The kitchen table of our house in Burlington was Gossip Central, with my mother the mistress of ceremonies. The other participants varied, with a half dozen or so regulars. The subjects were the peccadillos—both real and rumored—of most everyone else in the neighborhood.
If I was quiet, seemingly absorbed in a game or a book, I could catch the gist of the conversation. Obviously, I had developed a penchant for journalism at an early age.
One frequent subject was a family from our church, a family that included 12 children. The patriarch was not popular with the kitchen-table group.
He had, according to my mother, insisted that he was going to father a dozen kids. He was successful, though the ordeals of birthing the youngest three or four “almost killed his wife.”
Usually my mother, a stickler for education, would add a knowing, “Why, he can’t even read or write.” I had no reason to doubt that, as he made his living by odd manual-labor jobs (scuffling), with the family being frequent benefactors of the church’s community-outreach efforts.
It didn’t occur to me until years later that many adults couldn’t read or write. True, I knew some who had never learned to drive a car—both my grandmothers, for example. (They both were literate—they just never bothered to learn to drive, depending on the men of the household to take care of the transportation for any errands that required it.)
But I never considered that the insurmountable hurdle for many might have been the written driver’s test.
In the grocery line once, when I was impatiently squirming because it was taking so long, my grandmother quieted me down by whispering that the woman in front, an acquaintance, was having a problem with the prices because she could not read.
When I was in high school, my sister told me about a friend’s father who was illiterate. Retired, he was taking an adult-education course, to try to rectify his problem.
Later, after professionals began to understand and diagnose dyslexia, it became obvious that illiteracy often could be traced to that affliction. That, his daughter was convinced, was her dad’s problem. Whatever the reason for his not being able to read and write, she said, “he always provided for us.”
My younger brother had problems in school that were later diagnosed as dyslexia-based, though when he was in school in the 1950s, recognition of the problem was rare. Like many others, he was passed along, moved up a grade by teachers and administrators who had no idea what the problem was.
When we were adults and I would ask if he wanted to join me on a research-run to the library, he would always beg off. And he had a perplexing habit, at family gatherings, of immediately bringing up any subject that I had cautioned him not to mention.
Somehow, despite his handicap, he managed to accumulate most of the credits needed for a bachelor of arts degree. He, too, had been passed along by the education system.
Nowadays, of course, dyslexia is addressed in school, with special attention. Other learning disabilities—attention-deficit disorder, for example—are also diagnosed and addressed.
A friend and I were discussing the issue—and how it was basically unknown when we were in elementary school in the 1950s—when he mentioned one of his theories. Many tradesmen (he specifically mentioned carpenters) probably were so afflicted, and that’s one reason they were attracted to their vocation, where reading was not required.
There is probably some truth in that.
Looking back, I remember an occasional episode that demonstrated the truth of the time. And one that happened fairly recently. I had contracted with a friend of the family who was in his 60s to help move some stuff to the dump.
Years ago, I had began to suspect he couldn’t read, as there had been a couple of episodes involving fuse boxes and printed instructions.
In this case, I was driving, and when I pulled onto one street near our destination, he proudly read the sign naming the street.
It was a two-name drive; he nailed the first word, but mis-read the second. When I corrected him, he just said, “That’s what I meant.”
The episode and his response, I’m sure, had often been repeated.
Chris Wohlwend's Restless Native addresses the characters and absurdities of Knoxville, as well as the lessons learned pursuing the newspaper trade during the tumult that was the 1960s. He spent 35 years working for newspapers and magazines in Miami, Charlotte, Louisville, Dallas, Kansas City, and Atlanta. As an editor, he was involved in winning several national awards. He returned to Knoxville in the late 1990s and now teaches journalism part-time at the University of Tennessee. His freelance pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and numerous other publications.
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