FOR MOST OF THE CENTURY: READING! (PART 11)

Learning to read and having more books available were two of the best things to come out of Loughboro school days.

I had a head start, not in the sense of government sponsored Head Start programs at the last of the century, but we had a funny collection of books at home from which Mama read aloud to anyone who wanted to listen.

My first book, given to me before I could read, was "Little Boy Blue." This was an expanded version of the Little Boy Blue who was urged to "come blow his horn." The book had a blue hardback cover and the indented title was in black. The black eventually wore off from my tracing the lettering with my finger. Before I knew an A from a B, or the word cow from horn, Mama, Lillian, Lou, anyone I could babyishly beg, read this slender book to me, over and over and over.

The book mysteriously disappeared! But it was too late for any relief its disappearance may have afforded. I had, unknowingly, learned it by heart, could read it exactly and did so over and over and over without it being in my hands, could even turn the absent pages at the right word. So I knew what the words boy, blue, horn, meadow, cow, little, etc. looked like and could identify them on sight long before I started to school. However, when I started to school, the word, little, was introduced to me in a box at the top of the new lesson page as lit-tle, with a strange marking over the first t. It threw me off a lit-tle, but, still I had a good head start.

The most elegant piece of furniture we had was the combination bookcase and desk. On one side were the book shelves behind a long, outward-curved glass, wood-framed door, complete with keyhole and key. On the right side, about half way down was an inward slanting door that could be dropped down to form a writing board. Behind this writing board door, also with keyhole and key, was a number of interesting little pigeonholes of varying sizes. Below the slanting door were more open shelves for books--a truly antique piece of furniture today.

It was the books behind that glass door that were of interest to me, although the curved glass and key and keyholes were always a marvel for me. There were no other keys anywhere around, except those to wind the clocks.

To a perceptive adult reader, the little collection of books would have seemed odd, perhaps even comical.

Titles were "The San Francisco Earthquake," "The Great Chicago Theater Disaster," a gloomy volume titled "Night Scenes from the Bible," agriculture books, "Romola," two Waverly novels with gold thistles on their green covers,a softly padded black leather volume of "Longfellow's Poems," "The Poems and Dramas of Lord Byron," an old Missouri Blue Book and "Douglass' History of Southeast Missouri." This must have been the original collection that was brought to the farm. How did that curved glass door ever make it intact, in the bed of the wagon, over those rocky hillsides and rocky-bottomed river to the farm?

... to be continued.

Read the rest of Jean Bell Mosley's story about reading and books Sept. 28.

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.