Who Flunks Second Grade?

My fight with dyslexia began in earnest in grade school. If it had truly been a fight, I would've won. I could have balled up my fists, socked it a few times, and pounded my chest in celebration. Maybe even added a side order of turnbuckle stuffing with gravy. The letters of the alphabet that encircled every classroom would not have appeared to me as though they were hieroglyphics. The abacus that sat near the teacher's desk would have wound up with a black eye, a bloodied nose, and you'd see fewer teeth than in a Crest toothpaste commercial.

But I didn't know anything about dyslexia then. I could not have come close to spelling it on a Scrabble board. Dyslexia is a learning disability few teachers understood back when I was growing up in Madison Heights, a suburb about five miles north of Detroit, Michigan. When I was a kid, measuring intelligence was uncomplicated: you were smart or dumb, bright as a shining star or dim as a 15-watt lightbulb. Our grade school class was divided into different reading groups: bluebirds, redbirds, yellow birds, and brown birds. I roosted among the brown birds, which meant I could not read worth a crap.

We read aloud about fun with a couple of kids named Dick and Jane. Well, there was nothing fun about stammering. I don't care if Dick was sledding and Jane was skating or they both were playing with a dog named Spot. I did not know anyone named Dick, did not care about anyone named Jane, and thought Spot was a mighty simplistic name for a mutt.

But Dick and Jane were the main characters in reading books written by William S. Gray and Zerna Sharp. They were used in pretty much every school this side of the School of Rock to teach kids to read from the 1930s to the 1970s. The focus was to develop the Curriculum Foundation Series of books for Scott Foresman and Company.

Dick, Jane, Spot, Baby, Mother, Father, Puff the cat, and Tim the teddy bear ganged up to become the banes of my existence. Oh, see. Oh, see Jane. Funny, funny Jane. It was not the least bit funny to me. Oh, see. Oh, see Jim. Unfunny, unfunny Jim Myers.

The drawings were simplistic and so were the words, but not to me. The text was all in black and white, but nothing about reading was black and white to me. Everything fell into the gray area.

Honestly, I would have loved to have told my story and never mentioned these struggles in school. That is a chunk of my life I do not enjoy recalling. Even all these years later, the embarrassment still stings. I would have loved to have been the kid who won the spelling bee, the one who got the shiny red apple from the teacher and not vice versa. I would have been proud to have been a National Honor Society member, one of those kids who gives speeches on high school graduation day. But that would have been dishonest. Dyslexia is a part of me, and if writing about it helps someone, then it is worthwhile. If your children are having problems in school, get them help. Do not write them off as being dumb as a cinder block. Don't call them stupid as a Kardashian. Just call the school principal. Call the school psychologist. Get them some help.

Unfortunately, I was just written off as dumb. My report card was filled with Es and Fs, two letters I had no trouble deciphering. That is the way it was back then.

Consequently, I hated school and despised the laughter and taunts of my classmates. I tried to disappear, which is not easy unless your name is Copperfield or D.B. Cooper. Since I was the biggest kid in class, it was especially difficult. It would have been like King Kong trying to blend in with the jockeys at Churchill Downs. When I was called on by the teacher, I hated school even more. I'd get up in front of the class and it was as though I had a mouth full of malted milk balls. I stuttered and stammered and the other kids in school would start laughing.

That is why I especially hated the desk my parents bought when I was in the first grade. That's where I sat for hours after school trying in vain to learn my lessons while my classmates played in the schoolyard across the street. That desk became a symbol of all my frustrations. It was big and wooden and as foreboding as an angry teacher's stare.

Still, it was important to both my mom and dad that I got a good education, and that is why Dad put a bear hug on the anemic family budget to buy that desk. It was where I was to study and do my homework. It was a gift from my parents. But it was also a curse.

After school, I would spend hours at that desk. I could not go outside to play until I studied my vocabulary words. I also had to do my arithmetic and my reading. That was like locking a person in solitary confinement and telling them to enjoy the conversation. The harder I tried, the more difficult it got. My dad was a very patient man, but he became very frustrated trying to help me learn. Dad never realized that what he was seeing on those pages was not what I was seeing at all.

Dad never had the opportunity to get a good education himself. The youngest of 13 children, he came to Michigan with his mother. By then, all of his brothers and sisters had already left home. His father had died.

My dad's family was almost literally blown out of Oklahoma by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s that lasted nearly a decade. The wrath was felt by a lot more folks than the Joads, the characters in The Grapes of Wrath. "Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless — restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do — to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut — anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land."

Grasslands had been deeply plowed into oblivion. Wheat was planted, and when Mother Nature kicked in with her PMS tears, the rainfall produced bountiful crops. But as the droughts of the early 1930s descended, no matter how much plowing the farmers did, nothing would grow. Crops withered and died, and so did dreams of living off the land. Winds whipped across the plains and even daytime turned dark.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office as president in March 1933, the country was in bad shape. FDR quickly shored up the banking industry, and also enacted the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act and the Farm Credit Act.

In 1937, Roosevelt's second inaugural address prefaced those of Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath: "I see one-third of the nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished ... the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those...