Dumas
Fenix, Tom

TOM: Alright now, the way I was being told is the story is early literacy experience, something that encouraged me in reading and writing. I was actually from a small town in Missouri and I want to say it was about third or fourth grade we had a book fair and because we did so well with selling books the school took us on a field trip to Laura Ingalls Wilder's homestead and while we were there at the homestead they had an actual book fair in a separate location, I don't recall what the whole thing was, it was a classroom of some sort that we went into. We got to meet some authors and things from the region and the area. One of the people that I got to meet was a man named Ram Rodgers, he's actually from around the area and I didn't have any recollection of this when I first started college back in '94 at Henderson State University. When my roommate and I were getting exercise for a fitness exam of some sort, we had to make sure we were meeting fitness standards, so we went to the watch tower at this university field, they were right across from each other on the street there. When we went to the Ouachita Baptist University field where we were going to run on the track, I noticed it was Ram Rodgers field and I remember the stories that he had told us. He had told us a story about when he was a little boy that he had actually written into a book. It was a story about when he was a little boy and the wild adventures they had and talking about swinging on a vine over the river as far as they could, and I think it may have been a rope, but they'd swing out as far as they could and they'd let go and they'd go into the water. Now in order to do this there was a branch that was actually blocking the way that would have kept them from swinging so someone had very cleverly gone out there and cut the branch off at just the point that was required for them to pass by, not up next to the tree but left it sticking out so far. In doing so, one of the guys ended up swinging past and came just a little too close and this trunk's got hung on the branch and he went on out and landing in the river naked with pants left up there on the branch. I thought that was rather humorous then when I was down at college and going out there on the field I had all these memories coming back and I got to tell my then roommate about it. The stories that I was told at that experience were things about Mark Twain predominantly. We ended up hearing about "Little House on the Prairie" and at the time "Little House on the Prairie" was still a TV series that we got to see a lot of. I really enjoyed hearing about Mark Twain and all of his stories. I've got several of his books at home that I've purchased off Amazon, the latest one I've got is "Letters from Earth", I'm still planning on opening that one up and getting started with reading just as soon as this semester course-load lightens up where I can do that. But when we moved from Missouri we moved to Pennsylvania and when we moved to Pennsylvania there was a bit of an educational difference; the educational requirements tend to vary state to state. What we were learning in Missouri, we were a little bit behind schedule when we moved up to Pennsylvania, they had just completed a Civil War unit and they were on a more advanced reading level. So it was a big deal for us to catch up, it took a little bit of doing. Within a couple of years we had been doing book reports and I had gotten out of enjoying reading and I was really getting into movies and my English instructor asked me, "Well what kind of movies do you enjoy?" And we had just seen the old black and white swashbuckler "The Three Musketeers" and the instructor said, "That was written by Alexander Dumas, he's written some really wonderful stuff, you should really go check this out." And here I am a junior high school student and I go and I ended up being encouraged by my instructor to go pick up "The Three Musketeers" by Alexander Dumas and I read it and I was absolutely riveted. Then I learned as it turned out that this was actually a serial novel, not a serial novel but a serial column in the newspaper and it wasn't put into novel form until like a hundred years after he passed away. If just blew my mind, I thought, "Man this is great, every page is wonderful action happening." And I ended up being encouraged to read the other ones as well. So "The Count of Monty Cristo" and "The Man in the Iron Mask" were all wonderful stories to read and that's one of the stories about when people start talking about the stories they read when they were children and things like that. I hear a lot of "Where the Red Fern Grows" and things like that, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and people ask me what I read and I get to tell them, "Oh, 'Man in the Iron Mask', 'Three Musketeers'," they cringe a little bit and say, "Oh my God, where did you go to school?" [Laughing]