My Literacy Story
Female; 1958 (2010-08-05)

>>WOMAN: I can remember in fifth grade we got the chance to have pen pals, international pen pals. People from another country we'd get to meet, and they'd be our age. So I was pen paled with Wendy Garvin from Australia. And we corresponded for four years. In fact I thought about, maybe I should Google her?

I also remember in fifth grade, this was my big year to everything I guess, because we got to walk around the public square downtown and to my astonishment there was a public library just off the square. Now some of my friends had known about this library and had library cards. I didn't get my library card until I was in fifth grade and found out you could check out books. I did get to order books from book clubs when I was in elementary school so I wasn't lacking books at home but here was this enormous, fast supply of books where I could read endlessly and find all sorts of endless topics.

So I remember that at my house we always got the Decatur Paper because my parents used to live in Decatur. We got the Windsor Paper which came weekly, whereas the Decatur Paper came every day. And then our local Charleston Paper which came every day. So at our house we had newspapers all over the place. At my dad's work he always got the Chicago Tribune and then he would also get the Wall Street Journal. And so I watched everybody read. 

My mom was in a Christian book reading club and so every month she would get Christian books. So we had book cases of books all over the place and my parents were avid readers. I felt like they set a great example for us and I remember that I didn't get to go to kindergarten but my mother would set aside time after lunch and would crawl into her bed and she would read us stories. And one of the series that I really enjoyed the most was Happy Hollister's. 

Now on a sad note, when I emailed my mom a couple weeks ago to 
say, "Do you remember reading because I just remembered those special times when we'd put the pillows up on the bed post and you would read us stories?" And she said, "No I really don't remember any of that."

I was the oldest of my family but I had cousins who were one year older, two, three, four, and five years older than I was. And we would go to their house and in the basement we always played school. And of course the oldest cousin Maryanne would play as the teacher. And we would sit and we'd do our reading and our writing and our math. And that was just a fun time. Now a special note about that is that Maryanne is a retired teacher. Her sisters Marvey and Martha are both teachers also currently, and I'm a teacher. So somehow our play had to do with our real life.