When I was a Crow

Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'
In the fall of 1957 our family moved to Blacksburg, VA so my father could earn his Ph.D from Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI, aka Va. Tech). I entered the second grade with a northerner’s accent and a reading disability. I had learned to read by rote, which is how they taught us in Rochester, NY where I had spent kindergarten and first grade. I had a good memory and did fine under that system. In Blacksburg they taught reading by phonetics, of which I had not...