A FAMILY OF READERS

December 3, 1940. The first step in mastery, of course, is learning how to turn pages. Then later one figures out which way is up. I probably had a little help here, but I don’t recognize the book so it’s hard to tell.


November, 1941. The ideal is to have a really big chair. We had two stuffed chairs in the front room: one was the big red chair and the other was the little red chair. (Actually, they were both maroon.) The big red chair was my father’s and the little red chair was my mother’s. But everyone got to sit in my father’s big red chair sometimes.


September, 1942. Once in a whlie nothing is so good as getting down on the floor, esp. when some beginning readers are already crawling. Dads didn’t wear sweatsuits then, but my father didn’t mind wearing his suit on the braided rug. It was wartime now and Look, Life and Time were vital to knowing what was happening.


Feb/March, 1947. Now I was eight and pretty good at reading out loud. (At least I thought so.) The big red chair doesn’t quite hold us all, so Mark is in one of the little wooden red chairs which really WERE red. The next door neighbor made them for us. He was a gentle old carpenter.


Saturday, Sept 8, 1948. Boys like their own kind of books. What better thing to do on a warm but rainy day?


July, 1949. Both my grandma and grandpa had been schoolteachers back in their homestead days in South Dakota. In fact, my grandpa, Samuel Strachan (born in Kilmarnock, Scotland) was a school superintendent for a while. I don’t know what was funny. This doesn’t look like a joke book! Maybe it was a joke about a Scotsman -- they both knew a few!