Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES III • July 24, 2013 Not feared and hated? Read more! Did you ever have the feeling that you get invited to too many parties? Do people honk and wave when they see you on the street, just to let you know they like you? If you read more, understand what you read, and tell people what you know, you can deftly eliminate these problems. I encountered this phenomenon early in life. I was not an avid reader when I was a kid, but I was a voluntary reader, and most of my peers were not. I was constantly being threatened by older bullies for telling them there were no tigers in Africa. I learned this from a Tarzan comic book -- less racist than the movies. Screams of indignation and outrage assailed my asser- tion that the final consonant in “Navajo” is pronounced as an “H.” Those of the Little League players who had just mastered the fact that “H” is pronounced as an “H” could not fathom that a “J” could also be pronounced as an “H.” This was not the type of school where parents signed their kids up for courses in cultural enrichment. Once I staggered forward from softcover pulp with color pictures to hardcover books, I received the scorn of some of my teachers for knowing more than they did. This was not difficult. One history teacher who also coached sports told us that all Romans died when they were 28 years old because their average life span was 28. That was what it said in the textbook. The term “infant mortality” did not occur on the racing form he sometimes kept tucked inside the New York Times in case he finished the sports page too soon. I had read enough to realize that many Roman states- men were active in their forties, fifties, and sometimes even older, and when you saw their likenesses, you sort of got the feeling that these guys were a little older than Fabian and Dion when they were sculpted. Similarly, while we were learning in world history that the Romans maintained an extensive network of public baths with hot, cold, and tepid water and steam rooms, the history teacher told us they were all filthy and that is why they all died when they were 28. He also told us that Kublai Khan built the Great Wall of China. I had read Harold Lamb by that time and knew that Kublai Khan’s grandfa- ther Genghis Khan -- played by John Wayne in what was not one of his best movies -- had bribed his way through the Great Wall of China when the wall was already hundreds of years old and some places were in need of repair. Kublai Khan was not even a Han Chinese -- he was a Mongol. The final corker was when the history teacher told us that he had visited Pearl Harbor 20 years after the attack and had seen a submerged wrecked aircraft pulled up from the murky waters -- and it was a Spitfire! The message here was that Churchill had attacked Pearl Harbor to get us into the war. No sale. I used to build plastic scale model aircraft and read the instructions and I knew that British Spitfires circa 1941 were fabric-covered and that all the Japanese aircraft at Pearl Harbor had radial engines, unlike the Spit- fire’s in-line engine, a Rolls-Royce Merlin. Only later did I learn that the Japanese radial engines were licensed by Pratt & Whitney and the fuselages were made of sheet metal from Alcoa Aluminum. Some of their dive bombers used Lewis machineguns manufactured under British license. Makes you think.... Nobody ever told me what an SAT was until I took one, but because of all the reading I had done -- most of it not assigned in school -- my verbal scores were more than respectable. I had to depend on the school for my math. Among the 21 st century Asian population of northwest Bergen County, a score like that is known as a “golf club.” That is what your dad uses on you to make sure the next score is better. I am not into golf, but I appear to have been motivated to pass the reading habit on to my kids in the hope that they might find literacy constructive and amusing. My daugh- ter Emily read the entire Bobbsey Twins series and most of the Nancy Drew books when she was of kindergarten age. After that, she got in touch with both teenaged stars of “Anne of Green Gables” by fan mail and read all of those books. My son Johnny started more slowly. When he was 10, he discovered Walter Lord and the rest was some very good history. He read every book Lord ever wrote, corresponded with the author, and read the books Lord recommended. Johnny and Emily even met Lord in person. They took the bus to New York City and Lord, who was chair-bound at that point, was waiting for their knock. He did not wait in vain. “All right, Johnny, don’t break the #$$#&#$ door down!” The three bonded like three armchair adventurers and Lord showed them his double-glass coffee table that was filled with keepsakes that surviving passengers of the “Titanic” had taken with them in the lifeboats. One item was a wind-up pig that played a jaunty French music-hall ditty. Lord told Johnny the pig had ceased to play and Johnny bet Lord he could get the music box inside the pig working again. Lord -- a great gentleman and a great dip- lomat -- told him he had trouble getting the glass plates off the table. The pig survived intact. Johnny also once ran a slide projector for E. Douglas Dean, a chemistry professor active in the scientific exami- nation of extrasensory perception. Dean -- a member of the Society of Friends who shared the Nobel Peace Prize for war relief in 1946, and a professor at Princeton -- was show- ing slides of anomalous plant growth caused by the water from healing springs and wells. He had slides of some pots of beans he had watered with tap water, and some pots he had watered with spring water from Lourdes. The differ- ence in growth was significant. Dean said that the Lourdes water was chemically normal but fluoresced differently from ordinary water. He and Johnny bonded instantly, and Dean let Johnny flip the slides in the projector. Johnny was impressed by the lecture. “I always assumed that Lourdes healing was either spiritual or psychosomatic, but this research opens up new possibilities,” he said. He then commented on another observation. Dean’s timepiece of choice was a Mickey Mouse watch held together by a middle-sized rubber band. “Do you think I should tell him to get a haircut and a new watch if he wants to be taken more seriously?” Johnny asked. “I think the Nobel Prize and Princeton will cover for it,” I said. Another time, when we were at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Johnny discoursed on the reconstructed Egyptian tomb on the first floor. “Aha!” he said. “The Canopic jars! During the mum- mification process, the priests excised the viscera and stored them in the Canopic jars. They saved the heart, but ironically they drew the brain out through the nose and dis- carded it because they didn’t know the brain was good for anything...even though they understood trephinning!” “How old is this boy?” a man with a Hungarian accent asked. “He’s 10, but he reads a lot,” I said. “Ten!” the guy said. “In that case, he is a genius. I thought at first he was a midget.” Johnny sometimes posed as a midget to cover his other activities, other times as an American Indian, but the inter- est in mummies once had caused him to make a literary blunder -- or so I thought. I was working on a newspaper in Denville, and I used to take the kids with me to help out around the office. “We have to get downstairs for the parade,” Johnny said. “They’re having mummies this year!” “Where did you see that?” I asked. “They had a sign up on the street....’ “I think it must have said mummers. Mummers are entertainers who wear fanciful costumes and strum banjos, like in Philadelphia.” “It said mummies. I want to see them!” I took the kids out of the second-floor office. The parade was yet to arrive, so we sat on the staircase outside the office looking down a long corridor. As we watched, a suntanned pedestrian walked down the sidewalk with extensive ban- daging after some sort of accident covering his head, neck, and one shoulder and extended arm. “I told you it said mummies,” Johnny noted defiantly. The power of reading had once again became palpable to him. Allendale AWC supports Family Promise The Allendale Woman’s Club recently presented Family Promise of Bergen County with the proceeds from this year’s Spring Promise Fashion Show. Proceeds from the Allendale Woman’s Club will help Family Promise pave the road to independent living for working families in Bergen County who have become homeless.