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Learning
from parents and learning to adjust
And
just as no pitcher wins a game alone, I, too, had lots
of help. Starting in 1978 when principals Jim
Moriarty and Mary McGrath of Springfield, Massachusetts, asked
me to speak to their combined PTO's, I worked with some
of the most dedicated, caring educators and parents in
America. They inspired me and educated me, sharing their
triumphs and failures with me, and allowing me to incorporate
them into my lectures, books, and films.
While most of my efforts
were in educating parents about what they could do to raise
readers, there were more than a few who educated
me instead. Marcia
Thomas and her husband Mark were
raising their Down Syndrome daughter Jennifer when she
wrote to tell me her family's inspiring story and then
trusted me to share it with my Handbook readers.
Likewise, Linda
Kelly-Hassett and her husband Jim kept
a diary of their dozens of daily read-alouds with their
adopted daughter Erin, then shared the list with me and
my readers through the years. I am more than proud to have
been even a tiny part of these families' lives and triumphs.
I'd be lying if I painted
every one of my 2,500 presentations as rosy perfect. A
few were the direct opposite. Consider, for example, the
school inservice one morning near the Jersey shore:
- Directions to the program
site arrived at my office the day of the program, 24
hours after I'd departed for Jersey;
- The
microphone didn’t work;
- Only half the overhead projector image
was bright enough, the other half too dim;
- The screen
was old, too small, and placed too low for attendees
to see;
- There weren’t enough chairs
for the 160 attendees (despite advance registration);
- When
the microphone was fixed, it hummed loudly if the overhead
was turned on.
Aren't you
glad they weren’t
in charge of the kindergarten field trip or the parent
picnic?
But if you're going to travel and speak
for a living,
you learn to adjust — to almost anything. Once I
arrived in a town (Arcadia, California) right after a Santa
Ana wind storm of record strength. Power lines were down
all over town, including at the school site, but
six parents showed up with high-power flashlights, sat
in the front row, and the show went on. One Saturday morning
in Tucson, Arizona, there were 500 teachers for a literacy
conference at a local high school. The only problem
was the light switches for the stage were locked up and
only the missing custodian knew where the key was. So I
presented on a darkened stage, barely able to see in front
of myself, telling the audience that if they were wondering
what I looked like, think of a young "Robert Redford."
They took it seriously, until a half hour into the program
when someone found the keys and put on the lights. It took
me five minutes to get them to stop laughing.
Five great principals
The occasional inept principal-host
was always overshadowed by people like Tom O'Neill Jr.,
Mike Oliver, Ross Scarantino, Randy Overbeck, and Joan
Moorman. I say we should forget about cloning
the sheep and start cloning people like these.
Tom 
O'Neil Jr.l was a Boston high school teacher when he attended two of
my programs back in 1982 and 1983. A year later they made
him principal of the worst-performing junior high in Boston
— where he incorporated two of my seminar subjects:
SSR and reading aloud to classes. By 1988, his school (the
one Boston teachers had nicknamed "the Loonybin")
had the highest reading scores of the city's 22 junior
highs. When I wrote of Tom's success in a subsequent edition
of The Read-Aloud Handbook, it was included in
the Japanese edition where his SSR program was adopted
by first one Japanese school and then by more than 3,000
schools.
Mike
Oliver, a Mesa, Arizona
principal truly devoted to children and literacy, attended
one of my BER seminars and took the idea of rain gutter
bookshelves to heights the rest of the nation could model
on. In 2008, ten of the top education officials from
Russia visited his school to see what they could learn
from his successes.
Ross
Scarantino, of Pittston,
Pennsylvania, and Randy Overbeck, of Xenia, Ohio, both
taught me how little I truly knew about inspirational leadership
in small communities. They predicted they'd have huge numbers
of parents for my presentations, despite my calm assurances
they had no chance of getting such numbers. Ross had
900 and Randy had 1,100. When I asked someone in Pittston,
PA, how Scarantino could have gotten that kind
of turnout, he laughed and said, "You
don't know how things work here in this town. They love
this guy so much that when he says jump, parents say,
'How high?'"
Joan
Moorman consistently
drew hundreds of parents to her school events, even though
she was principal of a largely blue-collar, Latino community
school in Covina, California. She not only shared her formula
with me, she also allowed me to post it at my Web site
through the years. Here's how successful it was. On two
successive nights a few years ago, I was speaking in two
southern California communities: Fontana and Laguna Niguel.
Fontana is a very blue-cola town, and home to one of the
largest numbers of trucks and truck-drivers
in America. Using the Moorman
formula for reaching parents,
the school district attracted 400 parents, half of whom
heard the presentation via headphones and simultaneous
translation in Spanish. The next night, a Laguna Niguel
school chose not to use the Moorman approach and drew 28
parents. You can lead a horse to water . . .
My professors of reading
and lit
Just like any rookie pitcher,
I benefited greatly from the counseling I received from
veterans who had been around the education field longer
than I. First, there was Bill Halloran who
shared his experiences and wisdom, while inspiring me with
his example. Nobody ever gave me bigger professional boosts
than Pat
Koppman,
one of the best presidents the International Reading Association
ever had. And then there were four college professors and
one librarian who were kind enough to treat me as an equal
when I was far from that: Diane Lowe at
Framingham State (MA); Stephen Krashen at
USC; Bee
Cullinan at NYU; the grand dame of children's
lit,
Charlotte Huck; and a librarian in Santa
Clara, California named Jan Lieberman (a true
Renaissance woman). These people made more sense of reading
than 90 percent of superintendents and secretaries of education
could in 100 years and I was blessed to have them touch
my life.
How does one begin to thank
the hundreds of classroom teachers who shared their thoughts
and classes with me? Whom do I dare slight by leaving
them off a list of accolades? Nonetheless, I could never
sleep at night if I didn't name these three: Ann
and Mary Dryden; and Kathy
Nozzolillo. The Dryden sisters were two extraordinary educators in
Springfield, Massachusetts, who were the very first to
invite me to their classrooms back in 1967. That first
school is now named after Mary and, appropriately, her
sister is principal. Kathy Nozzolillo, also from Springfield,
Massachusetts, has been my friend for a half century and
is the consummate educator who shared her love of reading
with her students and then couldn't wait to share those
same students with me in my films and books.
Those were
just the teachers who helped me professionally.
There were also the ones who took me in hand when I was
one of the students in their classrooms, beginning with Harold "Bud" Porter and Al
Schmidt in North Plainfield, New Jersey, and the
Sisters of St. Joseph in Springfield, Massachusetts.
The most important lesson I carried away from their classrooms
was this: "We really care about you and think you're
capable of great stuff." I never learned anything
more important.
My unofficial 'fan club'
Every
pitcher draws a big chunk of energy from his fans and
I had a few who, when you look up the word "kindness" in
the dictionary, there ought to be a picture of these
three. Marilyn Carpenter was a mom with three kids, working
her way through her education degrees toward a doctorate,
when she and her husband Warren invited me to stay in
their Arcadia, California home for several weeks back
in 1984. It was my first West Coast tour and I was a neophyte
on the freeways. The Carpenters' generosity with home,
hospitality, and freeway tips has never been forgotten.
And then there was Connie
Martin. She heard me 13 times and says she learned something
every time. As grateful as I am for her loyalty, I'm also
grateful she never died of boredom at any of my presentations.
One
night in 1995, I spoke in Pacific Palisades,
California, an affluent community outside L.A. I knew
my childhood hero lived in the town and while I was talking
with parents that night I told them I arrived two hours
early and drove around town hoping to see him, then chided
them for not having him on public display. They laughed,
but a stranger in the audience, Janet
Zarem, filed my
words away in her memory bank. A year later she saw in
the paper that I was speaking in town again, remembered
my words about that childhood hero, and she wrote
him a letter asking if he could spare an hour for coffee
with me. That's how I came to be sitting awestruck in a
sidewalk cafe, Jan. 30, 1997, with Vin
Scully, the longtime
voice of the Dodgers. (The story of that day can
be found online at American Public Media's "The Story
with Dick Gordon"; you can download the show's mp3
file at The
Story (the file will
automatically download to your computer; see second half
of show).
That hour with Scully ranked
at the top of my celebrity list, followed by sharing a
cab and years later a catfish dinner with Chicago's legendary Studs
Terkel.
And the only thing I've tasted on the road that was better
than those Mississippi catfish was "Aggie
Ice Cream" at
Utah State in Logan, something that ought to be
a controlled
substance. Another special treat was being interviewed
in-studio for Larry King's old all-night
radio program for Mutual, before CNN captured him and assigned
him to follow the celebrities' "white Broncos" every night
for the next two decades. It reminded me sadly of poor
King Kong chained to the opera house.
Still
on the subject of food, back in the early '90s, my friend
Steven Herb invited me to a dinner party
at his home before I was to speak near Hershey, Pennsylvania. This was decades before Steven would become director
of the Pennsylvania Center for the Book. I'm not sure if
Steven or his wife made out the seating chart,
but whoever it was deserves an "A" for timing
and placement. I ended up seated next to Paul
Serf who happened to be on the Hershey historical
commission. In the course of our dinner conversation he
gave me one of the great shocks of my travel life: There
was no existing broadcast recording of Wilt Chamberlain's famous
100-point game that had been played in Hershey back in
1962. Really? Absolutely.
The commission had checked everywhere. None. And then it
was my turn to jolt Mr. Serf: I had made a recording that
night in 1962, right
off the radio in my dormitory room at the University of
Massachusetts—a
recording I still had. Now, nearly 40 years after that game, the
recording is part of the archives at the Basketball Hall
of Fame. All thanks to a seating chart at Steven Herb's
house.
Every pitcher needs a
catcher (and some luck)
And finally, no pitcher
could win even one game without a catcher and some luck.
My luck (and it was gigantic)
was in having my neighbor Shirley
Uman bump into an old
family friend who was beginning his career as a literary
agent — Rafael Sagalyn. He was looking
for his first client and my neighbor mentioned the young
dad up the street with his self-published little booklet
on reading to kids. More luck: six publishers turned it
down (including Scholastic) before Penguin took it on in
1982 and now we're approaching 2 million copies in print,
while Rafe Sagalyn is one of Washington's top literary
agents. And then there was even more luck when a new mom
(Florence
Brodkey) down in Arlington,
Virginia was given a copy of my book by a grad-student
carpenter. The new mom, in turn, read it and wrote a
letter of endorsement to "Dear Abby," who
read it herself and devoted almost an entire column to
the book. Result: orders for 120,000 copies in 10 days.
Long before there was an Oprah, there was a "Dear
Abby," God
bless her. (The whole Abby episode, including my dinner
with the columnist and her midnight phone call
to me one Easter Sunday night, can be heard in my interview
with "Dick Gordon's The Story" online at http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_1008_The_Woman_Behind_the_Mask.mp3.
[Once at the interview page, push the audio meter to the
mid-program level for my interview in the second-half of
the show.] )
I was also lucky enough
to have a crew of great catchers in my family: my wife,
my children, and my brothers. I bounced more ideas off
them than anyone, trying things out on them long before
the audiences heard them. And like good catchers, they
kept me on track, told me when I was working too fast,
and helped me redirect my pitches and ideas. My brother
Brian not only caught the ideas, he practiced them with
his own family, and shared his own lesson plans with me.
I never had a better counselor.
Catchers are supposed
to manage the game on the field, keeping distractions
to a minimum — and nobody
did that better than my wife Susan. I never had to pay
a bill, write a check, or balance a checkbook. She took
care of business and just let me pitch. To top it off,
she cooked meals that rivaled great works of art. Who
could ask for more?
My children, Elizabeth and
Jamie, were the best audience a reader-aloud could ever
find. None of the thousands of sites I worked in through
the last 24 years were as good their bedrooms were from
1965 to 1982. They were the original inspiration for The
Read-Aloud Handbook, showing me what worked and what
didn't. Years later they shared their children with me
and I learned even more. All together they were the best
classes I ever took.
So now it's time to relax, pick up the books I've been buying for the
last 20 years but didn't have enough time to read (ah,
David McCullough), master my SLR digital camera, exercise and bike more often, play with my
grandkids, listen to (and download to my iPod) the BBC
online and NPR podcasts, and travel with Susan.
Thanks for being there for
me. I'm truly grateful. And if you're not too busy
yourself and you think there's something I need to know,
send me an email about it.
When
my father sat me on his lap and read to me each
evening in New Jersey, he had no idea where the "reading
seeds" he was planting would finally end up
sixty
years later—in a national reading campaign in
Poland.
See
Reading Seeds. |
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