Dick and Jane didn't thrill me, but Dan Frontier saved me.

This is going to sound strange, but I do not remember learning to read. However, I also do not remember not knowing how to read. What I do know is that I came from a family that read constantly.  My parents weren't teachers. There were no teachers in my family.  My father was a lumber salesman. My mother stayed home and raised five children.  My paternal grandfather was a maintenance man.  My paternal grandmother was a secretary.  My maternal grandfather was a machinist.  My maternal grandmother sold ladies clothing in a department store. None of them, not my parents, not my grandparents, went to college. Yet, they all read, all the time.

My Dad had a tidy library of classic literature, whose covers dazzled me. I  can still see him reading those books, sitting in an easy chair under a bright light.  My Mom tended more to magazines and popular novels.  I can remember that she told me that she felt my love of history and the Civil War was because she read Andersonville, by MacKinlay Kantor  and Confessions of Nat Turner, by William Styron when she was pregnant with me, her first child.  My paternal grandfather had the first and only recliner that I ever saw as a child with a pocket on the side.  In that pocket were always his reading glasses and a book, usually a religious book by Billy Graham or something by Norman Vincent Peale.  My maternal grandmother subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, and I loved to go to her house to thumb through those magazines.

My mother and my maternal grandmother read to us children constantly.  Little Golden books, mostly, but a lot of Mother Goose and Hans Christian Anderson as well.  And books that we saw on Captain Kangaroo and went to library to check out, like Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Caps for Sale and Stone Soup.  I well remember my brothers and sisters and I and usually a cousin or two all piling into one bed to listen to my grandmother read a story to us, hanging breathlessly on every word.

So, I don't remember being taught how to read, but I know that I arrived in the first grade already able to read.

And what did they give us?  Dick and Jane.  I was horrified.  I was disgusted.  This was drivel!  This was the silliest pap that I had ever clapped eyes onto.  The babies at home were being read silly stuff like this.  I was up to Mowgli and The Jungle Book!  To make matters worse, when my teacher realized that I could read, she called on me, often, in reading groups to read this silly stuff out loud.  I was not happy.

However, because I could read, the teacher didn't have to work with me at all, so, while she worked with the other kids, she would send me to the back of the room for "independent reading".  It wouldn't take me long to read the assigned Dick and Jane stuff, so I was soon looking for something else to read.  And there, in the back of the classroom, on a shelf low to the ground, was a whole row of Dan Frontier books!  I had never heard of Dan Frontier, but someone had written a whole lot of books about him, a whole series.  He was a fictional Daniel Boone-type character who went on some great adventure in every book.  Hunting bears, cutting trails through the mountains, building cabins, fighting Indians.  It was still pretty simple stuff, but it beat the heck out of Dick and Jane.  I would say Dan frontier was more on a third grade level.  So, all through the first grade, while everyone else struggled through Dick and Jane, I sat in the back of the room and devoured a whole series of Dan Frontier books.

Dick and Jane didn't thrill me, but Dan frontier saved me.