Childhood Reading Memories
McKinney, Eva

EVA: Well I've always loved to read ever since I can remember. I learned how to read letters, my alphabet and letters and words at a very young age, probably about four years old. I remember being in my four year old program at school and our teacher told us - she got a newspaper for us - and she told us to circle as many two and three letter words as we can find in the newspaper. Words like "it" or "if" or "by", two letter words, and I knew so many words in the newspaper that I literally had the whole newspaper just all written up and our teacher took us to the store and got us some ice cream. So that's one of my favorite stories. And also I was just always the kid that just loved to read all the time so whenever we would take a long trip or if I was at home bored I always had a book. I was always reading and my brothers and sisters thought I was really strange because of this but I was the quiet one that loved to read and was fortunate enough that the neighborhood that we lived in, we were very close to the library. So I would always go to the library and read even in the summer time when other kids were out playing, I was at the library. First of all it was cool in there and I was always surrounded by books and at my neighborhood library I started to read all of the Nancy Drew books in the whole series. I read every single Nancy Drew mystery book and these were the old ones before she got all modern and everything but I love Nancy Drew but my all-time favorite book in the whole world when I was a little girl was a book called "Loudell" and the author is Brenda Wilkinson and this is a story about a little black girl growing up in the South, I think in Georgia, and she was probably about ten years old or so in the book when it started and she lived with her grandmother and she lived next door to a family that had like five or six brothers and sisters and she was an only child so the book pretty much was just about her life as a child, the trouble they got into, the guy next door that she started liking, school, and then just growing into a teenager. At that time I was probably in the fourth or fifth grade myself so I could really relate to the story and I just love to read it. I bet if you went to the library today, Laman Library, North of Broad, you would see that I probably checked that book out probably about twenty times. They still have that old stamper. They probably had my name stamped in that book, probably the only person that checked that out, I still love it. It was one of my favorite stories growing up. So I just wanted to talk about my favorite story and that I love to read and I love all kinds of books and I try to share my love of reading books with my kids today and so that's it I guess.