In my 72 years man and boy I have gotten to watch two guys go from seemingly normal guys to royal pains in the ass and it was a beautiful thing to behold.
This is because they learned to read as older men. Yes. Read. This is what you are presumably doing right now. I seldom post pictures so it's unlikely you are here to look at them. This blog is like Playboy Magazine where people read it to check out the interesting articles.
One of them was back in the army and even back then I could not figure out how a person could have made Staff Sergeant without knowing how to read. Then I saw his Class As and figured he had simply been promoted in combat during Vietnam.
The other was early on in my career and it was a tugboat captain. He had both grandfathered his license and had upgraded by taking his exams orally. Years and years ago the Coast Guard permitted tug captains and others to do this.
Some of permitting people to take orals was a carryover from years gone by when a number of people never even got an opportunity to go to school. If I recall the tug skipper grew up on a tug his father ran and his father couldn't read because he grew up on a boat.
(Later I worked with an Ordinary Seaman that could not read and he had for some reason not been able to upgrade because he was colorblind. . He had some sort of a perception problem and tutors and God knows what else could not help him. He was a good and valuable man and very highly respected although he never learned to read)
Anyway, the Staff Sergeant got one of the college educated draftees to teach him to read. I believe the guy had some sort of primary school teaching degree. I arrived at he unit while he was still learning and noticed he was carrying kid's books.
I did ask one of his guys once I settled in and he grinned and told me he was learning to read. I did notice that the kids books got replaced with older kids books and then basic adult reading over the next couple of months. I guess he was a fast learner.
On the tug, I heard the skipper one day said to the Chief Engineer "I got a bottle of good whisky that can be yours if you teach me to read."
The Chief took the job on and by all accounts it didn't take long. Shortly after I left the boat for several months and when I returned I noticed ht skipper had his nose in a Coast Guard study guide and a couple of time he's ask "What's that word?" and point. That tapered to nothing and the skipper later went in to the Coast Guard Regional Exam Center and upgraded his license on his own.
Both of these guys got to be a pain in the ass in a way because after they learned to read you could never keep their nose out of a book.
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