Wonder Years

At the Chronicle of Higher Education website this morning, there is a fine piece by Michael Sim (author of a new book on E.B. White) about the joys of growing as a reader and an inquisitive young mind in the Sixties Era:

http://chronicle.com/article/Remembering-a-Golden-Age-of/130449/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

I have often written about that subject here, and so I could not resist making a comment. Some of this material has appeared in PMD before, but it is always good to write it down again. In fact, if I am ever inspired to write a book, this would be the theme.

This subject certainly resonates with me. I was lucky to grow up in an aspirant middlebrow middle-class household in the Sixties and early Seventies (I graduated from high school in 1976). My grandfather taught me to read at age three because I demanded to be taught - I kept pointing at the words in picture-books. There were wonderful books in our house, all from my mom's family - a complete set of Dickens, a 20-volume set of classics, a complete Shakespeare, many others. I was poking into these at a very early age, reading "adult" literature alongside "children's" literature alongside comic books. I remember that Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" was the first real novel I read, at age seven, and I got special adult borrowing privileges in the town library by fourth grade.

We had a "Book of Knowledge" encyclopedia edition from the mid-Fifties that, like "The Golden Treasury of Knowledge," was arranged thematically rather than alphabetically and was a delight to read. I learned so much from it. Public television and classic movies were a big presence in our household, and later I started to invest my own allowance money (and eventually, earnings from a clerk job at the library) in classical music LPs and classic novels from the used bookstores on Main Avenue in our town of Passaic, New Jersey. On weekends, my mom took me and my brother and sister to historic houses and zoos and other educative sites - the Thomas Edison labs and estate in West Orange were a family favorite. When we took a vacation trip, it wasn't to some amusement park, but to Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Cape Cod to soak up history and nature and the atmosphere of small seaside towns.

I will always believe that this was a very good way to grow up, full of curiosity and wonder, and I will always be deeply grateful to my mother and maternal grandfather for providing it. (He lived with us and in addition to teaching me to read, regaled me with thrilling stories of professional baseball in the New York of the early years of the century.) I had good schooling, too, first an excellent public elementary school in Passaic, later a first-rate Catholic boys' prep school. Ultimately I got to Yale, and that was thrilling as well, especially since I was first to attend college on either side of my family (my mom had gone to nursing school). There wasn't anything cynical in my rearing, and it was still possible for my mother to enlist the larger culture in the service of our family's goals, instead of constantly having to fight the larger culture off. This lifestyle was earnest, and it was also great fun.

POSTSCRIPT: Appropriately enough, this is a milestone post at PMD, #700.