LITTLE GOLDEN BOOKS

I don’t remember being read to as a child; I would have been very young, but I’m sure someone did.  My mother was an avid reader, and there were always books around the house.  Her sister, my aunt, was a kindergarten teacher and my grandmother taught first grade.  My grandmother’s brother was a superintendent of schools for the city of Paterson, New Jersey, and my grandmother's sister was a vice principal.  With all those educators on my mother’s side of the family, surely someone(s) read to me. 

My bookshelves hold very few books from my childhood.  I left most of them at home when I went away to college.  They were stored in the basement and were so badly damaged in a flood that my mother had to throw them away.  But I remember having several Little Golden Books—Mother Goose and This Little Piggy and Other Counting Rhymes, which were among the original 12 Little Golden Books published in 1942 and which sold for $.25 each.  I also had Dumbo and Bambi, which I found horrifying and took me months to get over, if I ever have.  I mean, come on!  Mrs. Jumbo gets locked up by the circus ringmaster because she tried to protect Dumbo, her child?!  Or Bambi’s mother, who did everything right with Bambi, her son, but halfway through the book gets killed by a hunter?  Seriously?  What kind of life lessons are those?  Who were the sadists writing this stuff?!   

I also had Little Black Sambo, which I loved.  The idea of a tiger being turned into butter by a clever little boy was absolute alchemy.  My grandmother, the first grade teacher, mourned when the book was removed from her classroom years later.  It was a wonderful, clever, exotic story, and I didn’t really notice the color of Sambo’s skin, which just goes to show you that prejudice is learned.

But if skin color has a lot to do with prejudice, I think poverty is the most determinative factor when it comes to the ability to learn.  There are two reasons I think this, and they are both linked to my college boyfriend, P, who lived in Winnetka, a Chicago suburb. 

P’s mother, K, was one of my favorite women—smart, sarcastic, engaged, energetic, progressive, intellectually curious--but like my mother, frustrated in her own personal development.  K’s father had been a doctor in a small town in Iowa, and she always expected to follow his footsteps into a career in medicine.  But that was the ‘40s, and she was steered instead into an exciting career in home economics by a college professor who told her—publicly no less, during a lecture full of male students—that she would never get into medical school.  Not because she wasn’t smart enough, mind you, but because she shouldn’t even think about taking a place away from a male medical student.  

Undaunted, years later she satisfied her interest in health issues by volunteering at Rush Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago, where she got involved in a study of the effects of malnutrition on pregnant teenagers, most of whom were very poor.  By malnutrition, the researchers meant poor diet; these young girls got lots of calories, just not the right kind.  K told me something about their babies that I have never forgotten.  Children born to malnourished mothers have two serious neurological problems.  One is a lower brain weight and the other is a malformation of the myelin sheath that impedes the electrical conduction of nerve impulses.  These congenital problems don’t ever go away, and they affect a child’s lifelong ability to learn.  So these poor babies, whose 14-year-old mothers were eating potato chips and drinking Coke for breakfast, probably because their own mothers didn’t teach them any better,  came into the world waaaaay behind the 8 ball.  And there isn’t much you can do about that, except teach good nutrition to the new mothers so that their next babies have a fighting chance.

The other thing I learned was from J, one of P’s best friends and our housemate.  After graduating from Colgate, J decided to give back.  He taught middle school for a year at the Hess Upper Grade Center in Lawndale, a solidly black neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago which, at that time, had not only the highest crime rate in the city but also the highest rising crime rate.  J would scare the crap out of us with stories of gang members from the Conservative Vice Lords who would barge into his classroom, disrupting what little order J had laboriously eked out, demanding to know:  “Who run it?”  J, being liberal but not an idiot, wisely answered, “YOU run it.”  But that’s not what I wanted to say.  

The really interesting thing J discovered was that he could immediately identify the middle class kids in his class.  Not by their clothes or how much lunch money they had, but by their behavior:  They knew how to sit still, listen, and follow directions.  In other words, they knew how to learn.  The kids from poor families, on the other hand, were more likely to live in situations where they were either left at home alone, or ignored, or screamed at.  They weren't spoken to, much less read to.  They didn't understand the concept of following directions, so how could they possibly learn anything?  And, as with the children of malnourished teen mothers, there wasn’t a whole lot J could do for them.  Their trajectories had already been set. 

I am deeply grateful that Little Golden Books were read to me as a child.  I was lucky to be born into a family that didn't have to contend with the psychological and financial stress so often paired with poverty.  My mother, grandmother, father, and aunt felt free to take me by the hand, metaphorically and literally, and teach me how to learn.  The Little Golden Books were the little golden key to my head start, which is the same head start every child deserves. 

Keep it real!

Marilyn