Family Literacy

"Because I read when I could still believe in magic, reading was magical, not merely breaking a code or translating one set of symbols into another. The idea of translatability was itself magical, and so it remains." –Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ruined by Reading

My family watched a lot of television, but we also read quite a bit. My father, mostly newspapers, but we always had a subscription to the Chicago Daily News and later The Sun-Times. My mother read many novels and we kids were all great novel readers. We would come home from the library with stacks of books almost taller than ourselves. We had at least two bibles and some children’s bible stories in the house, but we were not an overly religious family, even though at one time in her youth my mother studied to become a Lutheran Deaconess for awhile. Music and buying records was key as well. I do not remember a time growing up when music did not fill my house. My older sister Karen was the first to get into electronic gaming and it is a craze that has only interested her and my brothers. My younger sister and I never got into it. My older sister used to visit gaming arcades quite a bit as a teenager and considered herself quite the “Pinball Wizard.” If only Elton John and the Who would have known then the floodgates they would be instrumental in opening!