Although he could neither read nor write, Rich could match the city name on his bill of lading to the city name on his map. Highways always had numbers. Rich could understand numbers, so getting to the city was no problem. Jeanne Whitehead photo
Learning to read at 45
He is embarrassed to talk about himself even though most would agree his is a success story. We will call him Rich.
Rich, 45, and a trucker for the past 30 years, has taken a break from the workforce. He is learning to read, a decision he made shortly after applying for a job at Midland Transport.
“Things have changed,” says Rich. “I have a clean abstract, a clean police record—never had any problems crossing the border. And it used to be that those were the things that were important. A driving test and a handshake and you were on the road. But now they want you to fill out an application an inch thick. And now they have computers in every truck.”
Rich began his life as a trucker at age 15. It wasn’t his first job. That came at age 12 when he should have been in school.
“We lived in Toronto then. I worked in a corner store, stocking shelves for $25 a week. And I earned another $25 a week pumping gas.”
Determined to leave school
Rich’s parents knew that he was skipping classes, although they would drive him to the front door of the school and watch him go in.
They didn’t see him going out the back.
At one point, a police officer drove Rich to school. It made no difference. Rich was determined to get to his work. He went in the front door, out the back, and hurried to his job.
“I just didn’t like school,” he recalls. “Being inside all day, sitting still at a desk, that just wasn’t for me.”
Although Rich really didn’t attend school often, didn’t pass exams, he did acquire some basic numeracy skills. He also learned to recognize capital letters. He just couldn’t blend those letters them into words. But he passed into the next grade, year after year after year.
At age 14, he went before the board of education whose members realized Rich was not about to become a scholar, and so they granted him permission to drop out. Then they gave him a job as a dishwasher in their cafeteria.
“I still remember the address, 6900 Yonge Street. They were paying me $65 a week. I left after one week and got a job as a shipper-receiver for $150.”
Driving a truck at 15
Then came a job moving household furniture, and then the job driving a truck at age 15.
At age 16, Rich got his driver’s license. “There was a test, but they gave me the choice of taking it as a written test or an oral test. So they read it for me.”
In his 20s, Rich became a long distance trucker hauling loads in Canada and the U.S., from coast to coast. It’s a job he held for years,
“I couldn’t read a sentence,” says Rich. “But I could recognize that the word on a map matched a word on my bill of lading. And highways always have numbers, and I understood numbers, so getting from one city to another wasn’t a problem.
“If I was in a new city I could always go to a police station or fire station. There would always be someone there who would help me.”
“Logs were always numbers, so I could complete my logs no problem.”
When new requirements were put in place, such as the need for truckers to be licensed specifically for vehicles with air brakes, Rich was grandfathered: a written test was not required for truckers who had been driving vehicles with air brakes for years.
So, for more than three decades, Rich drove trucks, supporting his family, and only occasionally changing jobs.
Employers just wanted experience
“If I was applying for a job, I’d take in my resume, but mostly employers were interested in my experience. If I had to fill out an application, I’d take it home, or out to the car and call someone to help me.”
His last job ended when his employer went out of business. That employer did things the old way, but now most trucking companies are doing things the new way.
When Rich applied for his job with Midland and was asked to fill out the thick application on site, he knew this was the ways things are. He knew most trucks are now equipped with computers—and he knew the time had come when he would have to learn to read.
“I hemmed and hawed for probably about a month,” Rich says. “And then I got up the nerve to make the call.”
That call was to the Digby Adult Learning Association (DALA), an organization that provides education and career upgrading skills to local adults. Some if its clients, like Rich, are there for basic literacy training. Others are working on their high school equivalency.
Reading phonetically
Rich has been a student at DALA since the beginning of March, receiving one-on-one tutoring and doing lots of homework.
He is learning to read phonetically and consults his dictionary whenever he comes to a word that gives him difficulty.
His tutor says his progress has been remarkable.
Rich can now read and write words that would have been indecipherable to him before.
“It used to be I would ignore signs—and I couldn’t read the [news] paper. Now I find myself reading every sign I see. And I can’t read every word in the paper, but I can read enough to make sense of a story.
“When I came to DALA, I hoped I’d be in and out of here in a couple of months,” he said. He now knows it will take longer and he is prepared to do the work that is required.
DALA executive director Clyde Baltzer is encouraging Rich to return to DALA in September. If Rich continues at the pace he has been learning, then he will complete his grade school education well before next June.
Rich says he would love to complete high school as well, but for now, that is a long-term goal. His short-term goal is to learn to read and write and master basic computer skills so he can return to the workforce.
“I want to be able to walk into that trucking company and sit down and read and write that inch-thick application.”
