The Ex-Teacher Can Finally Read

In college, John Corcoran used his excellent vocabulary to make a strong vocal impression in class, but often handed in other students’ term papers and sought out copies of tests before his exams.

During his subsequent 18-year career in teaching, much of it in Oceanside schools, he never wrote on the blackboard and had students do all the reading in class.

When he left teaching to become a developer, Corcoran built his first project after buying completed plans and later surrounded himself with lawyers, secretaries and other specialists to do all his written work.

A few months ago, Corcoran, 50, revealed the explanation for all this behavior, an explanation that even his children and parents hadn’t known: For the first 48 years of his life, Corcoran couldn’t read.

“I couldn’t decode the words,” the multimillionaire developer said during an interview in his four-bedroom, four-bath, 4,000-square-foot hilltop home with a view of the Pacific Ocean. “I couldn’t hear sounds. . . . I never went to the next dimension.”

Financial Setbacks

After financial setbacks forced him to lay off much of the staff he had assembled as his business support system, and thus cost him those who were paid to read for him, Corcoran finally decided that he had lived long enough as an illiterate.

In September, 1986, he enrolled in the Adult Learning Program offered by the Carlsbad City Library and spent 40 to 50 hours a week for the better part of two years learning how to sound out words.

On Sunday, Corcoran took the lectern to demonstrate his new ability to read during an 11 a.m. service in the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, which is holding the service in conjunction with Project Literacy L.A., a cause that Corcoran has supported since coming forward with his story.

Corcoran, who as a graduate student won National Science Foundation grants to study in graduate schools at San Diego State, Louisiana State and Santa Clara universities and earned 90 units of graduate credit, recalled how hard he used to work to hide his inability to read.

It was a deception begun in grammar school, where he was regularly referred to as stupid and put in the lowest reading groups, and ended only when he walked into the Learning Program in a small Carlsbad shopping center two years ago.

It started, he said, when he failed to learn to sound out letters at any of the 15 schools he attended as a result of his father’s frequent moves seeking better jobs as a teacher. And his mother, he said, was busy raising six children. So he did not feel he could tell them about his problem, no matter how severe it seemed. He was able to hide his secret because he worked hard and his parents never stopped encouraging him even though they didn’t know.

His social skills and athletic abilities made him a leader on the playground, and he decided to use his sight, hearing and other strengths.

“I associated with people with good vocabularies and picked their brains so I developed a pretty decent speaking vocabulary,” he said.

“I listened to radio and watched films, TV, plays and pictures in magazines. . . . I went to all kinds of galleries.”

A Non-Reader’s Tricks

As he moved through school he also developed any number of subterfuges. He learned to talk to friends about magazine articles and then repeat the friends’ summaries of the information as his own. He gleaned information from television and passed it along as something he had read.

By the time he reached Texas Western College, now the University of Texas at El Paso, the 6-foot-4, 220-pound Corcoran had finely honed his athletic skills and was captain of the basketball team.

Yet if he entered a classroom where he had to take notes, he was terrified. “I would make sure nobody ever saw my writing,” he said.

He earned a degree in education and went to graduate school where classrooms could also cause anxiety. “If someone said, ‘Would you read?’ I would say I didn’t feel like reading,” Corcoran said. “It was a psychology class and you could say no. Nobody picked up on it.”

Classroom discussions were another matter. He entered them willingly because they provided a chance to prove himself. And Corcoran discovered that if he interested a professor in a topic, he might persuade the teacher to give him an oral exam rather than a written one.

“If there was any way I could come up with options to talk a guy out of a written exam, I had to take that chance,” he said.

Teaching at Oceanside, Carlsbad and El Camino high schools and other locations forced him to rely on other unusual methods.

“I could not even read the students’ names,” he said. “I had them fill in their names on the seating chart when I made it out.

“If students liked to read I would encourage them. I even took books to class for them to read. I would have them do some kind of oral report.

“In faculty meetings I would sit the farthest from the board, in case someone said, ‘Let’s get this on the board.’ But I always had a backup excuse (if I would be called upon to write).”

“He was a very articulate person,” said Don Marks of El Camino High School in Oceanside, who was Corcoran’s principal during the eight years he taught there.

“He was in the social studies area, and many of the classroom activities had to do with interaction and not necessarily a lot of written assignments. . . . As far as any problems with his reading or written skills, it didn’t come out. He was very popular with the students. He definitely overcompensated with his oral expertise.”

Corcoran continued his reliance on oral techniques when he began to fix up apartments and sell them as he moved from teaching into the development business.

He started by building his own house with a carpenter who showed him the construction business from the ground up.

At one time he had as many as 30 development projects in the San Diego County area. Today he is involved in 12.

Adult Learning Program

The financial losses that required him to reduce his staff finally drove him to the Adult Learning Program, where his achievements in business and education only mildly surprised the teachers, said program coordinator Lynda L. Jones.

Although most illiterates seek entry-level jobs, Jones said, “the flip side is that there are people in every segment of the population who have literacy problems. I have people . . . who own large businesses, two sales people who earn from $70,000 to $100,000 a year and a couple of department managers in large corporations.

“These people live with enormous stress that someone will find out about them. It’s harder because they feel that they have more to lose than the entry-level person. You are on guard all the time for fear that you will say the wrong thing and give yourself away.”

Corcoran masked that stress well. His family says that he filled his obligations so adroitly that he hid his illiteracy from not only his co-workers but his parents, his five sisters and his two children. Only his wife knew.

“I didn’t have any idea,” said his mother, Agnes, 80, who lives with Corcoran today. “(When people tell me) I always say, ‘Where was I?’

“He had five sisters and they did not know either. He was always very good on other things like making change. He did all our taxes and everything else. So you just don’t think about it.”

“I had no idea,” said his daughter, Colleen, 22. “Now, in retrospect, I see things. He read us books when we were young, but he must have been making them up. When we got old, he wouldn’t read. He would tell us stories. He would make things up.

“If we had math homework (and wanted help) we went to dad. If we had spelling or reading we went to my mom.

“In restaurants he would just order the same thing every time. Some places had it and some did not. When they didn’t, we would get so upset and say, ‘Why don’t you read the menu?’ Because it would feel so embarrassing. But it did not seem like a big deal to me.”

Corcoran’s wife, Kathy, recalled that “he told me when we got married that he couldn’t read. But I didn’t understand what he was telling me until I heard him try to read to Colleen.

He Learned by Rote

“He learned those things he knew he was going to use, like his address,” she said. “But if you asked him to spell some of the places or addresses he lived as a child, he wouldn’t be able to. But he could remember every one of them.

“I never appreciated the pain he went through until this all started to come out,” she added. “Why would I? He was a good husband, father and provider, and I couldn’t imagine something like that would be that painful to him because it did not seem to stop him from functioning well.”

But Corcoran had buried the pain for a long time.

“If you are illiterate or if people think you are illiterate, they think you are dumb and that you can not do things. That’s real,” he said. “It’s a constant source of frustration. It’s more than just reading per se. The essence of life is your ability to communicate your ideas, your feelings. What reading does is give you a tool to expand your thoughts.

“I always wanted to learn. There wasn’t a day that went by when I wasn’t frustrated. I’m an independent person; I’m an independent thinker. But I always had to depend on someone to take care of me.”

Kathy Corcoran said her husband used hostility to avoid detection. If a clerk in a store asked Corcoran to write something, she said, “rather than telling him that he could not write he would be hostile. Or when someone asked him to read he would be real snooty. Like he was above it. He developed all these self-protection techniques.”

It took a long time to tear down that protective veneer and a long time to develop his reading skills at the Learning Program.

Eleanor Condit, a 67-year-old volunteer who was Corcoran’s teacher, said that when the developer arrived “he could not separate unfamiliar words into syllables. He had acquired a vocabulary of words he knew almost like a picture and he could guess a lot of words from the context. But if you showed him the same words out of context, he would not recognize them.

Learning Vowel Sounds

“The difficulty he had was the difficulty that every beginning reader has, which was hearing the difference between the 18 different sounds of the short vowels.”

About a month after he started, he began to hear some of those sounds.

“I remember one day he came in with a big grin. He said, ‘All of a sudden so much of the mystery is gone.’ ”

“It was like, ‘Click,’ ” said Kathy Corcoran. “He started to spell words. Every sign we went by he would try to spell it out. He was spending so much time on it he’d be up all night. He was possessed. The phonics clicked in and then he went crazy to try to suck it all in.

“At least a year and a half after he started we were going to Lake Tahoe and he started reading something he was going to write. He said, ‘What do you think about this?’

“It was my first realization that he could read. I said, ‘John, you just read that so beautifully.’ ”

Being able to read has produced a change in Corcoran. “I’ve seen such a healing take place in him,” Kathy Corcoran said. “The angry man is gone.”

Sitting in his paneled office and looking like a typical upscale businessman in a blue blazer, a button-down sport shirt, slacks and black loafers, Corcoran said he has also gotten involved in a new cause.

He was featured on ABC’s “20/20,” participated in a symposium in Washington, made a dozen speeches around the country promoting literacy and is writing a book to tell his story.

“I had so much motivation,” he said. “I had to prove to the literate world that I could resolve these problems. I just did not want to fail, even if the odds were against me.

“I always wanted to learn how to read and write and to stand up to the literary world and say, ‘Quit calling us dumb.’ And I think that is why I am doing what I am doing right now.”