My Education

Some of the best educated people I know never went to college.  I wrote about Betty Rahn and Mary Grieb in my book, “Mama Goes to Paris.”   Neither went to college, yet they learned by reading and experience.  Besides being good companions, these two always gave me good advice. 

Harry Truman’s formal education ended when he graduated from high school in Independence, Missouri.  Yet people who knew him say he was one of our best educated Presidents.  He read constantly.  He knew history.  He understood economics and law.  He read critically and saw through the “baloney” of puff pieces and propaganda.  From experience he learned how to deal with Congressmen of both political parties in order to accomplice his goals. 

My education continued after I graduated from college  Riding the “el” to work in Chicago, as the train rattled along over the city’s slums, I read Dante and Marcel Proust in translation.  I learned about writing memoirs from the famous “madeline” passage in Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” 

Evenings, while Wally attended classes at Northwestern, I read Virginia Woolf’s novels and practiced my writing skills. I envied Woolf and her friends who lived in the Bloomsbury neighborhood in London before World War II.  Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s house was destroyed by German bombs during that war, but thirty later I wandered around in the streets of Bloomsbury and found plaques on the houses of the economist John Maynard Keyes and the novelist E. M. Forester.  In her diary Woolf called him “Morgan.”   By that time I had read biographies and learned that those talented people were not the happy, carefree bunch I had imagined.

I tried to read Gertrude Stein and James Joyce.  While I could saw how they experimented with language, for me it was more important to communicate in words ordinary people could understand.  Stein and Joyce are fascinating people, interesting to read about but for me too difficult to read. I closed the book on each of them and went to bed.

As a young mother, alone and lonely in a tiny apartment in Chicago, I read Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”.  I was amazed by the amount of research Darwin had done.  Years later when DNA was decoded, it proved Darwin was right.  Scientists are impressed by what Darwin had accomplished simply by observation. 

Holding my baby in my map, I read Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, which he wrote after doing research in the reading room of the British Library.  The same summer I wandered around Bloomsbury, I went to the British Library, where I was not permitted into the vast reading room, but where in a glass case at a special exhibit I saw Marx’s library card.  I have learned so much from books I checked out at libraries; I found it oddly touching to see that small piece of cardboard that enabled Marx to do his research.  Working conditions for the lower classes in Victorian England were so horrible, I could see why Marx thought the abused workers would revolt.  He did not foresee what would happen when workers formed labor unions. 

We moved from Chicago to Detroit to Dallas to Philadelphia and back to Chicago.  Besides finding new dentists and supermarkets every place my family lived, I saw how each community had its own customs and prejudices – and how similar they were in unexpected ways. .

In the library in Birmingham, Michigan, tucked away in a corner in the back of the stacks, I found a whole collection of books about various tribes of American Indians.  I could not foresee that I would spend twenty years living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I became a friend of a Pueblo Indian.  Like Marx unable to predict the future of the labor movement, I discovered many things about American Indians that were not in the books I’d read.

Reading was the basis of my education, but experience was equally important.  Living in five states, traveling throughout the “lower 48", and spending time in foreign countries, I constantly revised my thinking.  Telling about my eighty-six years of reading and discovering new experiences is the story of my life.