I read voraciously – so much so that I usually had read the books I checked out by Thursday after those Tuesday library visits.

For me, of course, often times that meant reading (and checking out) biographies. Every Tuesday afternoon after lunch we third graders trooped down to the library and were free to read (and eventually check out) any books we wanted to.

Library Day for my 3rd grade class was Tuesday. Such is the drug of knowledge to the intelligent.

I raced through these “biographies” at a ridiculous rate. And I read at an extremely high rate of speed. I have a sort of high I.Q., “experts” tell me. Some of these heroes of The American Experience figure prominently in the ensuing story. Their publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, who also gave us the Bobbsey Twins series (a guilty pleasure of sentimental children’s fiction for which I refuse to apologize to this day) offered a plethora of volumes on everyone and anyone who even remotely qualified as a “great American” among those I read about beside those stalwarts of American history mentioned above were Molly Pitcher and Sacajawea (among the few women included the in Bobbs-Merrill pantheon of American greats) as well as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and sports figures such as Lou Gehrig and Ty Cobb.

In that year alone I read 125 of those “biographies” (a term sorely abused by this genre which consisted primarily of either imagined anecdote or legend – and yes, the story of Washington and the cherry tree is recounted in George Washington: Boy Leader as actual biographical information). There was a series of books that I suspect all Boomers will recognize – they had names like Ben Franklin: Boy Printer and George Washington: Boy President and authors like “Augusta Stevenson” (a pen name probably, but real enough to an eight year old who pictured a refined lady like his grandmother toiling away in longhand to tell the story of our nation’s Founders). I became enamored of one particular genre: biography. I read 200+ books that year according to my reading folder, a record of my reading that required me to offer a paragraph of description to prove knowledge of the book recorded.

Eden by Louise Wise