OK, you can accuse me of a lot of things
and they're probably true, and one of them is learning of--
gaining the love of reading early.
And I think if you guys are here who are still
in school, who want to learn to succeed,
one thing is to learn how to read
and the other is hard work.
And to have my son take those lessons, that'd be OK.
This is "The Formulas of Words."
At that time, I don't think people do this anymore,
but in small towns, people would go around trading comic books.
Yeah -- [SNEEZE] Salud.
And so you would see people coming
with a pile of comic books like this--
comic books they had bought or read or traded,
and you would see which ones you could trade, which ones you
hadn't read that you wanted.
And one of the ones that people didn't want
was one titled, "The Classics."
They were about, I guess, about a quarter,
but there were stories of The Three Musketeers
and stuff like that.
Nobody wanted those.
Superman and all these other--
you guys wouldn't know Green Arrow and those kind of people.
So we'll see what happens.
"It was always the formulas of words I loved best.
I failed arithmetic in the fifth grade.
I never could do long division.
I did surprisingly well in algebra for a while.
Ended up taking plane geometry twice,
and got caught reading poetry in back of the classroom.
I never tired of grandma's stories, grandpa's adventures.
I would sit on the living room couch
after school, entranced by the rhythm, rhyme of the hymns,
stanza after stanza in the back of the catechism.
I read the stories in my uncle's schoolbooks
that grandma brought down from the attic.
Movies for a quarter--
what a deal.
Down at Bisconte's a double feature plus cartoons
and, of course, comic books, especially the
classics that other kids had trouble trading except to me."