Nov. 05, 2006 - 19:03 MST

THINGS I LIKE TO HEAR

The Denver Post staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday in The Denver Post. His today's article is under Rocky Mountain Ranger (Views from the West). Datelined Pueblo (Colorado) In full then :

EDUCATOR'S BOOK TRUMPS HIS WAR WITH WORDS

"In a tiny schoolhouse in a tiny Oklahoma town, the moment fourth-grader Richard Hartgraves dreaded had arrived. The spelling bee."

"It was his turn and he stood, knees trembling. The handful of other sutdents giggled and snickered. The boy shuffled his feet on the worn wooden floor. The teacher, a stern man, stared. The youngster felt his throat tighten. His mind was tangled."

"The word was "ball."

""B-L-A-L," he said quietly."

"The snickering got louder. "Try again," the teacher demanded."

"L-A-L-B," the boy whispered.."

"Life could not, it seemed, get any worse. And yet he knew it would."

"Later that day, at home, the teacher would stare and shake his head again. The teacher was Hartgrave's father. He did not know why his son was like that, why he couldn't spell even the simplest of words. He only knew that the boy did not perform in school like any of the other kids."

"Six decades later, Hartgraves, 71, still cringes at the memory.

"I spelled "ball" every way possible except the right way," he said. "I knew the letters but couldn't get them in the right order. And the longer I stood there . . . the worse it got."

COUNSELOR'S WORDS WERE "DEVASTATING"

"A few years later, after Hartgraves turned in a staggeringly bad performance on a standardized test, a high school counselor in that Oklahoma town of Ada called him into the office."

"He told me I better plan on working with my back because I wouldn't have much luck with my brain," Hartgraves said Thursday in his Pueblo West home. "It was a devastating thing to hear."

"Then the man with the gray hair glanced up above his desk in the small den in his basement and his eyes rested on a pair of plaques hanging on the wall. One was the governor's Incentive Award for outstanding innovation in education. The other was an award given to the Counselor of the Year for Secondary Education."

Both bear the name of Ridhard R. Hartgraves."

"And for just a minute he smiled."

"Hartgraves has a severe form of dyslexia. It is a battle he has fought with his mind since those earliest days in Oklahoma, a fight with a neurological disorder that shuts down the normal progression of information, ensnaring thoughts, jumbling the order of things and making reading, writing, spelling and math a monumental struggle."

"And though the fight continues even today, Hartgraves knows he has won."

"He is an accomplished painter, woodworker and craftsman. He spent more than 20 years as a guidance counselor at Pueblo County High School. He has a bachelor's degree from a small college in Oklahoma and a master's degree in counseling from Western State College in Gunnison (Colorado). He has a vocational specialist degree, too, a post-master's project from Colorado State University that is considered just shy of a doctoral program."

"Why didn't he push on for the PhD ?"

"I'd have to write a dissertation," he said and he smiled again."

"Because the frustration still lives. THe frustration of writing the letter "d" when he meant to write "B." The bewilderment of knowing a word but being unable to wrestle it onto a piece of paper and having to settle for using a similar word."

"LITTLE CEDAR" IS A TALE OF COUSINS IN THE 1940S

Later this month in bookstores around the country, a 129-page story will appear on the shelves. "Little Cedar" is a tale of cousins who spent a summer at their grandparents' home in Antlers, Okla., in the late 1940s. It's a story about a time when kids entertained themselves not with a video game joystick but with an actual stick snapped from a tree and used to thump a beehive just to see if they could escape a stinging swarm."

"The book was written by Hartgraves. It took him 20 years."

"I wrote it longhand," he said. "I'd write and then rewrite and then throw it away and start again. Over and over and over. I'd want to write "from" and it would come out "form."

"Through it all was his daughter-in-law, Gina Hartgraves, and wife Jean. Both of them read and re-read and edited the work in progress."

"A word like "was" became "saw," Jean said. "he wrote "how" as "who." I saw the struggle. And I'm so proud of him."

"Their home is filled with his woodworking projects. On a mantel sits a meticulously crafted scale-model stagecoach, complete with a tiny shotgun laid acrtoss the stage driver's seat and red felt seats for the passengers. In the basement rests a fascinating Rube Goldberg-like marble machine that guides the small ball through four levels of complicated chutes."

"Woodworking," Hargraves said, "unlocked the door."

"Dyslexics want to see how things work, how things fit together," he said. "From that we can see how words fit together."

"Sometime after his book's Nov. 20 release, Hartgraves willl sit at a table in a Barnes & Noble store in Pueblo and sign his work. And he'll think about his father, who died in 1968 and is buried in Antlers, about 80 miles from the old schoolhouse.

"I tried so hard to please my dad when I was a kid," he said. "He always wondered what was wrong. Now I've written a book. I wish he could see it."

++++++++++++++++++

What an accomplishment ! This is a person I would like to have as a friend.

I have in my lifetime known two dyslexic people, now lost in the mists of time, one went to another town with his folks and the other guy quit the job we were on and moved on to another town. Both persons were unhappy, angry and frustrated. And I can see totally just how infuriating it would be. I now know how that is when I reach for a word that I know as well as my own name and it just isn't there and I have to do a "work-around" word to put my thought across, my frustration index skyrockets off the chart.

I remember the one boy in school, having extreme difficulties when trying to read out loud - which was something we had to do in class. Being too big to cry and too young to curse, he stood red-faced struggling with all his might, until the teacher would have him sit down. Being young and ignorant myself I couldn't figure out how I could be of help to him, which frustrated me as he was such a good fellow.

I admire Mr. Hartgraves to the max and can see why he chose to be a counselor to school children, I am absolutely sure that he has been one of the best ever.

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