History of Reading News. Vol.XXIV No.1 (2000:Fall)
by Richard E. Hodges

When Jenny Monaghan invited me to contribute a 2000-word memoir to the History of Reading News, she suggested that I might share how my interests in reading and writing began. What follows is a casting up of accounts concerning my life-long interest in words—and some lessons learned along the way.

Part I: The Roots

I grew up in Los Angeles, California, at a time when there were streetcars, no smog, and "Angeles" was pronounced with a "hard g." Our Depression-modest home was near the corner of 93rd Street and Avalon Boulevard (now a part of Watts), seven blocks from the city's south edge. I am told that I was an early reader though I have no memory of being taught. I remember, however, the joys of reading just to find out things—at home, at 99th Street School, and at the local public library. And I remember writing a poem in third grade that was published in a city-wide school bulletin.

I have a vivid memory of fourth grade and Mrs. Stevens who guided our class project on "The First Thanksgiving." I think the Pilgrims must have smiled with pleasure on the day we reported the results of our efforts for our parents in the form of the original art, prose, poetry, and songs we had learned, all of us dressed as best we could in Pilgrim-like clothing. We even prepared a Thanksgiving meal (except for the roast turkey) from vegetables we grew in a school-yard garden, breads we baked, and fruits we dried. A lesson from Mrs. Stevens: some things are best learned by doing.

I remember, too, my part in a sixth-grade project on the building of the Panama Canal in recounting how yellow fever and malaria epidemics were stopped by destroying the habitats of the Anopheles and Aedes mosquitoes, and by other preventive measures. I also recall the melodrama a group of us eighth graders wrote and performed for the Junior High School student body entitled "Hark! Who's There?" All wonderful word-laden years—and another lesson learned about the importance of interest in motivating learning.

Then on to Mt. Carmel High—an all-boys' school; and I tried hard to be one of the boys. Some of the words I learned in those years are best forgotten. But there were other word lessons learned as well. I became enamored of Robert W. Service, poet of the Alaskan gold rush, whose word-pictures grabbed a teen-aged boy's imagination; for instance, the images of Dan McGrew's killer "with a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done" and of Yukon nights where "the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear...." Not great poetry; but a lesson learned about the power of common words to convey meaning.

Christmas, 1946, was celebrated in Koizumi, Japan, courtesy of the U. S. Army, and home in time for Christmas, 1947. In between, I learned some more words best forgotten and how (in practice) to triangulate the distance between a howitzer and its target; and I saw what war had done to a populace. Another lesson learned: I was no longer a kid. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, I entered Los Angeles City College, enrolling in English and Journalism. After a semester, I gained a temporary job as a copyboy with the Los Angeles Examiner, a Hearst newspaper. By summer’s end, I was taken on full-time, dropped out of school, and in about a year became head copyboy. ("Copyboy," by the way, is a misnomer. I was younger than most of the twenty-seven copyboys under my charge. We also had one copygirl). Thus began an on-the-job "tutorial" under the guidance of Jim Richardson, last of the breed of crusty big city editors, who maintained that journalists were made by doing journalism, not studying about it.

Over the next couple of years I began to edge into an apprenticeship in the newsroom. These were heady times for a young man. I saw how reporters gathered information and how rewritemen (another misnomer) shaped that information into informative, often zesty, text. I met a spectrum of notables, from Mickey Cohen to Earl Warren, and numerous Hollywood celebrities. And I came to understand the meaning of "yellow journalism." Another word lesson learned, earlier observed by Alice and Humpty Dumpty: words (and sometimes facts) can be made to mean whatever you want them to mean.

I decided to return to school, this time in the School of Forestry at Oregon State University (based on two high-school summer experiences with the U.S. Forest Service). I learned to identify Pseudostsuga taxifolia (Douglas fir), Toxicodendron diversilobum (Poison oak) and 103 other trees and shrubs indigenous to the Pacific Northwest; and I weighed my future in this field against another that interested me, a field in which I could be both learner and teacher.

I completed my studies at OSU and Oregon College of Education, prepared as an elementary school teacher. For nine wonderful years in Salem, Oregon, I taught 4th-6th graders about the "basics" and about the world around them; but, especially about language, as spoken, written, and read (even some Robert W. Service!) and about the joys of discovery and learning by doing.

I particularly remember the year I began an apprenticeship in administration as a teaching principal at Halls Ferry School, a two-room school housed in a former grange overlooking the Willamette River, with a divider forming the lower and upper-grade classrooms. The primary teacher and I both quickly agreed that the arrangement was nonsense; so, away went the divider. We became a one-room school with "team teachers" for thirty-seven kids, the older children helping younger classmates, all of us sharing in school projects—a true community of learners, teachers included.

Three more years followed of teaching and administration in progressively larger schools when I decided to act on a long-held dream—studying toward a doctorate at Stanford University. I enrolled for summer courses in Stanford's School of Education to "test the waters" and found the waters inviting. So, I left Salem the next year to take a fifth-grade teaching position in Menlo Park, next to the Stanford campus. The following summer, I became a full-time doctoral student in Elementary Curriculum, with Paul Hanna as my mentor; and a lesson learned from him—a sound investment is in your own education.

Part II: The Results

The Stanford years (1962-64) were fulfilling in many ways. Lois left her job as secretary to the Oregon State Board of Education to form a partnership with me in marriage and in my professional goals. I managed to focus paper assign-ments in most classes on some aspect of language. One paper resulted in my first published article in Phi Delta Kappan (1964).

But the most significant experience of the Stanford years was my involvement in the Stanford Spelling Project (with

Lois as the project's secretary), a USOE-sponsored study of English orthography that resulted in Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences as Cues to Spelling Performance (1966). Words were our focus day and night. We became familiar with the classic word studies, such as those of Gates, Rinsland, and Thorndike-Lorge. We read the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary from cover to cover twice! (Critique: short on plot, but an impressive vocabulary.) And we analyzed the spellings of 17,310 words using a new research tool, the computer.

In 1964 I became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago with two assignments—one in the Graduate School of Education where Bruce Joyce and I developed a small (twenty-five student) experimental Masters program preparing teachers for urban elementary schools; another in the Department of Education where I taught courses in elementary curriculum and developed courses and seminars in orthography and language development for students in the doctoral reading program. These were invigorating, chal-lenging years in an environment where discovery and learning were primary values and where intellectual stimu-lation abounded from interactions with my Education colleagues and those in other departments, especially in English, Linguistics, and Psychology. I also served as editor of The Elementary School Journal for five years. In the last two years (1974-75) with the University, I served as Secretary of the Department of Education and Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Education.

These were also stimulating times for literacy education. Linguistics, psychology, and sociology were breeding new disciplines with major implications for literacy practices in the schools. I became active in these pursuits in various ways: writing articles and a couple of books; consulting and evaluating projects and programs for USOE and NIE; participating in national meetings/conferences; serving in organizations, including the NCTE Commission on Reading (1970-74), the National Conference on Research in English (NCRE) (President, 1973-74) and the IRA Psycholinguistics and Reading Committee (Chair, 1971-73). I remember with fondness (as Alan Robinson did in History of Reading News, Fall, 1997) the IRA weekend workshops that took Alan, Dick Venezky, Ken Goodman, and me (with Ralph Staiger as “manager”) to Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, and Toronto where we explored with groups useful implications of linguistics, psycholinguistics, and socio-linguistics for reading instruction.

The year 1975 marked a major change in my professional life when I became Director of the School of Education at the University of Puget Sound, despite qualms about leaving the research-based heritage of a major university for the teaching focus of a small liberal arts institution. I found, however, a climate with even greater freedom to focus attention on the applications of language theory and research to educational practice in reading and writing. I also found that nearby SeaTac Airport allowed my continued attendance at IRA, NCTE, and other conventions.

My interests in historical aspects of literacy expanded in my new setting. I attended my first meeting of the History of Reading SIG (1976), serving as president in 1984-85. I also wrote a number of historical pieces for various publications in the areas of spelling and reading.

My life in words added another dimension, lexicography, when Ted Harris and I collaborated to prepare A Dictionary of Reading and Related Terms (1981) for IRA. Fourteen years later, Ted and I produced a second dictionary for IRA, The Literacy Dictionary (1995), with the association of Dianne Monson and Frank Greene.

Meantime, between the publications of the dictionaries, I had decided in 1985 to return to teaching, figuring that ten years of “deaning” was plenty for all parties concerned. My active university involvement came to a close with my retirement in 1995, providing me with unbridled opportunities to "do my thing" completely on my own terms. I continue to write. I’ve also served for the past three years as the treasurer of the Reading Hall of Fame, a group in which I was privileged to be inducted in 1994. Happily, I even find occasional time to learn by doing in a much-loved pursuit—fly-fishing.

There is one more compelling interest—Richard Hodges, "schoolmaster, dwelling in Southwark, near the Midle-gate in Montague Close," circa 1634-1657, who came into my life first in 1963 at the Stanford Library, and now again since retirement. Although Hodges has been known to philologists and many linguists since the early 19th century for his work on English spelling, his personal history remains unknown. Until now.

For the past four years, I've been assembling an accounting of my namesake’s personal and professional lives as author, "petty" schoolmaster (teacher of little ones), linguist, accountant, Puritan, and citizen of the London borough of Southwark during the turbulent years of the Royalists and Roundheads. In the process, I've learned much about British and London history, how to access 17th-century records and read secretary hand, and I've experienced an antiquarian's thrill reading original copies of Hodges' books in the British Library and Christ Church Library, Oxford. So, a lesson in process: The joys of discovery and learning last a lifetime (and maybe more).

I’ve also taken heed of a bit of advice from Harriet Jones, Senior Archivist, London Metropolitan Archives, who last year observed, "Well, Richard, I think it's time you started to write.” Thank you, Harriet. The Kindly Puritan is now underway.