Judy Reese

Judy grew up in a Catholic school system that taught reading by sight method — no phonics, no sounding out words. Flash cards were her “own little hell.” If she got the word wrong, her hair was pulled. Her father, taking pity on her, painted little eyes into the O’s on her wooden word blocks so she could get at least one right. The negative reinforcement taught her to hate reading. She was always in the last reading group, and she knew it.

After five grades in a big city school, Judy’s family moved to a rural community with a consolidated school and no library — serviced only by a bookmobile from the county seat 15 miles away. It was there, in high school, that she discovered algebra and geometry. Numbers made sense in a way words never had. She joined the Future Teachers Organization, imagining she might teach something she actually liked.

A student teacher changed everything. She introduced the class to the Dewey Decimal System — and Judy was captivated. A system that organized all human knowledge into ten categories, each subdivided further? This, she decided, was what she wanted to do. She wanted to become a
librarian.

The path was not direct. Judy turned down a $500 college scholarship — which would have covered her first year’s tuition — because she didn’t believe she could handle a full course load of reading. She applied to the Cleveland Public Library instead, only to be asked what books she had
read. “I didn’t want to READ the books,” she recalls. “I just wanted to put them back on the shelf where they belonged.” She did not get the job.
Years later, Judy made it to Lansing Community College — one or two classes at a time. She graduated with honors. It was there, in an honors English class, that she learned she was dyslexic. She had chosen dyslexia as the subject of her term paper and discovered herself in the research: the reversed numbers, the transposed phrases (“bag of dog food” becoming “dog of bag food” for weeks), the way left and right had no meaning for her while east and west — guided by the sun — always did.
Armed with that understanding, Judy became a literacy volunteer. She helped an older woman earn her GED. She volunteered for the library’s Literacy Program and for English as a Second Language classes for migrant workers. The child who once hated reading had found a way to help others love it.