Pueblo
In a tiny schoolhouse in a tiny Oklahoma town, the moment fourth-grader Richard Hartgraves dreaded had arrived. The spelling bee.
It was his turn and he stood, knees trembling. The handful of other students giggled and snickered. The boy shuffled his feet on the worn wooden floor. The teacher, a stern man, stared. The youngster felt his throat tighten. His mind was tangled.
The word was “ball.”
“B-L-A-L,” he said quietly.
The snickering got louder. Try again, the teacher demanded.
“L-A-L-B,” the boy whispered.
Life could not, it seemed, get any worse. And yet he knew it would.
Later that day, at home, the teacher would stare and shake his head again. The teacher was Hartgraves’ father. He did not know why his son was like that, why he couldn’t spell even the simplest of words. He only knew that the boy did not perform in school like any of the other kids.
Six decades later, Hartgraves, 71, still cringes at the memory.
“I spelled ‘ball’ every way possible except the right way,” he said. “I knew the letters but couldn’t get them in the right order. And the longer I stood there … the worse it got.”
Counselor’s words were “devastating”
A few years later, after Hartgraves turned in a staggeringly bad performance on a standardized test, a high school counselor in that Oklahoma town of Ada called him into the office.
“He told me I better plan on working with my back because I wouldn’t have much luck with my brain,” Hartgraves said Thursday in his Pueblo West home. “It was a devastating thing to hear.”
Then the man with the gray hair glanced up above his desk in the small den in his basement and his eyes rested on a pair of plaques hanging on the wall. One was the Governor’s Incentive Award for outstanding innovation in education. The other was an award given to the Counselor of the Year for Secondary Education.
Both bore the name of Richard R. Hartgraves.
And for just a moment, he smiled.
Hartgraves has a severe form of dyslexia. It is a battle he has fought with his mind since those earliest days in Oklahoma, a fight with a neurological disorder that shuts down the normal progression of information, ensnaring thoughts, jumbling the order of things and making reading, writing, spelling and math a monumental struggle.
And though the fight continues even today, Hartgraves knows he has won.
He is an accomplished painter, woodworker and craftsman. He spent more than 20 years as a guidance counselor at Pueblo County High School. He has a bachelor’s degree from a small college in Oklahoma and a master’s degree in counseling from Western State College in Gunnison. He has a vocational specialist degree, too, a post-master’s project from Colorado State University that is considered just shy of a doctoral program.
Why didn’t he push on for the Ph.D.?
“I’d have to write a dissertation,” he said, and he smiled again.
Because the frustration still lives. The frustration of writing the letter “d” when he meant to write “b.” The bewilderment of knowing a word but being unable to wrestle it onto a piece of paper and having to settle for using a similar word.
“Little Cedar” is a tale of cousins in the 1940s
Later this month in bookstores around the country, a 129-page story will appear on the shelves. “Little Cedar” is a tale of cousins who spent a summer at their grandparents’ home in Antlers, Okla., in the late 1940s. It’s a story about a time when kids entertained themselves not with a video game joystick but with an actual stick snapped from a tree and used to thump a beehive just to see if they could escape a stinging swarm.
The book was written by Hartgraves. It took him 20 years.
“I wrote it longhand,” he said. “I’d write and then rewrite and then throw it away and start again. Over and over and over. I’d want to write ‘from’ and it would come out ‘form.”‘
Through it all was his daughter-in-law, Gina Hartgraves, and wife, Jean. Both of them read and re-read and edited the work in progress.
“A word like ‘was’ became ‘saw,”‘ Jean said. “He wrote ‘how’ as ‘who.’ I saw the struggle. And I’m so proud of him.”
Their home is filled with his woodworking projects. On a mantel sits a meticulously crafted scale-model stagecoach, complete with a tiny shotgun laid across the stage driver’s seat and red felt seats for the passengers. In the basement rests a fascinating Rube Goldberg-like marble machine that guides the small ball through four levels of complicated chutes.
Woodworking, Hartgraves said, unlocked the door.
“Dyslexics want to see how things work, how things fit together,” he said. “From that we can see how words fit together.”
Sometime after his book’s Nov. 20 release, Hartgraves will sit at a table in a Barnes & Noble store in Pueblo and sign his work. And he’ll think about his father, who died in 1968 and is buried in Antlers, about 80 miles from the old schoolhouse.
“I tried so hard to please my dad when I was a kid,” he said. “He always wondered what was wrong. Now I’ve written a book. I wish he could see it.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
