When I was growing up in the 1970s in Kansas City (sometimes called “the buckle of the Bible belt”) my father, a Baptist minister, did not allow our family to go to the movies. It was too likely we'd encounter lots of larger-than-life sin on the silver screen. Better safe than soiled. Even the squeaky-clean Disney movies that played on television every Sunday night were beyond my reach — Sunday nights were spent at church.
Books were my refuge. Daily Bible-reading was expected, but it was an endless stream of novels and biographies that provided the great escape from our modest corner of the Midwest. My parents opened this door when I was a toddler; my mother read to me every day, often until she was hoarse. Soon I could handle the early readers and “Little Golden Books” by myself. Later, chocolate-voiced Mrs. Wright would entrance our fourth-grade class with a chapter a day from classics like Tom Sawyer and Robinson Crusoe, and I was reading and rereading the brick-red volumes of The Childhood of Famous Americans(Babe Didrikson, Gus Grissom, J. C. Penney) that filled the shelves of the Harry S. Truman Elementary School. I owned most of Louisa May Alcott and all of Laura Ingalls Wilder and read them till the spines split and pages fell out. Dickens and the Brontës joined the line-up in middle school, and I can still recap the plots of all the Sherlock Holmes stories for you, if you'd like. Television was allowed, but The Beverly Hillbillies and Speed Racercouldn't compete with Mark Twain and Josephine Tey.
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