The Enjoyment & Benefit of Reading

Comprehending the written language and the contents of what is being read give us the keys to unlock the door to all sorts of information and explanation... and it's fun!

Note: Here’s a ‘golden oldie’ that I wrote in 2014. I’ve modified the contents slightly for its return engagement. But little needed to be revised since reading—both its enjoyment and benefit—remain timeless.

     As a combination reporter and publisher whose daily bread is dependent on a public that likes to read news stories and my occasional columns, I had special reason to appreciate people who like to read. But even without that skin in the game’ I think the steady acquisition and mastery of reading skills is of fundamental importance.

    Comprehending the written language and the contents of what is being read give us the keys to unlock the door to all sorts of information and explanation and helps guide us beyond that entry point to more and larger understanding. It’s called knowledge.

    But reading is and should be fun!

   When I attended elementary school many years ago, there was a book series based on a fictional sports hero called ‘Chip’ Hilton. He excelled in football, basketball, and baseball. In each of the books, he and his teammates often faced athletic challenges. The stories also featured subplots, including minor mysteries or character issues.

    I remember one in particular where Chip had a summer job at a factory and was also pitching for the company team. As I recall, he had problems with a couple of his older co-workers/teammates and something suspicious was going on at the plant.

    Reading these stories, I daydreamed of being a sports star, like Chip, and helping to win the big game.

     I also enjoyed reading the Nancy Drew mystery books, checking them out of the library or borrowing ones that my sister had been given. The adventures of Nancy and her pals, Bess Marvin and George Fayne, and the occasional appearance of her boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, kept me turning the pages.

    The locales of her various adventures in or near River Heights seemed exotic in comparison to the Conway Township dairy farm where I grew up. I also imagined being in Ned Nickerson’s place and having this talented, clever, and attractive young lady as my girlfriend. And the mysteries, themselves, were entertaining.

     But Nancy Drew was a guilty pleasure; one I that I kept to myself. I was acutely aware that my interest in this series about a girl detective was akin (or so I thought back then) to a boy playing with dolls. I did not wish to risk my precarious position in the pecking order of adolescent males by telling my pals that I read these books.

    There were no such qualms about The Count of Monte Cristo. I came across the book in the school library when I was in junior high, checked it out, and started reading the first chapter while riding home on the bus. I couldn’t put it down; the story by of betrayal and revenge set in Napoleonic France absolutely captivated me.

     I subsequently read the author’s other famous adventure tale, The Three Musketeers, set in France during an earlier era when Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu, Ann of Austria, and the Duke of Buckingham reigned. I found and read most of the sequels that Alexander Dumas wrote, including The Man with the Iron Mask (about the musketeer heroes and a young Louis XIV and his alleged twin brother) and the Countess of Monte Cristo (a pale imitation of the Count).

    Perhaps as important, I looked up the actual history of those times and read about the real kings and queens, cardinals and prime ministers that Dumas had portrayed in his novels. I think that this might have been where my daydreams turned from being a sports hero to being someone who could write such fascinating stories.

    History was my favorite subject in elementary school. Aware of this, Grandma Horton (who was a school teacher) gave me a book about the Civil War as a Christmas present. It was designed for young readers and written by Bruce Catton. I was in fourth grade at the time. I know this date, not because of a fabulous memory, but rather because I still have the book, and because she took the time to pen a sentiment on the title page.

     I would later learn that Catton had written longer, more detailed books on the Civil War for the adult audience, including A Stillness at Appomattox. I’ve read most of them. In addition, I discovered that he had grown up in the small town of Benzonia in northwest Lower Michigan during the early 1900’s. There was a private school academy located there back then, and his father served as the headmaster.

    In 1974, when I first visited the village as well as nearby Beulah and picturesque Crystal Lake, the small white clapboard building that had housed the students still stood in the town square. A fire would later destroy it. Still later I read Catton’s memoir of growing up there, called Waiting for the Morning Train.

     I was residing in nearby Traverse City when I make that initial visit, trying to figure out how to be a writer. Or more precisely, I was trying to figure out how to make money as a writer. The attempts at short fiction I toiled over each morning-- poor imitations of Hemingway, whose influence I was very much under-- did not promise any immediate financial reward. So, I decided to try my hand at a non-fiction article on steelhead fishing with a hope of selling it to an outdoor magazine.

     Not having a car, I hitchhiked to Honor, talked to the proprietor at Bud’s about fishing on the Platte River, ate at a restaurant with an outdoors’ motif, and then headed down the highway towards Beulah. It was early December, and I remember strolling along the sidewalk of that downtown and hearing Al Martino signing ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.’ It reminded me of the scene from The Godfather where Marlon Brando gets shot with that song in the background.

      A woman at a bait shop called Dave’s described Crystal Lake as “the most under-fished one around.” She told me about her husband (Dave) who, she explained, was a professional fisherman, going out every morning to one of the nearby rivers or out on the lake with the goal of obtaining spawn for the shop. He also worked as a fishing guide in the spring and autumn for out-of-state visitors. I thought to myself that this would make an interesting article.

     I then walked up the steep hill that separated that village from Benzonia, saw the former school academy and then went down a side road to a bait shop near the Homestead Dam on the Betsie River. I could cover a lot of ground on foot back then.

      The owner of the place offered several tips as well as anecdotes about catching steelhead.  “Knowing the stretch of river you’re fishing is important,” he told me, adding that “concentration is the most important thing.”

    “Steelhead are quick,” he pointed out. “They can swallow a hook and have it spit out in a split second.”

    After these so-called interviews, I hitchhiked back to Traverse City. I say “so-called” because I did not yet how to take proper notes for an article that would require a lot of detailed, technical, how-to information interspersed with quotations, and it did not occur to me to bring along a tape recorder.

     I never got around to doing the magazine story. Still, all was not lost. I would eventually use the assortment of experiences and impressions that I’d accumulated during my time in this region of Michigan for several of my initial newspaper columns.

     In one of them I included the visit to the restaurant in Honor, the stroll along the sidewalk in Beulah with Al Martino singing in the background, my conversation with the lady whose husband was a professional fisherman, and the interview with the owner of the Homestead Resort in a column called Untold & Little Known Fishing Stories. Both of these writings and others, in their style and presentation, resembled the short fictions that I’d been working on.

    The opening paragraph went:

    “Near Cadillac the hills begin; long-sloped and tree-covered. The highway curves and twists through them. On either side are stands of pine forests and intermingled among the pine are thin white lines of birch. Driving along the highway, heading north, you may feel finally that your luck has returned.”

   A bit of my luck had indeed returned. It came in the form of the printed word.  First read and then written.

Steve Horton is a mid-Michigan journalist and editor-publisher of the Fowlerville News & Views.