‘Home’s’ Curtis Aikens Spells It Out for Viewers in Project Learning Ad

When Curtis Aikens, the garden grocer on ABC’s daytime “Home” show, recently taped a public service announcement for the network’s program PLUS (Project Learning U.S.), he came full circle: Seven years earlier, after watching a PLUS television spot in Northern California, the then-26-year-old Aikens called the literacy hot-line number it suggested and blurted into the phone, “I want to learn to read!” , “I didn’t get a basic foundation in reading,” explains Aikens, who graduated high school in his native Georgia and attended college on a football scholarship; he dropped out after his efforts to learn to read were rebuffed on the grounds that reading was not necessary for jocks. “Before I saw that PLUS ad, I thought I was the only person who couldn’t read.”

By the time his phone call led to a teaming with a husband-and-wife tutoring pair, Aikens had already been running his own produce business. He later returned to Georgia, establishing a company catering to film and television shoots and sharing his produce expertise on local television shows. A guest shot on “Home” last year to promote his book, “Garden Grocer’s Guide to the Harvest,” eventually led to a contract offer; he now appears on the show twice weekly.

“I got into television in the first place for a platform to speak on literacy,” he says. “To tell folks who can’t read: ‘If I can do it, you can do it.’ ”

He got his message across last June in particularly dramatic fashion. Co-hosting “Home,” he asked host Sarah Purcell to help him with a word on the TelePrompTer and then, overwhelmed by making a reading mistake on national television, broke down in tears. “What I thought was a total disaster turned out to be a great day in reading,” he says now. “I was on the phone (answering viewer calls) for three hours after that.”

Just what has learning to read meant to Aikens?

“Life,” he replies. “Total life.”