My grandfather devoured books

The eldest child of a farm family in the hills of Southern Indiana, he burned to learn. He became the first member of his—and my—family to attend and then graduate from college. He did it by taking classes for a semester, then taking a semester off to work so he could pay for the next semester’s classes.

He built his life around learning and teaching. He became a schoolteacher, a principal and a Boy Scout leader.

He never lost his hunger for books.

At his funeral calling, one of his former students, a man then in his 50s, said he and his classmates would go to the library and made a game of going through the stacks to see which books Grandpa had taken out and read.

“There were a lot of them,” the man said. “He was a smart man.”

When I was a boy and developed an interest in reading, Grandpa told me that learning leveled the playing field for people from modest backgrounds such as ours—and that books were the tools that did the leveling. He said a person’s mind was the one thing no one could take away—the greatest asset any person had.

“Read everything you can get your hands on, if you want to get anywhere,” he told me.

Grandpa was a Republican. He was nearly a foot shorter than his idol, Abraham Lincoln, but he shared the Great Emancipator’s belief that learning was a ladder—the means by which poor boys could elevate their lives’ expectations.

For that reason, like Lincoln, he would walk miles to find a book he hadn’t read.

Later, I encountered one of those great teachers who take a spark of curiosity and build it to a bonfire of comprehension and understanding. She, too, believed in the power of books. She told me that reading was a discipline.

“Serious people take a book with them everywhere they go and read whenever they have a minute to fill,” she said.

That began a lifelong habit for me of toting books with me all the time—when I was out with friends, on dates or running errands.

It earned me much teasing.

More than one friend asked, “Plan to be bored?” if I showed up at, say, a movie or for dinner with a book.

I would shrug, smile and say it was just a habit.

Then, when they went to the restroom or the concession stand, I would read a page or two.

The teacher who told me to carry a book with me everywhere also was a Republican. She was a conservative, she explained, because she believed the preservation of knowledge was the foundation for civilization, the force that kept chaos at bay.

She became a teacher, she said, because she thought a civilized society the only kind capable of both justice and basic humanity. Education and unfettered access to books and learning were the pathways to those goals.

I’ve thought about my grandfather and that fine teacher a lot these days.

I’ve wondered what they would have thought about the fact that the political party to which they were so faithful now devotes so much time, energy and money to making it harder for young people to read certain kinds of books.

That their beloved Republican Party would assert that government at any level should say it has the right and the authority to determine what anyone reads or learns would distress them. They both believed, as my grandfather counseled me decades ago, that a person’s mind is the one thing no one could take away.

The social conservatives advocating for book bans say they’re doing it for good reasons. They want to keep the minds of young people from being corrupted, they say.

Censors always say such things.

Whenever they seek to deny us the right to speak as we wish, think as we would or read what we want, they always contend that they’re doing it for our own good.

What they’re really doing is substituting their judgment for ours.

They’re denying us the right to make up our own minds about whether something is good or bad, whether we agree with it or disagree with it.

My grandfather and that fine teacher wouldn’t have liked that—because they were Republicans.

But that was back when Republicans still believed in freedom.