My Life - Chapter 4 - Children's Stories

This weekly blog post is my response to a weekly question that arrives by email every Monday.  This week's question:  What is one of your favorite children's stories?

This topic makes me think of my childhood and that of our two boys.

When I was growing up, Dad came upstairs after I was ready for bed to read some stories.  He started with Uncle Arthur's The Bible Story which was a 10 volume set of stories from the Bible re-written into something children could understand.

After that, Dad read from a longer chapter book.  

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I recall we read through Aesop's Fables at least twice.  According to Wikipedia, Aesop is thought to have lived around 500 B.C.  It's a collection of short stories with a message.  "The Tortoise and the Hare" teaches that slow and steady will win the race over a flash which can't keep a regular pace.  "The Ant and the Grasshopper" is all about work ethic told very clearly that the diligent ant eats his full after harvest. "The Goose with the Golden Eggs" is a tale of greed and impatience when the caretaker tires of getting just one gold egg per day.

Others that pop to mind include: Winnie-the-Pooh, My Friend Flicka, Tales of Peter Rabbit, Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, and The Swiss Family Robinson.  He would read a chapter each night.  Some times we talked about the book or what might happen next, but it was usually just the book.

As I got older and we traveled to games and things, if it was late enough, we'd listen to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater on the way home as they acted out a book with voices and sound effects.  

I don't remember when he started reading to me every night.  I can't remember him not reading.  As I became a better reader in the 2nd and 3rd grade, I started reading on my own after he finished with instructions to turn off the light at 9 o'clock.  My favorite books were sports biographies.  

The first serious book I remember reading on my own was "All the President's Men" in either 1975 or 76.  It's part of the reason I became a journalist.

Dad stopped reading to me around the time I turned 12.  A little more than a month after that birthday, my sister was born and the tradition continued with her.

When our children were young and the prime ages for me to read to them every night, I was selling insurance which often meant meeting with clients and prospective clients in their homes Monday through Thursday nights.  We did some reading together, but I and they missed out on that shared experience of reading together.

The first chapter book that turned their heads was Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.  I read the book to see what it was like and we got them their own copies.  Since one of my favorite books as a kid was a collection of Greek Myths and Legends, so I knew a wizard would capture their attention.  When the Potter series first came out there were some concerns about the subject matter, but after reading it, we encouraged the boys because it was nice to find something which made them turn off the TV.

Looking back at those years when Dad read me stories at bedtime seems like a glimpse to another time and place.  It was a world with 4 TV networks, very few sports on TV except the weekend and even then it was just a few games.  While there things for kids to do, youth sports were a shadow of what they are now.  

It also occurs to me that those nightly sessions were an incredible gift of time when certainly Dad could have done something else or my parents might enjoyed some time alone time (I don't think that was a thing in the 1960s/70s) themselves.  It also instilled a love of reading and traveling through time through the pages of a book.