When I reached about third grade, I was drawn to a certain special shelf at the Kellogg Public Library that held a series of books and I decided I was going to read every one of them. These were the Nancy Drew books. Each mystery took me to River Heights, into the world of Nancy Drew and her family and friends who would often stumble on a mystery to solve, or would get some help find the mystery from her lawyer father Carson Drew. However she would find her mystery, the words on the page sucked you into Nancy’s world. I remember some of the books described her hair as titian. I always wondered what color titian really was…but I guess I knew she was some kind of blond. And she drove a blue convertible -- Silver Valley Girl/Silver Valley Stories.

DFO: As a youngster, I read almost all of Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz series. There must have been at least 20 of them. But the book that made the greatest impact was Bernard Malamud's "The Natural." It was the first grownup sports book that I read. An arrogant freshman English teacher named Parley Melvin Anglin assigned the book to me b/c he felt it was time that I put away my childish reader. I never liked the man. But he was right about the book.

Question: Did any book play a pivotal role in your formative years?

---

---