A story well worth reading

Erma Washington is a soft-spoken, almost whispery woman who works as a volunteer at the Altadena Library, a small stucco building situated between the city’s business and residential areas.

She checks books in and out and puts returned books in their proper places on the shelves that line the room. The library is her sanctuary, her dedication, and in some ways a reminder of the person she once was. For most of her adult life, 60-year-old Erma Washington couldn’t read.

It’s a subject she broached one day “for the sake of others,” recalling a painful time in her life when writing a school absence excuse for her son or filling out a job application was an almost impossible mountain to climb. She lived in a world shared by millions of others in America, English-speakers who are functionally illiterate, but her own private world was a lonely place to be.

Born to alcoholic parents, she was handed off to a grandmother, a fifth-grade dropout who could offer only minimal help as a teacher, but taught her the values of punctuality and civility. It was mostly those values that got Washington through school.

“I was well-behaved and they liked me, so they passed me,” she said one breezy day in a small, cluttered back room of the library. “I met attendance standards and was never late, but I couldn’t read. I could maybe make out a word or two, but never a group of words.” The only way she could write a recipe in home economics was to copy from a book, letter for letter, punctuation for punctuation, word for word.

Quiet determination fueled her struggle through high school and for two months of junior college, but determination wasn’t enough. Demands to be able to read, to be able to write and to be able to understand words on a page defeated all of the effort she put into advancing herself.

Testing in school failed to reveal the reason for her disability. There was nothing wrong with her intelligence or her physical health. No attempt, however, was made to determine her emotional makeup or the possibility that she might have been dyslexic, with her inability to read rooted in a genetic flaw or brain injury.

“I went to reading classes in the summer, trying to prepare for college,” she said, “but I barely passed with a D. In college, I took apparel design and could do the hands-on work, but that wasn’t enough. The terminology in all the classes was like a foreign language. To read a chapter a week was mind-boggling. Even if I did understand it, I couldn’t write anything down. It was hopeless.”

She kept five dictionaries and spelling books in her home, relying on them to help her through reading problems that wouldn’t even begin to challenge an average fourth-grader. Shopping was hard. She had to practice recognizing the shapes and colors of products instead of trying to read the words on the packaging. She carried the spellings of numbers in her purse to help her write checks.

Married and with a son, she worried about him and about four foster children she was raising. “I didn’t want them to be like me,” she said softly. She enrolled them in phonics classes and then heard about programs offered for adults by California Literacy Inc., a 47-year-old nonprofit organization geared, simply, to teach grown-ups to read. For Erma Washington, it was a life-saver. And it didn’t cost her a dime.

She began with classes in the Altadena Library, one of about 150 programs in the California Literacy network throughout the state, and advanced to workshops in the same area. Expert reading tutors and volunteers help almost 50,000 adults a year overcome literacy or language problems. Washington is one of their success stories.

Beginning with phonics, the classes taught her to recognize words and to write them and spell them correctly. But possibly most of all, they gave her self-confidence. After taking the course twice, she began tutoring other adults, which bolstered her own increased capacity to learn. Later, she worked with children in another phonics program, “because I don’t want them to suffer the way I did,” a recurrent theme in all her efforts.

I’ve been to other countries and have some idea of what it’s like not to be able to understand signs or to communicate a desire. But I can’t imagine what it would be like in my own country not to be able to read prescriptions or labels or tax forms or signs or the thousand and one documents necessary to function on a basic level.

Erma Washington is one of those people who, burdened by adversity, refused to give in to it. She crawled over the barrier that limited her life and is applying what she learned to help others. The drama here is a quiet one, the story of an often lonely quest by one person who rose from despair to a life that shines with its own virtue. I’m pleased to tell that quiet story today.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez @latimes.com.