Former Marin resident fulfills promise to late wife to learn how to read

By Kerry Benefield

The Press Democrat

James Heard worked his way through school, first in Marin County and then in Santa Rosa. He graduated from Montgomery High in the mid-1960s before finding steady and rewarding work in carpentry.

He met Carol Lockhart when they were both teenagers working at a car wash on Santa Rosa Avenue. They later worked at a cannery in Sebastopol.

They married and had a daughter they named Margaret Marie. It was a good life.

But for years Carol wanted something of James, wanted him to do something for her. For him, actually.

In fact, she long ago made him promise.

Carol wanted James to learn to read.

“She was going to try to teach me herself, but I thought it would be kind of … I thought it would create arguments,” he said. “But she probably could have.”

Now he is keeping that promise he made so many years ago.

When Carol Heard died in 2020, she and James had been married 52 years.

Today, James Heard is 80 years old and is 11 months into the Adult Literacy Program at the Sonoma County Library.

Today he is learning sight words and tackling short biographies of famous Americans.

Today, James Heard is reading.

There are approximately 43 million adults in the United States who struggle to read — defined loosely as comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Of that group, approximately 8.4 million adults are unable to successfully determine the meaning of sentences, read relatively short texts to locate a single piece of information, or complete simple forms, according to the NCES.

The cost of our nation’s failure to teach tens of millions of people basic literacy skills is both public and personal.

A 2020 Gallup survey on behalf of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy found that low levels of adult literacy could be costing the U.S. as much $2.2 trillion a year.

But there can also be a personal stigma and shame associated with illiteracy which is hard to put a price on.

Heard’s answer was to constantly work.

“When I was young I thought, ‘I will make it work some kind of way,’” he said. “I made sure I had a job all the time. That kind of kept me going. Through my career with jobs and stuff like that, filling out applications, I would have my wife do it but before I met her I’d have a friend do it.”

Even in leisure, Heard had to find work-arounds for his inability to read.

An avid fisherman, Heard would always drive on fishing trips — so his friends could read maps and road signs.

“They did a lot of the co-piloting,” he said.

The stigma associated with illiteracy is real, he said.

“I depended a lot on other people. They helped me out as much as they could,” he said. “But it would embarrass me.”

It was a year ago he signed on with the Adult Literacy program through the Sonoma County Library. He was paired with tutor Midge Binnewies, 85, of Oakmont.

Eleven months into their partnership, Heard was reading a synopsis of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” on a Thursday morning at the Sonoma County Library in Rincon Valley.

“He’s so smart. He comprehends so well,” Binnewies said.

What makes Heard and his commitment all the more remarkable is that he and Binnewies, who has a background in special education, both believe he has severe dyslexia, a learning disability that affects the ability to read, spell and write.

Other than repeating the third grade, Heard can’t recall much education intervention on his behalf.

He does remember doing just fine in math and art classes and then going to some specific classes at Montgomery “for people who didn’t read.”

It’s Binnewies’ theory that seven decades ago, when Heard was making his way through elementary school and beyond, diagnoses of learning disabilities were exceedingly rare. So with a dose of grit, charm and smarts, Heard made his way through the education system and earned a diploma, all without acquiring basic and essential reading and writing skills.

“They just kept passing me through,” he said.

“Later on in years, I cut school a lot because there wasn’t a need to go there because I wasn’t getting anything out of it,” he said.

And if he did go to class?

“You just kind of sit back quietly and sometimes hope they don’t even ask you a question because you don’t know it anyway,” he said. “It was kind of tough to be honest with you.”

Heard offset that deficit by being a relentless worker. He found carpentry and discovered that he was good at it because “most of it is math.” If possible, he kept his lack of reading skills to himself.

“I found a job that I loved. It wasn’t really that hard,” he said.

If colleagues and employers did know about his inability to read, they didn’t much care because he was good, he said.

“I was probably one of the better workers there, so they helped me through because of that,” he said.

And at home, Carol paid the bills, looked after medical appointments and prescriptions and kept the family books.

When Carol died four years ago, Margaret stepped in to help her dad out. Still, James wanted to make good on that promise.

“Once she passed, I figure I should have did that,” he said. “So I told my daughter I was going to take a class at the JC.”

He and Margaret looked into it, but he got nervous. The education system hasn’t been good to Heard.

“If you go to the JC, it’s class again and you are stuck in the same thing you were stuck in the first place,” he said. “I was kind of excited but then I was kind of scared because it was like going back to school again.”

So they found the Adult Literacy Program through the library. Tutoring was free, he just had to commit to six months of one-on-one lessons.

He signed up and was assigned a partner in Binnewies.

“Midge is a really good teacher,” he said. “I don’t see how she’s so determined.”

Binnewies is one of about 45 volunteers assigned partners through the Sonoma County reading program. About half those are English learners and half are native speaking adults learning reading and writing skills, said Joe Ayala, an adult literacy associate.

The program has a waiting list — for those seeking tutors and those wanting to teach — because the program tries to link tutors with learners at specific branches, Ayala said. So sometimes the numbers don’t match up quite right.

“We are always looking for tutors at the Santa Rosa Library,” he said.

The program offers a training program that can be taken over Zoom. No teaching experience is required.

What is required is generosity.

“It’s very hard to ask for help,” Ayala said. “Tutors just need to be willing to be patient and kind with their learner.”

The minimum commitment is six months, but pairs sometimes work together for much longer.

“We have pairs who have lasted a long time, many, many years together,” Ayala said.

Last Thursday, Heard and Binnewies went over sight words, with Heard using a pencil, and sometimes the eraser, to help him see where sounds should be blended. They reviewed a list of words he would encounter in their next reading.

Binnewies marvels at Heard’s determination. He spends hours at home working on his skills between their weekly meetings.

“It’s very, very hard,” she said of developing reading skills as an adult.

But as a teacher, she’s no pushover. She stops Heard when he moves too fast through words and make small mistakes. She insists he go back and grasp the word.

At one point recently, he was misreading “these,” turning it into “those.”

“Let me show you, James,” Binnewies said.

“Oh, I’m putting the ‘O’ in there again, aren’t I?” he said.

He was. They went over it. Then in the next sentence he rolled right through the word “chimpanzee” with zero hesitation.

In the gray backpack that sits at Heard’s feet are a handful of books. There are short, elementary-level biographies of national figures, like Rachel Carson and Bayard Rustin. Next to those are a few workbooks and library-issued readers.

But there is also a tome.

In his backpack, Heard carries around “Muhammad Ali, His Life and Times” by Thomas Hauser, all 500-plus pages of it.

It’s his goal to read it. So he carries it as a reminder of his commitment.

And once Heard is committed, he’s all in. Look no further than that long ago promise to his wife.

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