Catching Up on the Reading : Illiterate Adults Carry Terrible Secret, but New Skill Causes Other Problems

One of the first times George Mooneyham saw Tommy, the 4-year-old who was to become his stepson, the child asked the man to read to him. Mooneyham froze. Finally, the boy looked at him in amazement and asked, “Can’t you read?”

Mooneyham had been found out.

Whenever Diana Davies had to write a note explaining why one of her sons had missed school, she would open her refrigerator door and painstakingly copy the word C-o-l-d.” Today, years later, she laughs and says, “Every time they were absent, they had a cold.”

Robert Mendez remembers the first time he was able to share a book with his preschooler son, Matthew. “It was a Mickey Mouse book, and I was able to read enough of it so my son understood it, and I didn’t feel like a total idiot. I got a little puddle in my eyes. He saw that and wanted to know why. I just said, ‘Daddy has something in his eye.’ ”

To be an adult, and illiterate, is to carry a terrible secret. It’s a secret that must be hidden from employers, friends and even strangers. Through guile and bluffing, some non-readers are successful--for a while, at least--in keeping their secret even from the people they care about most--their families.

Almost inevitably, however, the time comes when they are no longer able, or willing, to carry on the charade. They have wearied of the excuse-making and of living in fear of being found out.

For non-readers, the decision to seek help can hit home in unexpected ways, sometimes solving problems, sometimes creating them. For spouses and children, literacy experts say, it’s like living with a recovering alcoholic.

Juanita Stanley, executive director of Pasadena-based California Literacy, a statewide volunteer group, explains that often the spouse who can read tries “to control the relationship. They are the ones who handle the paperwork, who know what’s going on, and the other person is, at least in this aspect, dependent on them.”

If the relationship is an abusive one, she adds, the reading spouse may make threats to discourage the new reader: “You can’t do this without me. You can’t get a job. You can’t leave me.”

The new reader has new contacts, new friends, new emotional experiences the spouse cannot share and that, says Stanley, “can be very hard for a spouse to deal with.

“I know of a woman who had to hide her books from her husband,” Stanley said. “The only time she could study was if she locked herself in the bathroom and ran the water.”

Other literacy workers remember a man who bought his girlfriend candy and presents when she skipped her lesson and a husband who refused to baby-sit so his wife could study.

Even so, “I cannot think of an instance where the outcome hasn’t been positive,” Stanley said. “But it may be rocky getting there.”

Coming clean with another adult is traumatic enough; admitting to your child or stepchild that you can’t read can seem potentially devastating.

Typically, non-readers “try to keep it from the children in the family,” says Jackie Pleasnick, literacy coordinator for the Hemet Public Library.

“I have a learner who’s been with us about three years who’d just have cardiac arrest if his children found out he is learning to read. His wife is the one who helps them with everything. He’s always ‘busy.’ ”

However, when children are told, Pleasnick said, they often are “extremely supportive.” Rarely has she found that children are embarrassed by their parent’s problem. In fact, she said, “We have one learner whose youngest child, who is about 8, helps his father” with his reading.

At 37, George (Gig) Mooneyham is what’s called a “new reader.” Two years ago, he started working with a tutor, Glenn Henderson of California Literacy. Today, he is reading at third-grade level.

Until four years ago, when he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, Mooneyham was battling a trio of demons: illiteracy, alcohol and drugs.

Growing up in Monrovia, one of eight children in a dysfunctional family, Mooneyham was a classroom misfit from the start.

“I couldn’t spell and the kids were laughing at me,” he remembered. By third grade, he was regularly ditching class. In fourth grade, he was shifted to a special education class and labeled by other kids as retarded. But by the time he reached eighth grade, having been held back a year along the way, there was no room in special ed, and he was returned to the regular classroom.

By ninth grade, he was experimenting with drugs and alcohol and his goals were to “smoke pot, drink whiskey, chase women and get high. Who wanted to learn?”

He stuck it out until 11th grade, when he “just walked out,” an 18-year-old with admittedly “no smarts” and dim prospects. He got a job in a factory making sprinklers. He earned $81 a week, enough for a motel room in Duarte, liquor and cigarettes.

Today, Mooneyham is a self-employed house painter. He is not a contractor, he said, because in order to get a license he would have to take a written test. If a customer wants a written contract, his wife helps him draw it up.

Like others who have only rudimentary reading skills, Mooneyham has learned “how to avoid everything” he can’t do. He knows the freeway system by heart. When they go to the movies, his wife reads the titles for him. She pays the bills, although he has taught himself to write checks. In his wallet, he carries a piece of paper with numbers--10, 20, 30--spelled out.

During his first marriage, Mooneyham tried to keep his illiteracy a secret. “Who wants to tell a woman that?” he asked. It worked, until his wife discovered that he was unable to fill out a job application. They had a young son and, Mooneyham says, she decided, “I don’t have time to teach both of you.” The marriage broke up.

When he “got sober” through AA in the summer of 1986, he stopped blaming everyone else--the schools, the world--and began thinking about trying to find help.

By that time he had met his current wife, Carol, an executive recruiter. They were married two years ago.

Early in their relationship, sensing Carol’s loyalty, he “told her everything I ever did. And that I can’t read and write very good. I’ve got nothing in the closet.”

“Before she married me,” he says, “I laid it on the line. This is what you’re getting, this is the package, and she bought it. I may not be able to read and write very good, but I have other qualities. Her qualities and mine together make a good system.”

He figures, “I’m real lucky. She wouldn’t give up on me.”

Carol Mooneyham, a teacher’s daughter who learned to read before she started school, says she always knew Gig had a reading problem. Even before he confessed, she had observed that “he couldn’t read things in the grocery store, couldn’t read signs.”

When her son Tommy found out that Gig couldn’t read to him, she says, he was too young to understand that this was embarrassing, so “it was no big deal. He couldn’t read, either, so to him it was probably cool. He wasn’t the only person in the world who couldn’t read.”

She was always honest about Gig’s problem with Tommy and her older son, Robby, but, she says, “I didn’t make any kind of a big deal out of it and they just accepted it. They didn’t care because it wasn’t affecting them. They didn’t put him down. If anything, we’ve probably overcompensated at times.”

Gig said, “Robby has told me he’s tried harder in school to read better, knowing what life is like for me.” Gig taught Robby all about auto mechanics; now Robby reads Road & Track magazine religiously and tells Gig what he’s read.

“Without anyone consciously being aware of it, Gig had to be stronger in other areas,” Carol said. “No one in this house really pulls rank on anybody or tells anybody else, ‘you’re dumb; you’re stupid.’ Maybe because of Gig’s handicap, the boys are a little more sensitive to things that happen to people that aren’t their fault, that don’t make them a bad person.”

“Sometimes it’s a little bit awkward,” she acknowledged. “He mispronounces a lot of words. That can be a little uncomfortable . . . say, when he’s talking to the boys’ teachers. But no one has ever said anything.”

Gig and Carol share head-of-household duties. She helps the boys with their homework.

Never, he says, has either of his stepsons attacked his Achilles heel, his illiteracy. He says, “They accept me for what I am. I’m very lucky.”

In the Mooneyhams’ La Crescenta apartment, there are books on the shelves, but they are Carol’s books. Gig opens Jack London’s “The Sea Wolf” and starts to read, hesitatingly. “I get the little words,” he says. Still, in the first paragraph, he stumbles, mistaking class for cause, though for through. He explains that, under pressure, “I screw up.” Then he closes the book and says, “Four years ago, we wouldn’t have been doing this.”

Mooneyham knows nothing of either the great books or the popular fiction that supply the characters and phrases that are part of the American culture. “I don’t know what I’ve missed,” he says. “I know I missed something because everybody tells me.”

Today, he is a proselytizer for education. “I had a dad who wanted me to be out mowing the lawn, not reading books,” he says. He is adamant that his stepsons, 10 and 17, will go to college. If they don’t, he vows to “make their lives miserable. My kids, my grandkids, they’ll all know how to read and write.”

Gig Mooneyham has never read a book. He has never written a letter.

But he is learning.

Carol is with him all the way. She says, “I know I can’t teach Gig. That’s too frustrating. But I’m very happy that he is going to tutoring.” Someday, she hopes, “He’ll also sit down and read and I’ll be able to read uninterrupted.”

Carol, who has three years of college, does not dwell on Gig’s shortcomings. She sees him as intelligent, hard-working--someone who has integrity and, most of all, “empathy for other people.”

Will his learning to read turn their lives around? Carol doesn’t think so, except “maybe he would go into a different profession. I can only see it would be positive.”

Gig fantasizes about being able to read and write well enough to be a salesman--”I’d be a good salesman. I don’t have to be a doctor or a scientist” to be happy.

Meanwhile, working at a computer with his tutor, Mooneyham has advanced in two years to four- and five-letter words. The computer gives him a story with words to be filled in from a multiple-choice list. Sometimes it speaks to him: “Gig, I hope you did OK.”

And sometimes Mooneyham, frustrated, talks back: “No, I didn’t.”

Mooneyham knows he won’t learn to read in weeks or months. Maybe in five years, he figures, when he is 42, he’ll be reading at sixth-grade level.

And yet, as he sits at the computer, he is impatient about his own errors. “We want it overnight,” he says. “We want to fit in.”

When an unplanned pregnancy compelled her to drop out of high school, Diana Davies wasn’t overly concerned. She figured she’d “be a mom and wife for the rest of my life.”

But reality was a divorce and the need to support two small sons.

She worked as a waitress. “I’d have to memorize the order, run back to the kitchen, get the menu and copy the word.” She also worked as a typist. She laughs and says, “I didn’t know what I was typing. I’d have been great in the Secret Service.”

At PTA meetings, at gatherings of Little League parents, she lived in fear of being found out. Visits to pediatricians’ offices, where there were forms to be filled out, were a dreaded event.

For 12 years, she was a single parent, supporting two sons. For 10 of those years she had a good job as a checker at a Ralphs market, turning down promotions that would have required filling out reports. In 1983, tendinitis of the elbow forced her to quit.

Soon afterwards, she sought help. She went to California Literacy and the events that followed turned her life around.

She says she had stayed in an abusive early marriage because she had neither skills nor self-esteem. Today, at 45, she has completed a vocational course at Fullerton College and is a state-licensed facialist and makeup artist. More formally, she is an e-s-t-h-e-t-i-c-i-a-n ----she spells out the word. And she has earned a high school equivalency certificate.

For Davies, the horrors of being a non-reader are still frighteningly fresh. The suicidal depressions. The excuses. The challenge of just writing a check.

When Davies started working with a tutor, she read at second-grade level. Now, she’s stopped counting, reasoning, “It’s like getting on the scale” while you’re dieting. What’s important, she says, is that “I’m doing it.”

She remembers being a giggly child who was always “put in the corner” in school. She grew up in a Mexican-American family during a time when parents wished their children to speak only English. Davies says, “English was the only language I knew, so I was embarrassed in both languages. I couldn’t speak Spanish and I couldn’t read English.”

In 1982, 10 years after her divorce, she began dating a sales representative, who proposed. Although she was very much in love with him, she turned him down. “He kept insisting, asking ‘why?’ ” She just suggested that there was something about her he didn’t know.

Finally, she confessed that she couldn’t read. His relief was written across his face. Davies says, “He thought maybe I’d been a prostitute!” They married in 1984 and live in Walnut.

Davies’ sons are now grown, and she has an infant grandson. She has already started a library for him.

“As I proposed to my first wife, I remember telling her I couldn’t read,” Robert Mendez said. “My fear was she would not marry me. But I felt I had to tell her because I was living this lie.”

Looking back, he realizes that his lack of self-esteem was one reason his marriage broke up.

“I didn’t feel very good about myself,” he said, “so I was looking for immediate gratification. I wasn’t a very good husband. I chased women. I think I did it because I didn’t feel I was worth anything and, at least in that part of life, I felt I was good at something.”

Seven years ago, he married Mary, a high school dropout who later earned her diploma in night school and now works as a secretary.

“She has known (about his illiteracy) almost from the very beginning,” he says. “One of her brothers had a reading problem. I couldn’t hide. She knew all the tricks. She did one of the best things for me: She stopped reading things for me. Sometimes your spouse can help you too much.”

Five years ago, when Mendez decided to learn to read, he found his wife was “very supportive.” He says, “She knows how it is to have nothing” and, through perseverance, to earn something.

For Mendez, the turning point--the moment at which he acknowledged to himself that the lie he was living was catching up with him--came in 1984. He was a part-time adult-school photography teacher and was asked to present awards at an assembly.

Unable to wiggle out, Mendez had to confess that he couldn’t read. “The director of the program asked if I could memorize the winners and I said yes, I could. He gave me 10 pages . . . my wife read them into a cassette and I repeated them over and over and over, five names at a time.

Mendez recalled his feelings after the program: “No one knew.”

Looking back, he says, “For years, I stopped myself.” He believed what he was told, that he was just a little slow.

As a Mexican-American child, Mendez believes that teachers did not expect him to do well academically. At Monte Vista High in Buena Park, he was president of the Pep Club, senior class representative, a “good child” who gave no one trouble.

Even though he flunked English three times, and copied his history papers out of library books, Mendez graduated--with 20 extra credits. He points out the irony: “I could not read my diploma.”

Armed with that diploma, he worked as a janitor until volunteering for the Army during the Vietnam War.

In 1972, when he was 23, he began working as a school custodian and stayed at one school for 14 years. He remembers, “People would say, ‘Why are you still here sweeping floors?’ I’d make one excuse after another. It was safe there. No one expects a janitor to be able to read very much.”

He attempted night school, but that wasn’t a fit. Then one day in February, 1985, he heard a public service radio announcement. That led him to literacy tutor Glenn Henderson and the chance to learn.

Today, he is a fifth-grade-level reader and is plant manager at Commonwealth Elementary School in Los Angeles.

In December, Mendez, 41, will be in New York to address a United Nations conference on literacy. This is someone who, at 23, was convinced that “the best I’d ever be was a man who cleans toilets.”

He regularly takes son Matthew to the library, to give him “the gift I never had.” Right now, Matthew is into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Mendez also has an infant son, Steven, and, he says, “As soon as he can hold himself up, I’m going to start reading to him.”

Mendez recalls the thrill of reading his first “book.” It was a copy of Golf Digest. But the bigger thrill, he says, is being able to write poetry. In one poem he compares the plight of being a nonreader with being in a room with no lights and being afraid to strike a match for fear the match won’t work. He’d been afraid to try to read, afraid that he “really was stupid.”

One day, he knows, his sons will probably have reading skills far beyond his. “That doesn’t bother me,” he says. “It isn’t how well you read, it’s that you read that’s important. I may never read as well as a college graduate, but I can reach for the stars. Instead of being 40 years old and thinking my life is coming to an end, I’m 40 years old and think my life is just beginning.”

And he has something his sons are not yet old enough to grasp--”An understanding of what that book or those stories can mean.”