A few days ago, I learned with some sadness that the Encyclopedia
Britannica had announced it would cease its print version after 244 years in
business. The news brought back all
kinds of memories of my mother and my early childhood. I hadn’t really thought much about it in
years, but Britannica was a major factor in the shaping of who I turned out to
be. To understand this, you need to know
a little bit about my mom.
My mother’s name was Henrietta, which I always thought was
kind of cute since my father’s name was Henry.
She was a kind of tall, slender woman with prematurely gray hair. She had two sisters and a brother and was
raised on a farm near Willis, Kansas.
Her folks (my grandparents) were of Scottish – English descent, which
was kind of unusual given all of the Norwegian and Swedish immigrants in the
area. Upon graduating from Willis high
school, she married my dad and moved to the big city of Horton, Kansas.
In fairly “traditional” fashion, my brother and sister were
born, dad worked, mom took care of the house, there were lots of family around,
and everybody voted Republican. I
believe she was very intelligent, as graduating from high school was a pretty
big thing in that area back then. My
dad, whom I also have come to regard as vcry smart, dropped out before junior
high to help support his large family. Mom
was “untraditional” in this way--far as I know, she never drove a car or wrote
a check. The town was small enough that
she could walk anywhere she wanted and she depended on dad to handle the money.
She also pretended to defer to him on just about everything.
Quite a while later, I came along. Apparently, I was a little surprise nine
months after a family vacation. My
brother and sister were 14 and 10 years older than I, respectively. By that time, we were living in a little house
across the street from the post office and just down the block from the public
library. It was a small two story home
with a covered front porch that had a three foot tall crawl space underneath it
enclosed by lattice; this was a perfect area for young boys to hide and do
their secret stuff. The sidewalk was made of old red bricks that had become
uneven and broken in most places with grass coming up in the cracks. The grassy
area between the sidewalk and the street was about 15 feet wide and filled with
wonderful old oak and elm trees that stretched to the sky. In the back was an
old shed my brother used for his woodworking, and a rusted out oil drum by the
alley used to burn the trash.
Mom was very shy and introverted. Although she was active in church, I don’t
recall her having a lot of friends that she spent time with. Mostly it was one relative or another, or one
of just a couple of other ladies. Of
course you also have to recognize that we had a helluva lot of relatives in the
area. One of her mannerisms that just drove me crazy was the way she put
herself down as an excuse for being quiet.
She would often claim that she was not smart enough to join a discussion
or just a plain old country girl who didn’t know much. She was quite content to
let Dad make most of the decisions and be the social butterfly (more about that
elsewhere).
Anyway, I sometimes wonder now whether she was ready for a
third child at that stage in her life.
She was already busy with a teenage boy and a preteen girl, a husband
active in business and local politics, two sets of older parents, church, and
many family interactions. She also did quite a bit of arts and crafts stuff:
knitting and sewing different projects, some ceramics, etc. We still have some
quilts she made around upstairs.
One big memory: I remember her teaching me to read at a very
young age; I may have been just out of diapers. After I had learned enough to
get through a short book without too much help, she would then often sit me
down and tell me to read and be quiet while she made dinner or something. At first, this involved children’s books.
Then one day I stumbled on her set of the 1936 Encyclopedia Britannica.
I remember being dumbfounded that all the knowledge in the
world could be found in that one set of grey hard cover volumes on the
bookshelf. Like most little boys of that age, I was interested in dinosaurs,
and mom showed me how to look up that subject and to follow related topics
elsewhere. From then on I was hooked. I would go from topic to topic, digging
into each one as much as I could until something else caught my fancy. Reading
about volcanoes led to the idea that there were different kinds of rocks which
led to minerals which led to gemstones like diamonds, etc. Different gemstones
were associated with astrological signs which had to do with constellations of
the stars which led to Greek and Roman mythology. Then I might be distracted by
an article about tornadoes which piqued my interest since we had just had a
tornado warning the day before. So off I would go learning as much as I could
about weather. You get the idea.
I don’t remember that we had a television until a couple
years later. Most kids in those days spent most of their time outside playing
some kind of ball, cowboys and Indians, War, or something like that. I spent
much of my time lying on my stomach on the floor with an encyclopedia volume
under my nose. Occasionally, I would have to ask the meaning of a word; Mom
would patiently explain it to me and then showed me another wonder: the
dictionary. After that she pretty much never had to worry about where I was and
I rarely bothered her.
Another big development was my discovery of the public
library just down the block from our house. It was one of thousands of such
structures across the country originally funded by the Carnegie Foundation
decades before. It resembled some ancient Greek temple with lots of big stone
steps leading up to the entry door which had something carved in stone above
it. I can’t clearly remember if it had stone columns or not, but it might as
well have. To me, it represented the repository of all the secrets of history
and everything there was to know. One day mom took me in and signed me up for
my very own library card.
I can still remember the smell of all the books and the
smooth leather tops on the tables. It was one of maybe two buildings in Horton
that had air conditioning at that time, and I remember how much pure joy and
relief I felt upon entering on one of those hot, sultry Kansas afternoons. Although
the library was small by today’s standards, my recollection is of a great maze
of freestanding heavy oak shelves nearly reaching the ceiling. Every wall was
covered with an expanse of shelves, broken only once in a while by a window.
The fancy new fluorescent lighting made every corner bright as day; the floor
was covered in some kind of hard tile that reflected and seemed to amplify the
very smallest noise or whisper such that it could be heard across the street. The
big oak main desk was directly in front of the entry door and was usually
occupied by a lady whose chief purpose seemed to be dusting, shushing noisy
kids and periodically helping people find books. She was nice enough to teach
me the Dewey Decimal system so I wouldn’t have to bother her. Usually though, I
would just poke around the shelves and select a few books at random to sit with
over by the air conditioner. Most of the time, I had the place to myself.
Here is where I learned there was such a thing as comic
books and a newer, different Encyclopedia Britannica. Many of the things I had
read in my mother’s 1936 Britannica edition were now remarkably different. The
whole discussion of atoms now included references to something called nuclear
energy and hydrogen bombs. I had heard some of the old people talking about
that, as well as someplace called Russia. A lot of countries had changed names.
The Wizard of Oz was a favorite movie and I happily discovered Frank Baum had
written several additional books about that world. Tarzan was a popular
Saturday afternoon television show and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books led me to
the Time Machine and John Carter of Mars. Huckleberry Finn, Tom Swift, Jules
Verne, and many other names rush back to me like a big wave.
Yes, it is fair to say I became a bookworm. There was so
much to learn and I wanted to know it all. I maintained a broad range of
interests, although this finally coalesced into more technical and scientific
stuff than, say, theater and literature. This had its own set of ramifications
for my life, not all of them positive. I eventually grew up, did well in
school, and seem to have had a successful career. Many people (such as my wife
and a lot of former employees) would describe me as often having a lot of
different irons in the fire at once, maybe too many. I am someone who knew a
little about a lot of different things, but not really enough about any one
thing to be an expert. Therefore, I was kind of a natural chief executive.
My recollections of work include a lot of organizational
initiatives and change efforts. Much of that activity was based on some
management theory, or the best practices employed by other utilities, or
something else I had read about. Probably my most accurate critics would
observe that we tried to do too much at once without actually firmly completing
the execution of many of the things we tried before starting something else.
That may all be true. Nonetheless, I still think we had one of the cutting-edge
organizations and our stats generally supported that characterization.
Now I am retired and doing other things with my time. I am
bemused at the number of times I find myself consulting Google or Amazon in
order to locate a source of information to read about whatever it is I want to
do--whether it’s how to paint with watercolor, apply a particular finish to a
furniture project, or play a particular bridge convention. The common thread
throughout most of my life’s activity is the act of reading…..a skill my mother
made sure I had at a very early age. I know my grandkids are being taught to
read, and I am sure they will become highly skilled, but it just won’t be the
same for them without that big old Britannica. As fast as everything is moving
now, it will probably be better.
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