do that," and I'm not a journalist student, he said, "you can do that." And you should call a guy, so I got my nerve up to call George Myers, and I sent him a couple papers I'd written in class. I followed up a couple weeks later and he said, "you're hired," and so the first book I did was a new biography that had come out about Lyndon Johnson. I didn't do them on a regular basis - they use a lot of freelancers, but of course he didn't, they didn't know anybody on the staff who was black so I ended up doing the black books, which is, you know, it's ok. So that's what happened and then when George left somebody else took over, I didn't have that connection anymore so I didn't hear about anybody. And then of course, Black History Month rolls around, I call it the ghetto of Black History Month and then of course you'd pile up all these books, you're tripping over them, and I had seen something in the paper and the editor was talking about black books and stuff and I had written him and said, "Yeah, you're talking a good game, but here's what I see..." and was like, "oh, well thank you very much. I didn't know about you, I didn't have anybody to do these." So I started doing things for this second editor, whose name I can't remember. And again, you don't do it very often, it kind of peters out and lots of newspapers - for instance "The New York Times" their book review thing is online now. Lots of news edits, one of the things that gets axed in this time of newspapers cutting budgets apparently a newspaper that is supposed to be read - it's not important to have a book review section - go figure. So I had always been talking with one of my colleagues, my initial appointment was in the department of social and behavioral sciences and one of my colleagues in there, the other political scientist Dr. Bob Petrakis, he is the editor of "The Columbus Free Press" which is a progressive journal - it used to be a written journal, now most of it is online although they might do a print copy a couple times a year. He would always say that we need somebody to do this, because he does investigative journalism and we talked about that for years. So finally last year we decided to do it so I am the - created this position of book critic from "The Columbus Free Press" and that's me. So the only thing better than getting books is getting free books. [laughing] So I forgot how much time it took, my initial thing was I wanted to do one a week or one every couple of weeks and it certainly hasn't come out that way; it's been more like one a month. Again, finding myself able to read solely for pleasure, and as you know from being in school, from being in graduate school, you're reading for purpose and then to read something for pleasure where there's no pressure and that sort of thing, I'm sort of rediscovering that. What's funny is I have hundreds of books. In fact my late fiancee is engaged to a man who loved reading as much as I did; his father had been a stringer, a photo-journalist, for papers in Wilmington, and across the border in Kentucky and that sort of thing so he too grew up in a family of readers and things like that. We used to joke that when we finally moved in the house together that we would have to reinforce the floor joist because both had tons and tons of books.

>>SPEAKER: [laughing]

>>MARILYN: And, my practice often was I would see something that I liked and I would buy it not knowing when I could get to it, but just to look at them all piled up there like - I was looking there and I was like, "oh I have that one and that one and that one," just to see them like that. I don't know, maybe it sounds silly or something, but just to see the books all on the shelf and piled up on the table and stuff it just makes me feel really good. I don't know, it's like a hobby and an advocation and again we teach because we can still go to school and we can still read and people will pay us to do it. [laughing] So it's really terrific. 

>>SPEAKER: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

>>MARILYN: Well I'm always lookin' for the next great book and one of the thing I noticed driving over here is the days are getting longer which means that winter is almost over and I've always hated winter. In fact, the joke in my family was everybody, all the other kids would be playin' in the snow and Marilyn would be in the house with her feet on the heat register and her nose in a book. [laughing] So that's kinda known for that in my family I have a niece who her dad is my middle brother and he calls her - when she was in high school - she's out now but he always called her "little Marilyn" cause she always had her nose in a book. Maybe it is a kind of generational kind of thing but I think it's the greatest gift you can give somebody - the love of reading - I hope I pass that on to my students and I really - you know the computer and Facebook and twitter, twatter, whatever it is - those things are ok, but, and ebooks, I guess they're ok, and I actually like to listen to books on tape, I don't think there's anything like curling up in a big chair with a fresh book, the smell, the slick pages, the pretty pictures. I don't even like when people touch my books before I do, you know, when I buy them - my nephew did that one and I was like, "I haven't read that yet, that's mine, put that down!" I don't want him touching my books before I touch them, but there is something about that that is almost sacred to me, maybe that's a refer - I consider reading to be sacred. And I think it's a wonderful gift that my sister gave me even though she doesn't remember.

>>SPEAKER: [laughing]

>>MARILYN: One of the things students, even maybe remember this from when you were in class, I would say something and I'd say, "oh I had a copy of this," or something. You'd say, "well, go to Youtube," so I now get feeds from different places. Feeds from the, automatic feeds from RSS or something like that, from publishing houses, from things that students have said to me. "Dr. Howard, have you seen this?" I can't think of any specific thing but I always say that we learn as much from them as they do from us and they do keep me somewhat young because I think in some sense when you teach you have to meet people where you are. My bar is pretty high but also I'm not one of those professors who says, "well I'm not gonna make copies for them because they should make copies for themselves," or, "I'm not going to put this on Power Point cause then they'll just... or I'm not gonna do this..." I think you meet people where they are to a certain extent but I still think if we make them reach, if this is where we set the bar, this is where they'll reach. In the process I learn from them and they learn from me, so yeah I do, I think we all do, and the day you stop learning maybe it's the day they should put you in the ground or something. I can't imagine not reading the rest of my life, not learning the rest of my life. I can't imagine that. A lot of times what I do in my work is because I read, so I may have three classes in a row like one quarter I had a 10:00am, a 1:00pm, and a 5:30pm, and they're the same class but maybe between when I got out of the 10:00am class, before I got to the 1:00pm class I logged on and I saw something, the title of a book or an article or something like that and so the students in the 1:00pm class and the 5:30pm class heard about it that day and then the other students heard about it the day before. Last quarter what really came up that was kind of funny was that we were talking about doing a lecture on the "N" word, and it's a serious academic lecture and we were talking about the images of men and women, but particularly black women. I had a picture of, I don't know if you've heard of Hot and Tot Venus, sort of a circus act, and one of the students said, "have you seen Buffy the Body?" I had never, who is Buffy the Body? So they were like, "well log onto Google," this is in class and I log on and I get this picture of this woman and so it was a wonderful addition to my lecture because again it talked about how we objectified women, how we actually paid for that. How young women are happy to do that. I grew up in the time when you didn't even tell your girlfriend her slip was hanging, that was too indelicate. You got really close to her and whispered, "it's snowing down South." Now I got Buffy the Body and so I wouldn't have known about that, and that added something in my lecture that came from the students themselves because they started thinkin', "oh, I thought maybe before this was a joke or just something I should accept but now maybe this is a new way for me to think about it." So yeah, student feedback and the stuff they tell me is always terrific yeah.