COAL INSPIRED LIFELONG LOVE OF READING
Clive McFarlane
Worcester Telegram, Massachussettes
April 27 2007
Fifth-grade teacher ‘was the breakthrough’
She had black eyes and black hair and her teachers would often gush
over them.
"Come over here, Vicky," they would say. "Look at those eyes," they
would say. "Look at that hair."
One of her teachers had a fondness for white gloves, and would usually
send her on errands to the nearby dry cleaning shop to drop off or
pick up her gloves.
In all cases, little Victoria Hagopian would oblige, smiling, feeling
loved, feeling needed.
But those moments did little to soothe her building frustration of
not being able to read. Her parents were Armenian and that was the
language spoken at home.
At every grade, after entering Canterbury Street School as a
kindergartener, she would be told that she had two weeks or so to
demonstrate she could do the work, or she would be held back.
So she learned how to cheat, but wasn’t really good at it.
In the third grade, the teacher divided the class into two groups,
giving each a different assignment. She copied from both groups and
they marched her back to the second grade.
She bawled her black eyes red, until they took her back to third grade
and told her she had one more chance. She made it through that year
by the "skin of my teeth."
It helped that she had fallen in love with the cutest boy in class
and couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from him.
It wasn’t getting any easier, though. The written word kept eluding
her like an unfair hide-and-seek partner.
Then one day in the fifth grade, it happened. She was sitting, staring
and listening intently as her teacher read a book on anthracite,
how it was dug out of the ground and how it was called coal.
Coal? Her dad had just bought some for the house, and she had watched
him store it in the cellar. "So that is where it came from," she
thought. She couldn’t contain herself. She wanted to grab the book
from the teacher.
Just as how heat and pressure over a long period can turn vegetable
matter into coal, perhaps her mind had been steadily sorting the jigsaw
puzzle of the lessons she had tried to learn in school up to that
point, and "coal" was the piece that finally brought understanding.
Whatever the explanation, the moment was magical.
"That was the day I became a student," she said. "That was the day
things began to get interesting, when I found out what we can learn
from books."
She was a three-times-a-week regular at the library after that.
Mystery stories became her favorite genre, and her father would often
find her late at night, her feet close to the stove, reading.
"I know," he would say to her. "You are only going to read one more
chapter."
When she left Canterbury after the eighth grade, she wrote a "prophesy"
story in which she predicted what her classmates would do for a
living. It was a funny piece that was circulated in the school long
after she was gone.
She had wanted to be stenographer, but she had to put those ambitions
on hold when her mother died shortly after Victoria had enrolled at
Commerce High School. She quit high school to help her father raise
her four younger siblings. (She eventually got her diploma in 1976
by attending night school.)
"Playing mummy," as she called it, was a tough life, but she always
had her mystery stories.
"The girls at the library would look out for me," she said. "If they
find a book that they think I would like, they would save it for me."
Victoria is now 91 years old. Her eyes are failing her, so she doesn’t
read as often as she would like to.
And of all the memories that she has compiled in her years, the
one that is her constant companion these days is the one of her
fifth-grade teacher at Canterbury, Ms. Willie R. Higginbotham, who
passed away last year at the age of 108.
"I can still see her in front of me," Victoria said. "She was the
breakthrough. She opened the door."