http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4415
By Mary Grabar
In my ignorance, I once held hopes of gaining entrance into a club more exclusive than any country club or nightclub.
Having been educated in public schools and therefore exposed to only one http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2224 represented intellectualism.
My first exposure to intellectual thought was a shelf filled with dime store Golden Books. One of the American “ladies” had heard about the cleaning abilities of a http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1772 immigrant woman who was laid off from her job in a factory. So this lady picked my mother and me up and drove us out to her big house in the suburbs. The drive was a special treat for me, for I rarely got car rides; my family would not own a car until I was twelve.
As my mother cleaned upstairs, my eyes caught sight of a shelf, fairly glowing gold in the sunshine streaming through the large picture window. There were dozens of dime store Golden Books lined up! The children that lived here must truly be rich, I thought. My sister and I had one Golden Book between us, Hiawatha and Little Bear, that my father struggled to sound the words from. In later years I realized that he was probably functionally illiterate in his native Slovenian, having only a fourth-grade education. One of nine children, he slept with his brothers in the hayloft because there wasn’t enough bed space in the two-room straw-thatched house. No time could be spent on school when all hands were needed in the fields. I skipped kindergarten so my mother could work in the factory and longed for the written word. After some catching up, I became a star reader in the first grade.
I also began noticing “class distinctions.” The children whose houses my mother cleaned often made fun of our ways. They mocked our language, my Slovenian-style braids. They made fun of the fact that I wore their older sisters’ hand-me-downs. These children were driven to dance lessons, music lessons, and outings by their mothers. They were fawned over and bragged about. They carelessly left their Golden Books lying about and later would complain about having to read. I was taught how to clean so I’d be able to earn my own money a few years down the road.
As soon as I could, I took advantage of what a library card could offer me.
When I decided to fulfill the dream of a life of ideas and books years later and pursued a Ph.D. in English, I found those spoiled kids grown up and teaching the classes I was taking. Their classes were exercises in demolishing the great works of the past with postmodern and Marxist theories. They lent an air of superiority to their deconstructions of Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot, and declared them guilty of the sins that afflict all http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2390 from which they dissociated themselves.
http://townhall.com/columnists/MaryGrabar/2008/05/04/because_they_wouldnt_let_me_in_their_club