WEBVTT

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OK, you can accuse
me of a lot of things

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and they're probably true, and
one of them is learning of--

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gaining the love
of reading early.

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And I think if you guys
are here who are still

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in school, who want
to learn to succeed,

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one thing is to
learn how to read

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and the other is hard work.

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And to have my son take
those lessons, that'd be OK.

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This is "The Formulas of Words."

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At that time, I don't think
people do this anymore,

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but in small towns, people would
go around trading comic books.

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Yeah -- [SNEEZE] Salud.

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And so you would
see people coming

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with a pile of comic
books like this--

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comic books they had
bought or read or traded,

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and you would see which ones
you could trade, which ones you

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hadn't read that you wanted.

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And one of the ones
that people didn't want

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was one titled, "The Classics."

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They were about, I
guess, about a quarter,

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but there were stories
of The Three Musketeers

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and stuff like that.

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Nobody wanted those.

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Superman and all these other--

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you guys wouldn't know Green
Arrow and those kind of people.

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So we'll see what happens.

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"It was always the formulas
of words I loved best.

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I failed arithmetic
in the fifth grade.

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I never could do long division.

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I did surprisingly well
in algebra for a while.

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Ended up taking
plane geometry twice,

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and got caught reading poetry
in back of the classroom.

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I never tired of grandma's
stories, grandpa's adventures.

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I would sit on the
living room couch

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after school, entranced by the
rhythm, rhyme of the hymns,

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stanza after stanza in
the back of the catechism.

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I read the stories in
my uncle's schoolbooks

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that grandma brought
down from the attic.

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Movies for a quarter--

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what a deal.

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Down at Bisconte's a double
feature plus cartoons

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and, of course, comic
books, especially the

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classics that other kids had
trouble trading except to me."

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