Theodore
And I did reasonably well in school with good marks and all, but my family
never made an obsession of it. They never said anything, except if I got a C my
father would say, "Gee, what happened because most of my marks were As
and-but they never drove me to excellence in school or anything like
and
that.
And then the thing that had a major effect on my education happened when I
was in first year of high school. In early May, after school one day I was
riding on a bicycle out to the farm, which was three miles away. The front tire
blew out as I was going down a steep hill. I went head over handlebars, and the
bicycle landed on top of me. I had a broken leg, the femur just above the
I went to the hospital in early May, and they put me in traction, trying to gain
a little bit of length because my right leg had ended up shorter because of the
polio.
I was in the hospital until about the 4th of July, and then I was around on
crutches all summer. That was the summer that my education really took off.
My brother had never been able to get through college. Determined to
himself, he had bought the Harvard Classics, and the Harvard Classics Library
of Fiction, and I literally think I went through the whole of those volumes, 50
volumes of the Harvard Classics, that summer. Now, I know a lot of that was
too much over my head for me to understand, and a lot of it I skimmed-
Then there was a complete set of Dickens. And the Waverly, novels of Sir
Walter Scott. I did a lot of reading. H.G. Wells, Will Durant, I wish I could
remember it all. But the significance of it was it opened my eyes to the broader
world while I was still a teenager.
A lot of this is already written up in my journals that I wrote from 1935 to
about 1955. I've written a bit here and a bit there, and I've always thought that
it ought to be documented-in a lot more detail about my family.
Is it in publishable form?
A: No, no, no. It's just in drafts. In fact, it's not really very good-none of it has
even been typed, but I used to write it in notebooks.
I see. That's fine.
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