Uncle Albert's Baby Brother

My father, Robert, was Albert's youngest brother.  

School Supplies and Books

When young Robert started each school year, his mother gave him a tablet of coarse paper and a stubby pencil. She told him not to waste. These supplies had to last him all year. She had an income, which would have allowed her to purchase more paper and pencils for Robert and his siblings, but she didn’t spend her money that way. His handwriting, as well as his sense of punctuation and capitalization, were substandard.

And yet…

The man Robert, my father, could read a three-hundred-page book…anything I checked out from the library and brought home for him…in a night. The librarian wouldn’t let me check out a book until I’d finished the one I already had. She usually expected each student to read a book in a week. I felt bad because I wanted to bring more books home to Daddy. If I rushed and read the book faster, she’d say I was probably neglecting my other work. It was a hassle to check out another book before the passage of seven days.

I asked him, “How can you read that fast?”

With a twinkle in his eye, he said, “I don’t know. I just do.”

He never walked through the doors of a public library. In the summer my mother let me go to the library. I usually checked out three books a week. He finished all of them before I could read half of one.

By setting this example, he taught me to read fast and enjoy books.

He graduated from high school, which consisted of grades one through eleven with no kindergarten or senior year. Then he attended a summer session of normal school, which qualified him to be a teacher.

He never taught. All his life he farmed. The only work he loved was farm work.