As a child in the 1960’s and 70’s, when my parents were in graduate school, my Dad, Mom and younger Sister Leah moved in and out of various rental apartments around the University of Chicago campus.  Money was tight, material things were not much of a priority, but from my earliest memory, we always had lots of books in our home - used books, paperback books, and textbooks on every subject imaginable.  It was not uncommon to see passages in books underlined, comments penned in the margins, dog eared pages turned down at the corner hopefully marking the reader’s return.  Our 13-inch black and white television with rabbit ear antennae, had three main stations, and was usually off while the adults read and discussed the events of the day.  My Mom, a lifelong reader regularly read every night to me and Leah, even during law school when I saw her reading heavy leather-bound law books for hours each night, there was always time for a bedtime story.  The Trumpet of the Swan, Charlotte’s Web and other classics were read and re-read to me and Leah when we were growing up.  

 

In the late 1960’s, Dad wrote and published two children’s books which were beautifully illustrated with watercolor paintings by family friend and artist Lucy Hawkinson.  My Dad’s stories titled “Just One More Block” and “Lost Bear, Found Bear” featured me and Leah as small children.  In Just one More Block, Leah knocks over my castle made of blocks and instead of getting angry, I share my blocks with her to make a castle of her own.  In Lost Bear, Found Bear, Leah loses a precious object and the hunt to find it begins.  I was too little at the time to understand that the publisher had covered up pictures of Leah the toddler, who was originally drawn without clothes, and her lost pacifier in one of the stories was changed to the more politically correct lost teddy bear.  Leah and I spent many a Saturday afternoon trailing our Dad, a lifetime educator, through used bookstores around Chicago seeking treasure.  The endless maze of passageways created by bookcases full of books, at first provided only a physical playground, for as a young boy, I was not very interested in reading.  Energetic, athletic, always seeking adventures outdoors, and years before Attention Deficit Disorder was a thing, I simply didn’t like sitting still to do much of anything, let alone to read a book.

 

At age 13, while on a rare family vacation in Acapulco Mexico with my Paternal Grandparents Ben and Freddie, at night in the hotel there was not much to do except read and my Dad was reading a popular espionage thriller of the day called The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum.  Feeling restless in the cramped hotel room shared by the four of us, my Dad said in his characteristic low-key way, “Now, you can choose to do whatever you want, but if you just read a few pages, I bet you ten dollars you won’t be able to put the book down”.  Already interested in the James Bond movies, I was also influenced by my Grandfather Ben who had been an intelligence officer in the Army during World War II and Korea.  As a juvenile officer with the Cook County Sheriff’s Department in the 1960’s, I was vaguely aware Grandpa Ben at times carried a badge and gun.  Interestingly, in the 1930’s Ben had been persecuted by the FBI for being Jewish and a suspected Socialist. He was arrested, court-martialed and eventually was exonerated and received a pardon from President Franklin Roosevelt restoring his full rank and pension.  

 

It was always an adventure being on a trip with Ben and Freddie; they were seasoned travelers. The sights, sounds and smells of Mexico were exotic and I pretended I was a spy in a foreign capital, embarking on a secret and dangerous mission.  It was during this trip to Mexico, trying to encourage me to read, that Dad offered me $10 cash if I would read the first 100 pages of Ludlum’s book.  Ten dollars was not an insignificant amount of money to me in the mid-1970’s and I took him up on the challenge.  Dad promptly tore the paperback book in half where he had left off reading and handed me the first half of the book.  This creative act of a challenge with monetary reward, transformed reading for me from a chore into a gift, and the unconventional tearing the book in half, combined with the great writing and intrigue in the Ludlum book – I was hooked.  I read the first 100 pages in one night and finished the book in a few days.  For the first time, I experienced that feeling of reading a page-turner that you couldn’t put down, feeling like you were inside the story and characters, and sad when it ended.  From here I read every book Ludlum wrote, and I began my journey into the fantasy world of espionage and intrigue that would eventually lead me to a career in the FBI and my own secret missions in far off places.  More importantly, I became a lifelong voracious reader, and I still love a good espionage thriller.