Well-Read Life™

The True Writer Turns Twenty

When we launched our first True Writer pen in 1999, it was a strange thing to do. After all, the nation was in the midst of the dot-com boom. The smart companies were betting on virtual things. Levenger, by contrast, sold old-school real things—bookcases, leather notebooks, 3x5 cards and other decidedly low-tech “Tools for Serious Readers.”

The explosive tech boom at the century’s end seemed to bring with it yearnings for these older things.here was a rage for fat cigars and equally fat fountain pens, especially those with the Mont Blanc snowy logo on top. Things that had gone out of style before the Eisenhower administration were back.

So when the the big money was looking forward, we looked back. We appreciated that our customers were buying the fat-cat Mont Blancs, yet we knew from studying the history of writing instruments that most people back in the heyday of fountain pens, before WWII, used less expensive pens made not with nibs of gold, but with nibs of steel.

An old cigar box

In gaining a hands-on feeling for fountain pen history, we got a lucky break. My grandfather, George W. Knock, had been a penmanship and typing instructor, teaching for most of his career at North High School in Syracuse, New York. He passed away in 1957.

When my mother saw we were selling fountain pens, she called me, laughing. “Your grandfather would be so pleased—his grandson selling fountain pens! ” Then, as an afterthought, she said, “ I found an old cigar box of pens in his desk and put them in the mail to you.”

A battered cigar box of my grandfather’s held the beginning of a True (Writer) story.

When they arrived, it was like Christmas.

My grandfather had left us well-used Parkers, Sheaffers, Esterbrooks and other brands now lost to memory, including a beautiful tortoiseshell pen from Moore Pen Company. There was an astonishing variety of colors, including a number of pens in a sort of marbleized green that must have been popular back in the day. The pens hadn’t been used in decades, but when we washed them out and dipped them in new Levenger ink, the old pens wrote just fine. It was a gift.

And that’s when the light bulb came on. Fountain pens didn’t have to be costly status symbols. We envisioned creating a new pen in the spirit of the best of the everyday working pens of old—functional, honest, well made, long-lasting, pretty—maybe even inspiring—and not costing as much as a car payment.

We found the right German company that could make high-quality yet affordable steel nibs, feeds, and converters for filling the pen with ink from a bottle. A little company in Taiwan still made gleaming pen barrels of polished resin, the old-fashioned way.

We needed a name that would convey the sensibility and flair of what we hoped would be an enduring series of pens. Our head merchant, Denise Tedaldi, came up with “True Writer,”which seemed to capture the essence of a tool that would stay true, write after write.

Thus prepared, we launched our first pen in May, 1999—in that marbleized green we had found in my grandfather’s cardboard treasure chest.

101 Dalmations...and True Writers

It sold.

And thank goodness it did, because we had bet big on tooling and inventory commitments.

And it still sells.

I was surprised when our product team told me how many True Writers have come out in the last 20 years: 101

That’s not counting all the different modes —ballpoint, roller ball—and different point sizes of fountain pen nibs.

The Levenger Kyoto True Writer (2006) , on the left, next to its inspiration: The Moore tortoiseshell pen that George W. Knock, my grandfather, owned.

 

It sure feels good to be celebrating the True Writer’s twentieth birthday. We have updated the True Writer Timeline to include the history of all the pens that have come out under the True Writer banner since 1999, so you can find out just when yours was introduced.

My thanks to our dear Levenger customers who purchased more than a quarter-million True Writers over the last two decades. Collectors of Levengeralia can enjoy a limited edition Anniversary pen.

I’d also like to thank George W. Knock and my mother for the gift of his cigar box full of pens. As the penmanship teacher at his high school, every springtime he would write each graduate’s formal name on his or her diploma. I think he would have been pleased to know that his legacy also includes the thousands of Americans who have used their True Writers in the 21st century to pen their own words, worthy and wise.

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The only example of my grandfather writing my name is this inscription in my copy of Now We Are Six. I was two when he wrote this. He passed away later that year.


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Reclaim Your Peace and Tranquility in a Noisy World: Introducing Peacephones™ by Koss and Levenger

Many of us work in noisy, distracting environments—at airports, coffee shops, even our own offices with colleagues all around. It’s often a struggle to get enough peace and quiet just to think.

Fortunately, we can thank the Beats company, now owned by Apple, for making the wearing of over-the-ear headphones fashionable, or at least acceptable, even while walking in airports or sitting at desks. And fortunately for me, a few years ago Michael Koss asked me to join his board.

Hearing is believing

The Koss company, founded in 1958, invented the headphone industry. While the field  is now populated with giants, Koss still makes some of the finest professional-grade equipment available. During a break at one board meeting, I asked Michael what he would recommend as the best headphone to create peace and quiet while traveling. He thought for a moment and said, “Try our model for professional sound engineers.”

“But it’s not the sound quality I care so much about,” I said. “It’s the quiet.”

“I know, but first you’ll want the best sound isolation you can get, which is what these give you, with their D-shaped ear cups, and you want something comfortable, lightweight and foldable for travel.” 

‘But aren’t sound-canceling headphones better?’

That’s what I asked Michael, and was surprised by his answer.

“Sound-canceling ’phones, which we also make, are good for blocking out constant, droning types of noises, especially in the lower frequencies.” (That’s what makes them so good on long airplane trips.) “But they can’t counteract the variable, unpredictable sounds of human speech. For that, you want over-the-ear, passive sound isolation.”

And the special D-shape ear cups, he explained, are not only comfortable, they also minimize the volume of air inside the ear cup. That, along with the supersoft, conforming foam, produces something approaching recording-booth-like quiet, and also the comfort demanded by sound engineers who wear these babies all day.”

I was still looking doubtful. “Try ’em,” he said. “These are like a raincoat for sound.”

Peace and tranquility to go

So I did...and was blown away. Rather, I was whispered away—to a new land of peaceful productivity. The conversation in the row behind me, the PA announcing the airline’s latest credit card offer, the fussy baby somewhere, faded as if a block away. Before my plane touched down, I was hooked. Now I don’t leave home without them; it’s just so nice to be able to bring peace and tranquility with me wherever I go.

I told Michael he was right and that I was sold. Moreover, I felt pretty sure that Levenger customers—many of whom read and write on the go—would love these, too. So the teams at Koss and Levenger set about outfitting the ’phones and their pack case so that they’re optimized for peace-loving road warriors venturing forth in our cacophonous world. Their newest armour is now the Peacephones.

Add a pair to your Every Day Carry

 For peace and quiet, you don’t need a cord, so with Peacephones you don’t have to have one. Plug in only when you want to listen to music, a podcast or an audiobook. What’s more, Peacephones have two cord jacks, one on each ear cup, so the cord stays clear of your keyboarding or writing by hand.

And by the way, when you do listen to music, buckle up for a sound quality that will rock your Mozart; you’ll be listening the way audio professionals do. (That’s why the four of us who put the America the Bilingual podcast together, all use these, too.)

For the case, the Levenger team chose luxurious but durable full-grain black leather that matches the studio black of the Peacephones. And at only 6 x 9 x 2 inches, it tucks in most bags quite contentedly. Inside the case you’ll find a zip pocket that’s perfect for the extra cord (read on). And for heaven’s sake, slip a business card in there, too, so some Good Samaritan can return these to you. We designed this cuddly little leather calzone to earn a cherished position in your EDC.

An incentive to spread peace in the world

The Koss + Levenger product teams understand that in the real world, people have to take calls while in the middle of their peaceful productivity, so in addition to the studio coil cord, we include a cord with an onboard mic for making calls in new-found quiet.

Of all the tools Levenger sells for peaceful productivity, Peacephones have become one of the most valuable for me, and I think they just might become that for you once you slip on this raincoat for sound.

Four Rules for Flying with a Fountain Pen

In case you didn’t get that memo that came out in 1954, fountain pens are obsolete. I know, I love them too. They are just so pleasing—the way they write with real, liquid ink, and give you that distinctive broad downstroke and thin horizontal stroke. That’s what writing by hand is all about.

But remember that fountain pens were designed decades before people were fool enough to go up in airplanes. If you carry one aloft, you’re messing with a technological Jurassic Park. But since I know some of my fellow travelers do just that, I offer four simple rules for flying with your fountain pen:

Rule No. 1: Don’t.

Rule No. 2: Since I suspect you’ll ignore Rule 1, then at least fill it up all the way—or better yet, drain it completely. Half measures are asking for inky fingers and a dry cleaning bill.

Rule No. 3: If you’re still ignoring Rule 1 and have elected the “fill it up all the way” route in Rule 2, for your safety and the safety of those around you, don’t use your pen on the plane. It won’t kill you to use a ballpoint for a few hours. Then once you’ve landed, head to the nearest restroom.

Rule No. 4: Once safely inside the restroom, open your treasured fountain pen over a sink. Don’t be fooled by seeing no ink on the pen—it’s just hiding. Rinse out the cap (and thank me when you see inky water come out). Rinse the nib and the rest of the pen, too. Dry with paper towels, making sure not to get paper fragments stuck in the nib.

The potato chip factor

When you go up in an airplane, the cabin is pressurized, but not all the way to sea level. When you reach your cruising altitude of, typically, 35,000 feet, the air inside the cabin will be at the equivalent of about 7,000 to 8,000 feet.* This is like driving over a moderately high pass in the mountains. Did you ever notice potato chip bags puffing up as you do? That’s because they were sealed at sea level; once surrounded by the thinner air in the mountains, the relatively compressed air inside the bag of chips wants out.

Which is just what the air inside your fountain pen wants. And if there’s ink in the way, that ink is coming out first—ready or not. Filling your pen as full as you can will minimize the air that can expand, but even a little air can cause your pen to become a squirt gun.

Keeping ink in the pen—then and now

In their defense, fountain pens used to be high tech themselves. Back when Thomas Edison was etching sound into wax and Gustave Eiffel was erecting an iron tower over Paris, other inventors were reinventing the way humans put words on paper. After many an inky failure, they accomplished the age-old dream of literate humans worldwide—to have a pen with its own onboard ink supply. Finally, humans would be liberated from that pesky ink pot we previously had to carry with us like an unwelcome little brother. Instead of dipping our plumes or steel nibs every line or two, ink flowed—as if from a fountain—right out the tip of our pen. Amazing.

Even if you lived in the Alps, a fountain pen would work because the air up high was thin all the time. It was the rapid change in air pressure that airplanes visited upon us that revealed the Achilles heel of the fountain pen.

Not to be left on the tarmac, the pen industry came out with the ballpoint. The ballpoint and the modern jet airliner both graduated from college shortly after World War II and started working together. The paste ink of the ballpoint, with some grease behind it, slides down its tube as you write, impervious to altitude changes. It was now safe to move about the cabin and write postcards to Mom. Newer rollerballs and gel ink ball pens behave basically the same, just using different ink formulations.

Touchdown

Now you know the facts. When you ignore Rule 1, Rules 2-4 will let you travel with your land-loving, gloriously antiquated fountain pen and avoid fuel spills. Then you can enjoy miles of real writing pleasure...when you have arrived.

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*My thanks to Captain Wayne J. Welch, Retired, of American Airlines, who explained pressure change inside airplanes. To pressurize cabins all the way to sea level would require having heavier fuselages, reducing payloads, and adding cost. Most passengers can put up with the equivalent of 7,000 to 8,000 feet for most flight times.

 

The Little Guide Returns, with Another on the Way

The calendar never ceases to startle. How did fourteen years pass in the space of what seems like four?

And yet it was, indeed, fourteen years ago that my first book was published, The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life. It was published as a lovely hardcover Levenger Press print edition (thank you, Danielle) and as an audiobook. Now, the brand-new America the Bilingual Press has reprised it as an e-book.

Just as print books did not disappear in the past fourteen years (as some had predicted), e-books and audiobooks have both become more mainstream. In what seems to me like The Golden Age of Books, many of us now partake of them in all three forms. I’m happy that the original Little Guide has now, finally, joined the e-book format.

And I’m pleased to announce that a new Little Guide—in e-book, print and audio formats—is coming soon.

Two disparate topics…or are they?

I’m currently finishing up The Little Guide to Your Bilingual Life, which America the Bilingual Press will publish later this year.

Proceeds from the books that America the Bilingual Press publishes will go to the Levenger Foundation, the family foundation that my dear father started. It has long supported literacy, and now will also support biliteracy.

This new Little Guide has been 12 years in the making, begun soon after I embarked on my own journey of learning Spanish. The responses I heard from my fellow Americans when they learned I had begun studying a language are what prompted me to begin reading about bilingualism, and interviewing what now totals hundreds of people about their own language biographies. The result was that I retired from Levenger and started a new initiative dedicated to reporting on bilingualism in America.

For longtime readers of this blog, you might well wonder how I went from running Levenger to starting a bilingual initiative. I didn’t see the connection at first myself.

But then I realized that the two occupy different points on the same continuum. Both a well-read life and a bilingual life result in our leading larger lives—more connected to others, filled with greater empathy, and more connected to ourselves.

Yearning by sort of a different name

My editor calls it my entreprenyearnial spirit (you know how editors love their words). But if so, it’s not just mine.

It’s what I’ve always sensed about Levenger customers, from those early days of selling “serious lighting for serious readers.” It’s not just about the reading lamp, it’s about the enlightenment that comes from reading.

Whether it’s reading another book or speaking another language, it must (to borrow Marie Kondo’s sweet mantra) spark joy. Just as we have choices in the way we read, we can—and should—choose to learn a language according to our time, tempo and temperament. And just as we are meant to lead well-read lives, we are meant to be bilingual.

For some of us, it may work out to having just a brush with bilingualism. For others (like me), they will adopt a second language to love for the rest of their lives. It’s however each of us chooses to live our own well-read life.

What has that been for you?

I’d love to hear how your own well-read life has evolved over the past fourteen years, and if you’ve had your own brush with bilingualism. You’re welcome to comment on this post, or you can email me at steve@americathebilingual.com.

Why I’m Glad Staples Knocked Us Off

The day I walked into Staples and saw their knockoffs, a cold shiver went down my spine. There, on a long section of aisle, were what looked just like Levenger Circa notebooks. Sitting propped up at a nice angle were our leather covers, our dividers, extra discs for enlarging notebooks, even our wide-column paper formats with our miniature illustrations of the various paper options. “Slavish” was the word that came into my head. They had slavishly copied Levenger, not even bothering to pretend that they had come up with anything original. They did what big-box stores tend to do: find innovation in the marketplace, make it cheaper, make lots of it, and blow it out the door.

Of course I thought about suing Staples. I mean, come on! Even our page formats? Plenty of customers who had also seen the products reached out to us. They asked, “Are you selling in Staples now?”

But we didn’t sue Staples. I knew too much. First off, they had more lawyers. And second, the original design for what can generically be called disc-bound notebooks was patented in Belgium in 1946.

When I saw my first disc-bound notebook, it was a little item with the brand Atoma. I saw it at a pen show, some 25 years ago. It was all plastic and kind of cheap. But the revolutionary idea was there.

Consider conventional three-ring notebooks: You pry the thing open, exposing ragged metal prongs, remove a sheet, close the rings with a finger-pinching thwack, pry it open again to put the sheet somewhere else, and snap the contraption closed again. Forcing inherently strong metal to open up and then chomp back down again is a bad idea that, like a bad gene, keeps replicating down through the generations.

The fundamentally different idea in disc-bound notebooks is to take advantage of the inherent flexibility of paper to bend easily when in a single sheet, yet be strong when united together. It’s a kind of Zen approach to notebooks.

After seeing my first disc-bound notebook back at the pen show, I went hunting the world for more examples. At the international stationery show in Frankfurt, my merchandising group and I found versions from Israel, Brazil, India, Europe, and the UK. Each had slightly different spacing of the discs and different page sizes, but it was clear the idea had traveled around the world. Yet while it had gone a long way geographically, in another way, the idea had stalled out.

In all the renditions we saw, the notebooks were trying to compete with existing, inexpensive wire notebooks sold around the world. The disc-bound notebooks were better, yes, but their parts and assembly made them inherently more expensive to make. Since the largest market worldwide is for low-cost notebooks, the innovation foundered on the rocks of conventional thinking.

But Levenger was, and still is, an oddball company in the stationery world. We sell to lawyers, engineers, teachers, scientists, doctors, professors, writers—professional people of all types whom we sometimes refer to as the hyperliterate. Our customers read and write for their livings—and typically for pleasure, too. They look to Levenger for high-quality tools of their trade. So we had a different mission than companies that had tried to sell disc-bound notebooks in the past. Ours was not to make them as inexpensive as possible in a vain effort to compete with conventional low-cost notebooks. Our mission was to see how good we could make them. How beautiful could these kinds of notebooks be, both in their function and their looks? First we would build it, and then see if they would come.

Build a Better Notebook

The first thing we did was reunite paper with its longtime friend and fellow naturalist, leather. Then we upgraded the discs. We realized they didn’t have to be plastic. We made them out of aluminum, instead—lightweight, strong, and handsome in the variety of colors we introduced. We found that the pages also turned more easily over polished aluminum, “high-speed” discs.

Finally, we improved the paper: not just the feel and performance of the paper, but the graphic layouts of pages as well.

Facing the increasing competition from digital devices, we felt an obligation to see how good paper notebooks could become. How fast and how far could paper notebooks evolve?

Thanks to thinkers like Paul Saffo and Kevin Kelly, we were aware of a pattern of technological change: that not all old technologies go away when they are obsolete. Candles are obsolete as a lighting source, yet they continue to evolve. What home or romantic dinner is complete without them?

Bicycles are another of my favorite examples of this pattern. Made obsolete a century ago by cars and motorcycles, human-powered bikes continue to evolve into ever more specialized and delightful forms.

Yet who was doing this with the paper notebook? Paper is obsolete for big data, but who doesn’t still want notebook pages to fill with inspired thought? Around our conference table, we would ask ourselves, “What company will do this if not us?”

A latte grande you can write on

Periodically, journalists would pen articles about the paperless office, often predicted, yet always just off on the horizon. Sometimes they would call me for interviews and I’d quote Steve Jobs: “The easiest way to predict the future is to invent it.” So while Silicon Valley was reinventing telephones and countless other digital devices, we were laboring over new paper notebooks.

The good news: Our expensive Circa notebooks took off. Bless our customers who would pay for better function and looks. Who says notebooks could cost only $1.99? Starbucks didn’t think coffee had to be 99 cents. And just as customers drank up the affordable luxury of a Starbucks latte, they turned with pleasure the pages of Circa notebooks from Levenger.

Staples noticed.

When they launched, they also did hip videos and social media. Clearly, they were serious about making this a significant part of their business. We felt the impact right away. Our sales went down. Then Office Depot and other notebook makers got on the disc-bound notebook parade. Martha Stewart, who had praised the Levenger notebooks on one of her platforms, liked them so much she made her own.

Our CFO was alarmed. “Shouldn’t we go after them?”

But then something else happened. Our sales started to grow again. It seemed that some people who were introduced to disc-bound notebooks at their local big-box store somehow found out about Levenger and upgraded.

Instead of suing Staples and the other followers, we wrote the words of Walt Disney on the whiteboard: “We can invent faster than they can copy.”

When innovative companies come up with better products and big players copy them at lower prices, customers win. It’s what’s supposed to happen when capitalism works well. And in the spirit of Conscious Capitalism, I salute Staples, Office Depot, Martha Stewart, and the rest of the players who copied Levenger. For they all have helped spread this advancement in heritage technology to millions of new people who would not have found it otherwise.

Editor’s note: Steve writes more about candles, bicycles, and Circa in his quasi-memoir, Holding Dear: The Value of the Real.

Reflecting on Paper

Steve Wozniak, the uber-geek co-founder of Apple, gave a speech a few years ago when I was in the audience. I’d heard he carried four or five smartphones around at any time that he was testing out, so I expected him to read from one of them, or maybe from an iPad. When “The Woz” stepped up to the microphone, he reached into his sports jacket and pulled out a sheet of paper that looked like it may have come from a yellow legal pad. He unfolded it twice, looked down at what he had written, and began to speak.

 

The Woz reminded me of something I saw every day when I was at Levenger: people who know and love the latest technology frequently love paper, too. After speaking with many of them over the years, I’ve come to believe it’s because they appreciate appropriate technology, and paper is, after all, technology. I call it heritage technology. Pens and pencils are technology, too. And virtually all of what we count today as civilization was created by writing things down by hand on paper. Only in the last one percent of our history as a species have we been using anything else. 

 

Rediscovering Comfort Food for Thought

 

Not that screens are bad. Like most of us, I love them. They have the ability to instantly morph to something different and update themselves as we direct—and often as we don’t direct. When we’re trying to concentrate on one thing, we’ll get an alert about something else. Sometimes this is welcome, but often, it is not.

 

From what I’ve seen, our chameleon screens are distracting many of us much of the time. To actually get work done, some of us, including me, try to apply some discipline. We may try to check email only at certain times of day. We may intentionally go offline. We may even try to use software to shield us from other software, although this seems like asking the family dog to watch a house full of teenagers.

 

I love my screens as much as the next knowledge worker, but I also recognize that I need some peace in order to get any real work done. When trying to get my mind around some big ideas (big for me, anyway) I don’t sit at my computer. I sit in a comfortable chair or sofa with a big sheet of blank paper before me and sketch my thoughts out on that old comfort food for thought—paper.

I’m not alone.

 

A  young friend who is an undergrad at Stanford, and a wiz on her laptop, keeps her calendar on paper. “I just find it easier,” she explained. And author Tom Kelley of IDEO keeps all his notes on half-sheets of paper—one idea per sheet—and then uses a big table to shuffle them around and arrange them into the structure for his next his book. (Shameless Commerce plug: these half-sheets of paper are pages of Levenger Circa Jr. notebooks.)

 

On paper, we can reflect, gaze out the window, and return to the same page we left. Instead of it changing, we change. If screens are about going fast, paper is about going slow. If screens are where we connect with others, paper is where we connect with ourselves.

 

A Golden Age for Creativity

 

It seems to me we live in a golden age for creativity. We have our fast updating digital screens that daily find new ways to delight us. And we also have a cornucopia of paper and pens—heritage technology ready to be called into service. When all we had was paper and pen, that technology was very limiting. But today paper and pen have been liberated to do what they do best.

 

It has been a century since horses have been freed from being beasts of burden and engines of transportation. Today horses are recreational, and help us humans recreate ourselves. The same is true for sailboats, which became obsolete about the same time horses did. And in our present age, the same evolution is happening for paper.

 

Leave the heavy production to computers with their ultra-high resolution, touch-sensitive screens. But for recreating ourselves, paper—humble, glorious, quiet paper—is waiting for us to come home.

 

Steve writes more about the value of paper in the virtual age in his book, Holding Dear: The Value of the Real.

Encore: How Some Retirees Choose Not to Retire

As those of us north of 50 come to know, retirement is not what it used to be. In fact, many older Americans are retiring from their principal professions only to pursue a different kind of passion. Often it’s one that takes us well beyond our ZIP code, and comfort zone.

The dividend that comes with age

Ann MacDougall is the president of Encore, a nonprofit organization based in California whose mission, Ann told me, is “to tap into the experience and wisdom of older adults for the greater good.” Ann describes the dues that older professionals have paid during their years of working as “a dividend of talent and experience.”

It’s a dividend, she says, that we can apply toward making communities better.

I had a chance to see some of that dividend when Lori and I visited San Miguel de Allende, a picturesque city in the central highlands of Mexico with a thriving community of American expats.

“The expat community here is all about contributing,” Robin Loving told me.

 

Robin Loving's little project

Raising money, winning trust

A successful public relations executive who sold her company when she was 51, Robin left Austin, Texas, to come to San Miguel de Allende on a calling.

“I had this notion I should be working with girls,” she says. That notion turned into a seven-year project helping a local orphanage for girls, raising a million dollars for them in the process.

“The triumph for me was getting the protective Catholic nuns to allow me to come into their orphanage and see what they needed,” Robin says.

 Robin had studied Spanish in school, but like many of us who did, never used it on a consistent basis. In San Miguel, she decided to forgo the kinds of classes she’d had the first time around and work one-on-one with a Spanish tutor instead.Part of Robin’s success is her engaging, warm nature. “As friendly as a stray dog in a meat market” is how one Texan friend describes her. But she also became adept at trading her delightful Texas twang for a very respectable Spanish accent.

“I didn’t want to hear anybody else’s mistakes,” she says. “There would be enough of my own.”

Redefining citizenship

Jennifer Lawson is another American expat in San Miguel. A retired executive from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington, D.C., she had long had on her bucket list a wish to become fluent in Spanish.

She chose a different path from Robin, undertaking a full immersion course that ran from 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. every day, and living with a local family.

Having a second language in this, her second act, “makes me feel that I’m more a citizen of the world,” Jennifer says.

Adventures in language learning

At the language school that expats Warren Hardy and his wife, Tuli, have run in San Miguel for 27 years, they see a lot of older Americans experiencing a broadening of horizon.

“These are people 60, 70, 80 years old,” says Warren, “all lifelong learners. They’re still engaged in reading, learning and growth.” Learning a second language adds to the adventure.

“When people first come to San Miguel, they’re nervous,” Warren says. “They learn enough Spanish to get by.” But as they settle in, they’re eager to learn more of the language. “It’s an evolutionary process,” he says.

“A win for our country”

Ann MacDougall, president of Encore

It also flies in the face of what Ann MacDougall of Encore calls “pervasive ageism”—the myth-guided notions that older people are rigid, fear technology, and don’t know how to learn anymore.

And the notion that older people can’t learn other languages?

“Nonsense,” Ann scoffs. Older people learn a language differently from younger people, especially children, who learn more reflexively. But older learners, according to Ann, “bring a discipline and focus to the job.”

That’s true even for older Americans who see their second-act adventure closer to home. Says Ann: “The whole notion of making our country more multilingual is a win for our country.”

Click here to hear more from Ann, Warren, Jennifer and Robin in Episode 16 of my America the Bilingual podcast, “Bless the Late-Blooming Bilinguals.”

And I’d love to hear from you about your second acts—those in play, and those you’re planning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shave and a Haircut—Two Books

Alvin with a young Barbershop Books reader.
Photo by Andy Kropa.

One of the many rewards of sitting on the board of the National Book Foundation (NBF) is having the Levenger Foundation underwrite the NBF’s annual Innovations in Reading prize. It’s a call to action to the many individuals and organizations around the country who are engaged in creative ways of promoting reading to share their programs with the NBF. The NBF has the difficult job of picking the best of these innovators as the recipient of the $10,000 prize.

This year’s winner is a program that Alvin Irby conceived, prototyped and is now scaling. Writer and editor Mim Harrison spoke with him and relays his inspiring story.

                                                                    —Steve

While he was getting a haircut one late afternoon in the barbershop across from P.S. 69 in the Bronx that he frequented, Alvin Irby noticed the fidgety first-grader. He knew the little boy: he was in the class that Alvin taught at the school across the street. It was clear to Alvin that, while he waited with his mom to get his hair cut, the youngster was bored.

If he wasn’t a teacher and the boy wasn’t his student, Alvin says he might not have come to the conclusion that he did: the little guy needed to be reading.

Alvin, who has a master’s in childhood education (one of two—he also has an M.P.A.), had an idea for how to make that happen. It was one of those stunningly simple ideas that seem so obvious in retrospect: equip barbershops with fun books for young boys to read while they wait for a haircut.

From deficit to desire

 “Girls read at significantly higher levels of proficiency,” Alvin says. “They read more, more often, and better. This is true across all ethnic groups.”

By contrast, the U.S. Department of Education has found that 85 percent of African American fourth-grade boys are not proficient in reading. Alvin believes that the deficit framework used in early literacy, focusing on what kids can’t do rather than what they are able to, has contributed to poor reading outcomes among black boys.

Additionally, he says, when the books that boys encounter in school and at home are not culturally relevant, age-appropriate, or gender responsive, many boys conclude that reading isn’t fun. (How many of us, whether as children or adults, want to read boring books?)

“I wanted to combat these deficit ways of thinking,” Alvin says, “by providing social cues and environmental factors that would help young boys of color identify as readers.”

Go see Denny Moe, a friend advised him.

“Would you like to read some books?”

Dennis Mitchell is the owner of Denny Moe’s Superstar Barbershop, located on Frederick Douglass Boulevard between 133^rd and 134^th in Manhattan. The shop became the first to be part of Alvin’s nonprofit program called Barbershop Books.

“Barbershops are one of the few places left in many black communities where people from all walks of life come together and interact on a regular basis,” Alvin says. As an undergraduate at Grinnell College in Iowa majoring in sociology, Alvin spent four years considering how people and institutions intersect in society. He sees the barbershop as an ideal place to support early literacy for young black boys.

Between his background in sociology and his second job as a stand-up comedian, Alvin appreciates the value of knowing your audience. So he took a stack of books, geared for young readers through adults, to Denny Moe’s. He sat and observed for hours. Would children and adults read books in a barbershop? Alvin didn’t know but was determined to find out. 

“I’d spend eight to 10 hours just watching to see what would happen with the books,” he said. “I’d ask the kids, ‘Would you like to read some books?’ It’s how I found out if Barbershop Books was a viable idea that had value.”

The boys in the 4 to 8 age range were most likely to interact with the books. The next challenge was to figure out what books boys really wanted to read.

Captain Underpants, meet Gross Greg

Another stunningly simple solution: Alvin asked them. The responses he received echoed the results of Scholastic’s children’s survey, which revealed that the number-one thing children look for when choosing a book is one that makes them laugh—like Captain Underpants does.

Alvin further validated the results by writing a rhyming picture book of his own, Gross Greg. He sent the manuscript to a few kindergarten and first-grade teachers and asked them to read it to their students. Once he heard that it scored high on the laugh meter and had students “rolling on the floor,” he published it independently.

Barbers as early literacy advocates

Barbershop Books now outfits its partner barbershops with a small, colorful bookcase filled with carefully curated softcover books that the boys and girls can read while they wait. Some wait for a haircut; others wait for their dad, or brother, or uncle. Barbers at participating barbershops encourage the children and their family members to read. They also talk to the boys about reading. The barbers become male reading models who create early positive reading experiences for young black boys.

“Sometimes the family members that the children come with read to them,” says Alvin, “but for the most part, the boys read the books by themselves.”

Currently about 87 barbershops across 26 cities in 15 states and the District of Columbia participate in the Barbershop Books program, which has a goal of reaching 800 barbershops in 20 target cities over the next three years. The mayor of Minneapolis recently funded the implementation of Barbershop Books programs in 10 Minneapolis barbershops. Chicago, Oakland, Baltimore and Philadelphia are just a few of the target cities in which the program plans to expand.

Barbershops wishing to participate need only have space for the little bookcase, at least 40 young boys who come into the shop every month, and a willing owner. (If you would like to connect with Barbershop Books, visit barbershophooks.org or email info@barbershopbooks.org.)

Cheerio

Barbershop Books’ current headquarters “is my living room,” says Alvin with a laugh. “There are literally hundreds of children’s books and packing boxes everywhere.”

He buys the books from Scholastic and welcomes participation by other publishers. NFL defensive end Jarvis Jenkins led a read-aloud at Harlem barbershops in 2016. The support of individual donors in combination with local funders such as school districts, churches and local municipalities help keep the venture growing, with one dollar equating to 27 minutes of reading—an ROI that Warren Buffett might love.

Alvin would like to attract a national sponsor. “Cheerios would be perfect,” he says.

The entrepreneurial reader

As a young child growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, Alvin didn’t like reading and didn’t identify as a reader. It just wasn’t something he or his friends did.  But his mom, an elementary-school teacher, gave him reading lessons and ensured that he learned to read proficiently.

It was as a teenager that Alvin’s passion for reading was ignited. As the student council president at his high school, Alvin developed a keen interest in reading that inspired him to create a reading incentive program, for which he acquired an $810 grant from the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Little Rock.

Barbershop Books is, he feels, a doable idea that can make a difference. “But ideas just stay ideas until someone executes,” he says. “There’s always farther to go when you have a vision.”

And a love of books.

                                                                                        —Mim

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Let’s make some little doves”

 

 

Say “let’s make some little doves” to someone in Spanish, and you may soon be making some popcorn (palomitas de maiz—little doves of corn). In Episode 10 of my America the Bilingual podcast, I chat with two native Spanish speakers from Mexico, my producer Fernando Hernandez and friend Mario Bravo, about favorite dichos—those sayings in different languages that make the language sing.

Have a listen to our conversation. Then I’d love to have you share with me your favorite saying from another language you know, or admire, or aspire to.

And if you’d like to learn about the history of the Spanish language, including why it’s so wonderfully easy to spell, I recommend The Story of Spanish by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mother of Five, Disrupter of Monolingualism

Disrupting is a positive term in business, but for a young mother, “disrupting” was not a term friends used approvingly when they watched how she was raising her five children.

Why on earth was this American mom pulling her children of out of their good schools in the USA and taking them to Italy for six months at a stretch? And not just once, but every other year for six years.

In Episode 7 of American the Bilingual, Bettina Young, a lover of literacy (she’s been a bright light at the Literacy Coalition of Palm Beach County) and a lover of languages, tells why she did it, and the consequences for her children as a result.

Did she disrupt her children’s education, as some disapproving friends feared, by having them live in a country where they were surrounded by another language? One of Bettina’s children weighs in on that. So does Dr. Guadalupe Valdés, a professor at Stanford University who conducts research into bilingualism, with this surprising observation: language, she says, is not a school subject.

Listen on iTunes by clicking here: America the Bilingual by Steve Leveen on iTunes

Or on SoundCloud, by clicking here.

As a parent, I wonder what might have been

When Lori and I had our two sons, we dreamed of taking them to live in a Spanish-speaking country so that we could become fully bilingual as a family.

But our business was growing; the boys were busy in school and summer camp. Their grandparents, aunts and uncles loved having them around. Life was good, so maybe next year, and then next year, and suddenly our boys were off to college.

While we did travel with them, we did not give our boys The Gift of bilingualism. I’m in awe of parents like Bettina and her husband, Greg, who did choose the bolder path, which in the end, has such sweet rewards.

If you know some families with school-age children, you might pass this episode on to them. ¿Quien sabe que pasara? Who knows what might happen?