From The Memory-Box

By Cathy Caudill

Since I've come home for the weekend, I've been able to retrieve the article that I've been wanting to analyze since the class started: a feature story that was written about my family as we went on trips to the library.

It was published on September 24, 1995 (I was in the second grade). The bolded headline reads "A real page-turner: Old-fashioned trip to the library still excites this family" on the now-yellowed front page of the Charleston Sunday Gazette-Mail's Life section, written by Bob Schwarz.

He came across our story while chatting with the local library's desk workers, who informed him that there was a mother who came every few weeks with her four children and a box, which they fill to the top with library books to check out.

The article is so ancient I won't be able to post an online-link (back in 1995 the news was still almost exclusively restricted to paper and television), so I will provide the lead myself: 

"Gloriann Caudill's husband is an ophthalmologist, an eye surgeon who performs modern miracles in the way of vision repair. The family lives up on Fox Chase (error: spelled Foxchase), not in the biggest house in this neighborhood of big houses, but in one which commands the best overlook of Charleston.

She can give her children anything she wants.

Instead, she gives them a trip to the library."

For the most part I like the lead, but the tone strikes me as odd. It sounds as if we are millionaires, which is far from true. Had we been given "anything she [wanted]," my parents would either be in massive debt, or have doomed all four of us to an in-state university later in life.

The writer had ridden around with us in our van that afternoon. I don't recall him asking us any questions (the feature itself was centered to my mother and her quotes), but he did seem to quietly observe us. He noticed that at first we would have a mini-quarrel about once every ten minutes, but after the library we were well-behaved as we read in the back seat. I had a stack of animal fact-books on my knees, and the pulitzer-worthy quote he caught from me was, "Oh, look at the gibbon!"

Overall, though, the article is good. It does not dwell simply on the fact that my mother encouraged reading, but also accurately illustrated my family's values. For example, TV and video-games weren't forbidden, but they were limited. We didn't have televisions in our bedrooms, but we were allowed to read as late as we liked, and as a result much of our evenings were committed to reading. He also observed that while our parents didn't pressure us to achieve all A's in school, they fostered a love for learning within us. "Stress will come later," he quoted my mother. This love of learning might be most apparent at the library, as my mother was the only person in the town who would bring in "an oversized supermarket box made to hold 30 dozen eggs" and leave us to fill it up with books from the children's section. 

Even though I'm reading this article 14 years later, I can see he had observed the most important things my parents did that significantly impacted my upbringing (which I'm almost astonished that a man who spent a single afternoon with us was able to achieve): while there was always an emphasis on learning and Christian-ethics, there was always a time to play. I've never had a sense that they were over-bearing; education wasn't forced down my throat; rather, I was immersed in it, so I was able to chew it over and learn to love it on my own.

If anyone finds themselves at a smaller local newspaper, finding a story about a local family might be an interesting angle to pursue. After all, nothing gets a subscriber more excited than flipping open the paper to a familiar face and having that hey-I-know-them! moment. I remember when I arrived at class the following Monday, half of the students and the teacher had a clipping of the feature in hand, that doubtlessly their mothers tore out.

Just make sure you have your facts written down properly. My five-year-old sister Diana could barely spell her name at that time, but she was mortified when she saw that she was printed as "Dianna."