Learning to Read

In the summer of 1963, a five-year-old boy with a speech impediment and undiagnosed ADHD crossed the U.S. from coast-to-coast-to-coast in the back seat of an overloaded Simca. His older brother was already slotted for greatness. His older sister could see music as color. He was pegged as The Dumb One in both senses of the word. The one nobody noticed.

So he watched, and listened, and learned. Then somewhere between the Jim Crow South and Route 66, between an Uncle still taking photos over Cuba and a pair of Missouri mobsters who wouldn't scam a kid, he taught himself to read.

Nobody noticed that either - until he spelled out the Bayer Aspirin sign out loud from the top of the Empire State Building. And he began to find a voice.

One trip. One experience. One summer. Then more than sixty years later, he finally found the rest of his voice.

Learning to Read is a memoir which broadcasts a panorama of America in the summer of 1963, seen through the eyes of a five-year-old boy who couldn't yet read, couldn't speak clearly, and couldn't get anyone to notice he was paying attention to everything.

Structured around the stages of language acquisition - Letters, Strings, Words, Sentences, Paragraphs - the book traces his self-taught literacy against the backdrop of Jim Crow, Colonial Williamsburg, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Route 66, and a family of barely contained geniuses in an overloaded Simca with no air conditioning and a rag for a windshield wiper.

It is a love story - for the road, for a vanished America, and for the family that talked constantly and rarely noticed the quiet boy in the back seat who was absorbing it all. Learning to Read is the first volume of the Tales from the Backseat trilogy.