Private John Daniel Ramey
Until a few days ago, Private John Daniel Ramey was a jughead. That, at any rate, is what the permanent cadre of the Army school for illiterates near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, calls the students, and up to. very recently Ramey was one of them. The school, officially known as the Special Training Unit of the 3384th Service Unit, is a remarkable place at which an absolute illiterate can, in about three months’ time, pick up the equivalent of a fifth-grade or sixth-grade facility in reading, writing, and arithmetic. The Pennsylvania S.T.U. now turns out brand-new literates at the rate of two hundred a week, and since its activation, on July 12, 1943, the school has graduated a hundred and five classes, or something over thirteen thousand men.
The Pennsylvania unit is not the only Army school for illiterates. It could not possibly handle the traffic alone. Most of us have come to take literacy for granted, and yet there are still five million illiterates in the United States, one person in every thirty. In due course the able-bodied men among the illiterates have been drafted. There are, in all, fourteen Special Training Units like the one in Pennsylvania to take care of them. So far, these schools have taught more than two hundred and fifty thousand men to read and write. That is the equivalent of seventeen American divisions; thirteen divisions won the Battle of the Bulge, six took Okinawa. In a sense, at least, by a kind of displacement, the men whom the Army’s schools have salvaged from illiteracy have made possible some great victories. But far more important than that, these schools have given a very large number of Americans a marvelous new skill. The Special Training Units have opened blind eyes; they have given men, quite suddenly, the thrilling, frightening trick of knowledge.
To the soldiers of the permanent cadres that run these units, the excitement implicit in their work is understandably dimmed by everyday living with men much less educated than they themselves are. The members of the cadre at the Pennsylvania school cannot be blamed, really, for the mild intellectual snobbery that makes them call the students jugheads. But in many cases the epithet is unjustly applied. It certainly is in that of Private Ramey. There is some debate around the post about the origin and the exact definition of the term “jughead.” The word antecedes the school, but there is at least one sergeant in the cadre who thinks he invented it. An officer of the post, a Southerner, recollects it from his boyhood. “A jughead,” he says, “is a human mule. I grew up trying to push jugheaded mules around on the farm.” A definition attributed to the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Wellington B. Searls, requires some acquaintance with the habits of fowl, for he compares a jughead to “a duck in a thunderstorm.” During electrical storms, a duck, in dull panic, hunches his wing shoulders forward, withdraws most of his head under the forward part of one wing, and tucks his bill under the other, so that he seems not to have any head at all. One of the students of the school, who, like many of his fellows, is a Virginian from the hills, put the matter to me this way the other day. “What,” he asked, “has a jug got in it when you pour all the liquor out of it into your neck?”
A few of the students are heartbreakingly slow, but not many. The school has been able to graduate ninety-three per cent of the men assigned to it, and only two per cent have been discharged under Section Eight, which defines men who are hopelessly unqualified for military life. The rest of the discharges have been medical or disciplinary. When draftees come up for induction, they are given a literacy test consisting of what seems to most men very simple questions. There are thirty-five questions. Anyone who cannot answer at least nine correctly is classed as illiterate. Illiterates are then given two further tests, which screen out most of the unsalvageables. Men who pass these screening tests are assigned to Special Training Units.
Private Ramey, who was assigned to the Pennsylvania school toward the end of March, 1945, could hardly be called a typical jughead. There is, in fact, no typical illiterate, any more than there is a typical college graduate. Ramey is above whatever average there is. He finished the course, which usually takes twelve weeks, in ten. By jughead standards, Ramey is brilliant. He says that he was often embarrassed, when he was a civilian, by not being able to read and write, but the surprising thing about his life before the war is how much he, an illiterate, was able to do for himself: at one time he owned a house, ran a small coal mine employing twenty-eight men, and had two automobiles, the better of which was a Mercury with, as he says, “one of them cloth tops on it,” bought brand-new. The fact that he is above average makes him especially grateful for the opportunities, the amazements, opened up for him by being introduced, for the first time in his life, to the written word.
Ramey is thirty years and eight months old. He is a small, quiet man. He has blue eyes, black hair, and a deeply ruddy complexion, and two of his front teeth are crowned with gold. He has a rather intense face and a look of solid, if untutored, worth; his Army record has, in capital letters in the space of “Character,” this assessment: “VERY GOOD.” His voice is quiet and he almost never swears. His best friend at the school, a redhead named Harold Edward Rutherford, says he likes Ramey because “he don’t talk like some of the men, he always talks nice to you; when you’re worrying about something, he always talks good to you—you always have company with him.” Mrs. Elizabeth Harpel, who was Ramey’s teacher all the way through the school, came to have quite a bit of respect for him. “He doesn’t jump around like some of them,” she told me on the last day of his course. “He’s quite a study, that young man. I looked at him today and he seemed to speak to me through his eyes; he has very strange eyes; did you notice his eyes? They get so big—and he’s a rather intelligent-looking man. His skin has a strange shine to it; did you notice his skin? It makes me think maybe he has liver trouble. But he would never mention it unless you asked him. Some of them complain—oh, their eyes hurt and they tell me all their troubles and if they have a toothache I know it. But not him. I think he’s rather deep.”
Ramey was born and grew up, the third of five children, on a farm near Norton, in Wise County, Virginia. He says he didn’t learn to read and write because it was too far to walk to school. His parents did not tutor him, because his father, Tom Ramey, was a drummer for the Broadwater Feed Company, Wholesalers, and was seldom at home, and his mother “was kind of sickly—she never did feel up to schooling us kids; I had a good home, as far as that goes.” John was fifteen before he left the farm, and by then, he says, “why, I reckon I just like any other boy; I thought I was too big to go to school—something like that. I wanted to do a job of work, I wanted to make my own living—in fact, I never did realize till it was too late what a education could mean.” Off and on through the years, he thought of taking time out to get some learning, but life went too fast and things seemed to run along O.K.; he just never did.
In his first few jobs, being an illiterate did not seem to make any difference. After he left home, he worked at a filling station, and that simply meant cranking a pump and making change. When he was seventeen, he went to a government employment agency and signed up for a job with General Motors, in Detroit. Out there he became a gasket cutter. “All we had to do,” he says, “was to lay the material on, mash a button, and then pick it off—it was automatic electric.” He returned to Virginia shortly after reaching his majority and worked in a C.C.C. camp near Richmond; he drove a half-ton surveyors’ truck. He settled in Clintwood, Dickenson County, Virginia, in 1937, and there met his wife. She is the daughter of a preacher named McFall, who follows the faith of the Freewill, or soft-shell, Baptists. Ramey remembers very well the first time he met Irma Joyce McFall. It was in church. “Her father ‘bout to kill her for letting me go home with her,” he recalls. “I’d been going to church several times there, but I never paid any attention to her till one time she got right in front of me and, well, I got to paying attention to her.” His paying attention to Joyce rather than her father’s sermons continued week after week, and was intensified, and John and Joyce were married a year later, on her birthday, Christmas Eve. The marriage has worked out very well.
Mrs. Ramey is three months younger than her husband, four inches taller, and thirteen pounds lighter. She has long black hair and is quite pretty. The marriage rewarded Ramey with two daughters, Gaynell and Danta, and somewhat compensated for his illiteracy. Joyce’s father is an educated man, and she herself went through the eighth grade. She taught John addition, subtraction, and the multiplication tables, but she never tried to teach him to read and write. Mrs. Ramey inherits from her father, soft-shell though he may be, a tenacious purity of spirit. “She’s always been a Christian woman,” Ramey says. “She’ll visit with people and listen to the radio; otherwise, going to a show, anything like that, she won’t have a thing to do with it. I slip off sometimes and go to a show. I never did think there was so much harm in going to a show, if you just went to a show and saw a show and didn’t take to it like you would something to eat. She would say, ‘It don’t help anybody, going to a show.’ I always say anything that won’t help anybody won’t hurt anybody.”
HERSEY AND RAMEY
“They can take away my Gun also my Uniform but they wont ever take away how to read and write.”
During his courtship, Ramey became an entrepreneur. He took over a “wagon mine.” Wagon mining is common practice in parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania; when a small, isolated seam of coal lies on the surface of the earth and seems not to be worth exploiting on a large scale, the mining firm that owns the right turns the seam over to a man with a truck—in the old days, a wagon. Ramey opened up a seam near Banner, Virginia, and took out lump coal. He paid the Bannerville Coal Company fifteen cents a ton royalty and sold the coal to householders for $2.85 a ton. What with wages to twenty-eight men and upkeep of equipment—“so much dead work and dead money”—he cleared only about fifty dollars a week. Nevertheless, he saved enough money to build a small house. He chose a site half a mile from Clintwood, looking down the whole length of a seven-mile valley. He built the house himself, to his own plan. It has a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a bedroom on the ground floor. There is a bedroom upstairs, too, even though, he says, “I didn’t get my walls as high as I was going to on the sides; I meant to make them ten feet, but then I thought that was a little high and my lumber was kind of short that I wanted to start the frame with.” The whole family sleeps in the downstairs bedroom. The house is wood outside and beaverboard inside, and has both electricity and plumbing. For his water supply, he built a concrete reservoir, which holds sixteen hundred gallons, around a spring trickling from a vein of coal on the hill above the house. In the kitchen there is an electric stove, which cost $209 new, and a refrigerator, which Ramey bought second-hand for $80 from a friend who was moving to Detroit. Over the years, he has put more than $4,000 into the house, and he is proud to be able to say, “I never borrowed a penny of money from the bank or anything in my life.”
About eighteen months after his marriage, Ramey “got shet of” the coal mine and went to work for the Haysi Motor Company, the Chevrolet agency in Haysi, Virginia, as a metal worker and spray painter. That has been his line of civilian work ever since. It was at this point that illiteracy began to bother Ramey. Although his wife’s and father-in-law’s literacy made things easier for him, their learning made him, by the same measure, conscious of his lack. In Detroit, it had not particularly bothered him, when the work sheets were posted each evening with the assignments for the next day, to ask a friend to read them for him. But now all sorts of embarrassments cropped up. He would buy some paint and put the cans on a shelf and next day would have to ask someone to find him the right color for a certain spray job. He would slip off to a show and stand right in front of the billboard out front and have to ask someone what was playing. “I like to never got a driver’s permit,” he says. “I had an awful time there. I think I made six or seven trials.” The Clintwood cop, Dewey Buck Hannon, would patiently take him the rounds of the driving test and then would put the Virginia motor-vehicle codebook before him for the literacy test; and Ramey would say, “Dewey Buck, you know I can’t read.” Finally, with Dewey Buck’s encouragement, he found a solution. He had Joyce sit down with him and read the codebook over and over. She must have read it a hundred times before he had memorized every word. Then he passed his test. But out on the roads he would have to stop at a fork that was cluttered up with road signs and ask his way. People always pointed to the signs first; he would have to explain. The miracle was that with all the rubs and humiliations, Ramey never lost his temper and almost never got a contemptuous answer. He says, “I always tried to be kind in everything, always tried to ask everything in a kind way. I try to express myself before I ask a question.”
The climax of Ramey’s frustration, and in a way the turning point of his life, came in January of this year. He had worked since July, 1943, as a camouflage spray painter at the Portsmouth Navy Yard. He was earning $1.38 an hour, which, with overtime, came to $114.87 a week. The men, and especially his foreman, liked him. One day the foreman came to him and offered to make him a group leader, at $1.52 an hour. He was taken to the yard headquarters and an application form was put before him. When he said he could not write, a yard official told him he would need at least a fifth-grade education to be able to handle the pencilwork as leader. “I got so mad at myself,” Ramey says, “that I could have kicked myself out.” In fact, he did just that. He went home to Clintwood, terribly discouraged. Since he was no longer doing essential work, the local draft board took him.
Ramey entered the Army on March 19th. At the induction center in Roanoke, he signed his name, John D. Ramey, on a form. This much he had learned to do. But when he was told to spell his name out in full, he did not know the letters for Danul, as he had always pronounced his middle name, much less Daniel, as he had been christened. Nevertheless, he scribbled something. Later he was given the literacy test; his score was zero. But in the screening tests his innate intelligence showed itself. He was accepted. About the time the inductees were lining up outside to be marched away, he heard his name called. He was taken back into the building to an officer at a desk—“a tall man with a little old bald head,” he recalls. The officer’s words embarrassed Ramey more than anything else in his life ever had. “At your age,” the man sneered, “can’t even write your own name!”
This was the sort of raw material that arrived at the Special Training Unit late in March this year, ready—in this case more than ready—to learn to read and write. For the first few days Ramey bunked in white barracks, listened to lectures by platoon sergeants about Army spirit, marched up and down, and took tests. On April 5th he moved to green barracks and was assigned to Unit A, the beginners’ class. Not all the men at the S.T.U. go into A. Those who have had a little schooling start out in more advanced groups. Ramey started from scratch.
Ramey was lucky in the teacher he drew. Originally the teachers at the school were all Army men, mostly noncommissioned officers. Later, civilians were taken in, both men and women, at a salary of about two thousand dollars a year. Ramey’s teacher, Mrs. Harpel, has had wide experience, both in teaching and in life, and is a wise and charming lady. She is a widow of indefinite age. When pressed to place it within a decade, she says she believes she is “anywhere between sixty and seventy.” When congratulated on her wonderful appearance (she looks fifty), she replies, “They all say that. It’s because I’m interested.” From her youngest days, her mother urged her to become a teacher. “My mother,” she says, “had a hard time. She was born in Ireland, but she grew up in England on a farm—they were poor. But she was so eager to learn that a woman of the nobility took an interest in her. This woman taught a class in—I believe it was in some part of the Church. My mother was so anxious to learn that she soon was teaching the other children, helping this woman, and for that she got a little heirloom in the family and I wish I had it now; it’s the dearest little black-walnut case, has a little drawer for spools and things, and there’s a cushion on top. My oldest sister has it, don’t you know. You can see why my mother wanted me to be a teacher.” It was only natural that after Mrs. Harpel got through a Sisters’ school and high school in Detroit, she went to the Detroit Training School, a school for teachers. After that, she went to Wayne University for a year. Her teaching experiences include everything from a two-room, two-teacher primary school in Detroit to an adult-education course in civics in Cleveland. She has taken a course in short-story writing at the University of Chicago and worked in a hardware store, and she even took up the study of law and passed the Ohio bar exams because “the stories in the book of cases were so exciting.”
The classes at the S.T.U. are small; they range from six or eight in the beginning to twenty toward the end. Ramey found himself, on his first day, with a group of seven other total illiterates, sitting in a small classroom fitted out with long, backless benches, narrow tables, and a blackboard across the front wall. Mrs. Harpel had been waiting for them. After a brief introductory speech, in which she at once established herself as a nice, motherly grab bag full of anecdotes, she started in with the alphabet. She wrote the letters on the board, told the soldiers the names of the letters, and then gave their sounds. Since one of the tenets of the school is that reading and writing should be integrated all the way, she had the men write the letters after her, then went around to check on the various shapes they had drawn. Since another S.T.U. rule is, in the jargon of the teachers’ manuals, to “make use of the concepts which as adults the trainees can be assumed to have brought into the classroom already developed in good measure,” she often used the letters as heavily stressed initials of words with which they had lately become very familiar: “This is ‘S.’ The sound is ‘sss.’ ‘S’ is for ‘ssergeant.’ ” From day to day, she went quite fast, not stopping to make sure that every letter was learned by every man; she hoped to achieve that gradually, by repetition. If one man could not answer a question, she went quickly to another, operating on the manual’s theory that pausing over one man’s forgetfulness only produces a disabling emotional tension in him, and on her own that life is too short to hurt anybody’s feelings. Very soon she began giving the men simple words, teaching them to think of the sound of the initial consonant, plus the vowel, plus the following sound that completed the word. She chose words that are spelled the way they sound, like “dad,” “tag,” “job,” “top,” and “net.” She told stories to go with some words and drew pictures to illustrate others. Toward the end of the three weeks the men spent in Unit A, she began giving more complicated words, with two consonants at the beginning. She taught the reading of these words by what the school calls “phonic analysis.” She taught “brake” as “b-rake.” By the end of the three weeks she had given Ramey and his classmates about three hundred simple words, most of which would be useful in the “phonic analysis” of the more complicated words they were soon to learn.
Meanwhile, Ramey was exposed to other facets of Army life. His classes began at seven-thirty-five each morning and, with a ten-minute break every hour, lasted until lunchtime. Chow was heavy, monotonous, and good. In the afternoon, the men drilled. The evenings were free. Most of the time Ramey just sat in the barracks and talked or sang with his friend Red Rutherford, whom he had met at the induction center. One night, when they had nearly finished Unit A, they sang a song called “Precious Memory,” which made Ramey homesick:
Precious memory, how it lingers,
How it ever fills my flitting soul!
In the stillness of my homelife…
Ramey decided then and there to write a letter to his wife. He was far from equipped to do so, but Mrs. Harpel had given him confidence and he decided to try. Here is the first letter of his whole life:
Arpil 15 1945
Pul John Ramey
Co B STU
33914278
Joyce I got last 500 Dile you sene me lat night. Joyce I am Fine and hope you R the cam. Yousse gott $22.00 Mond and the take $7.20 off an me and $7.50 Fore Bond Joyce lat oline lase me $12.30 and old the love in my hort. Yall shold whit love fom
Pul John Ramey
Co B STU
33914278
The handwriting was jagged. The letters were formed laboriously and often had breaks between them. The thought was practical. Joyce undoubtedly knew that he meant he had received five dollars from her the night before, that he was fine and hoped she was the same, that she would get twenty-two dollars a month (for her allotment) and they were taking $7.20 “off’n” him (for insurance) and $7.50 for bonds, and that this left him only $12.30 (his arithmetic, despite her tutelage, was off by one dollar), and that he sent all the love in his heart. The final reproach, “You all should write,” was a proud invitation from a writing man to correspond. In later letters the serial number after his signature was replaced by amorous crosses and circles, the secret of which he learned not from Mrs. Harpel but from another student.
On April 18th, Ramey entered Unit 1, after having passed an informal test given by Mrs. Harpel. In Unit 1, he began, for the first time, to read a book—Technical Manual 21-500, which jugheads know as “Private Pete.” On the first page, at the top, is printed, “This is Chapter 1.” Below, under a full-length drawing of an impossibly handsome soldier, are the words “A Soldier—Private Pete.” The second page has a picture of men on parade with rifles slung, and under it is the sentence “The soldiers march.” Within a surprisingly few days, Mrs. Harpel had her class, now twelve men, on Chapter 2. There, aided by pictures to illustrate nearly every sentence, they read, “A soldier keeps his things in order in the barracks. There is a place for everything. He keeps everything in the right place. Every soldier has a place for his things in the barracks. Pete’s locker is near his bed. The soldier blows the bugle in the morning. The bugle call wakes the soldiers. Soldiers must get up when they hear the bugle call. Soldiers wash in the morning. They also take showers. Soldiers shave in the morning. Private Pete gets dressed. He puts on his socks. He puts on his shoes. He puts on his shirt. He puts on his trousers. He puts on his tie. He puts on his cap. Here is Private Pete in his uniform.” And the final picture shows him fully clothed and surrounded by a dazzling light much like the one which enveloped the Wizard of Oz.
Mrs. Harpel’s technique in Unit 1, and throughout the course, was about the same. Before each lesson in “Private Pete,” she would survey the day’s text and note down the unfamiliar and difficult words. These she would give the men by phonic analysis. Gradually, the words got more complicated. “She kept raising the words,” Ramey says. To keep the earlier words fresh in their minds, she constantly reviewed, both by combining old words with new ones and by flashing cards with the old words stenciled on them. All the time she drew on her years of experience to illustrate the words. One of the things the school stresses is “word concept,” which means that a man should understand a word when he sees it and not just read the sound without thought for the meaning. The Army judiciously mixes modern ideas—word concept, filmstrips, flash cards, and phonic analysis—with the tried and true method of the little red schoolhouse. Mrs. Harpel’s storytelling helped build “word concept.” Unlike most of the teachers, who draw on the movies, radio, and big-league baseball for examples, “traveling,” as the manuals say, “from the known to the unknown,” Mrs. Harpel kept telling Ramey’s class homely parables and episodes from her own life.
Mrs. Harpel’s classes never dragged. One day she began by saying, “Good morning, boys—or men, I should say. I know you still like to be called boys.”
She read the roll. Then she asked, “Well, how do you feel this morning?”
A chorus rose: “Oh, we feel great…rugged…O.K….”
She said, “Let us put our pencils down. Sit up like soldiers. We are going to review our sounds and combinations of sounds this morning.” She wrote the letter “E” on the board. “May I have an example of the short sound, please?”
“ ‘Exercise’!” said Ramey.
“ ‘Fret,’ ” Mrs. Harpel said. “Let’s take ‘fret.’ A baby frets. What is the difference between ‘to fret’ and ‘to worry’? A person must think to worry. Babies don’t think much, do they? I saw a baby just a month old last night, a healthful codger, but it was fretting. I went up and talked to it calmly and that little rascal just listened to me. We can’t tell what they’re thinking, can we? I wonder how we spell ‘split’?”
“S-l-i-t!” one of the men said.
“That’s right,” Mrs. Harpel said, not wishing to hurt anyone’s feelings. “That’s right, s-p-l-i-t. Now, here’s a word.” And she wrote “SIN” on the blackboard. “That’s a little word we do not like, but sometimes we must say it anyway. Look! We can make it nice just by putting a letter in right here.” She transformed “SIN” into “SPIN.” “What does that mean, Davis?” she asked.
Davis said, “Well, it’s like spinning wool.”
“That’s right! They used to spin wool by hand. Do they now, Lam?”
Lam said, “I never have been to a cotton mill. I been down around Chatham, where they raise a little cotton, but I never did get in a mill.”
“Is that Virginia?” Mrs. Harpel asked. “Seems to me a lot of my boys are from Virginia. Stand up, you Virginians.”
Seven of the twelve men stood.
“My, what a fine lot of men. How tall are you, Lam?”
“Five foot ten, Ma’am.”
“How tall are you, Rutherford?”
“Five foot eleven.”
“How tall are you, Ramey?”
“Five foot six and a quarter inches.”
“Well, you didn’t happen to grow. How tall are you, Pearsall?”
“I don’t know, Ma’am.”
“You ought to know that. You go over and stand against the measuring post,” she said, pointing at one of the uprights of the rear wall, a two-by-four that had about thirty pencil marks on it, where other men had already been measured. “Who will volunteer to measure Pearsall?” Mrs. Harpel asked.
Smith, who was not a Virginian, put his hand up. He marked Pearsall’s height on the beam, then measured it with a ruler. “Five foot ten, exact,” he announced.
Mrs. Harpel said, “How in the world did we get this far when we started with the word ‘spin’? That’s the way the mind works; it gets from one thing to another. I’m going to give you a long word. It’s the study of the mind. I’m going to write it down.” She wrote “PSYCHOLOGY.” She had several of the men pronounce it.
“Now,” she said, “here’s another little word. ‘Ore.’ What is the difference between ore and iron, Ramey? Stand up. Let’s see how tall you are.”
“It’s like mining,” Ramey said. “Ore’s got to be taken from under the ground and it’s brought out and as it comes to the mill it’s washed and the dirt is washed from the ore stone, and the stone is run into the furnaces. The ore comes out of the stone, out of the shale, and the shale goes out; it’s a waste. The ore is poured into forms and makes pig iron. The form is a small steel frame; it’s got a sand pack on the inside of it, has some kind of chemical into it that’ll make it bind and stick together, otherwise to hold the pig iron in the forms till it cools off.”
Mrs. Harpel said, “Oh, that’s very interesting! I want you to teach me a little more, Ramey.”
“Well,” he said, “it gets smaller when it cools. Any kind of metal expands when it’s hot. You take sheet steel for a ship—you have to allow for expansion where you’re welding; if you don’t she’ll buckle.”
“Will you tell me how they weld this sheet metal?”
“Which one you want, acetylene or electric?”
Mrs. Harpel dodged that one nicely. “What did you do before you came here, Ramey?” she asked.
“Spray-painted,” he said. “Camouflage in a shipyard.”
“We were talking about ore. That’s a big jump to welding, isn’t it? Well, that’s how the human mind moves from place to place.” She pointed a finger at “PSYCHOLOGY.”
Then she said, “I’m going to tell you a story I know about ore. I went to an auction store one day and I saw a lamp and this lamp was all metal from the base right to the top, so it must have come from ore. A woman, she was standing next to me, she said, ‘That’s a valuable thing, that’s a Chinese incense burner; it’s not supposed to be a lamp.’ It was taller than I am. I got interested because I like antiques. I said to this woman, who was a stranger to me, by the way, ‘How much do you think it’s worth?’ She called this clerk over and the clerk said, ‘Ten dollars.’ I was so anxious to get such a rare thing—what does ‘rare’ mean?—that I said I’d take it. Well, I got interested and I got some books and I studied up on it. The work is called cloisonné. Some of you might get interested in cloisonné someday. Say ‘cloisonné.’…Here is how they make it. They take little wires and fasten them on the incense burner in the form of pictures; they draw people and faces with the wires, and the book says they fuse the wires on the metal. On my incense burner there are little saints with halos. Halos must be hard to draw with wire because they have to be a perfect circle. Something irregular would be easier. What is something irregular?”
“A flower,” one of the men said. “Even in nature you get flowers so they grow irregular.”
“Well, they get everything just right with these little wires, even the eyes. What would happen if they got the pupils of the eyes wrong? Lam, what would happen?”
Lam said, “The saints might be cross-eyed.”
“That’s right! Well, they fill in between the wires with this beautiful enamel. The faces are white, the clothes are Chinese red and turquoise blue. Saints usually have blue eyes; that’s the color of the beautiful sky. The whole incense burner is copper. Sometimes I think it’s brass, because in places it looks like a brass penny.” She hesitated. “Do you really want me to talk about my lamp, men?” she asked.
The men shouted together, “Yes!”
“Well, these human figures on it are climbing ladders…” And she told many more details about her incense burner. Finally a bell rang, marking the end of the first period. “Oh, dear,” Mrs. Harpel said. “Men! Don’t forget ‘ore.’ O-r-e. Look at it! Don’t forget it! Class excused.”
I doubt that the men who were there will ever forget the shape of that small word.
Ramey was not the most brilliant pupil Mrs. Harpel had had, but before he passed into Unit 2, she had begun to take special notice of him. There were several reasons. For one thing, he had had wider experience than some of the men, and could tell an illustrative story himself if he had to. For another, he was more serious-minded than some, and each evening he read the work for the next day, so that he would have the jump, for self-esteem was apparently important to him. He says that he will always remember the word “determination” and the night he came across it. “Straight I say that word, I don’t have to spell it out—I can see it,” he told me. Long words like that, especially if they are meaningful, are easier for the men than the everyday small change of literacy—“am,” “they,” “are,” “but”—and Ramey still has to think harder about those small words than he does about “determination.” Ramey stuck to his work better than some, and, perhaps on the theory that what won’t hurt anybody won’t help anybody, did not even go to the enlisted men’s dances on Wednesday nights. He was also assisted in his progress by a relatively good memory. He has an excellent memory for names. When he is asked about his two gold teeth, which he acquired in Detroit twelve years ago, he promptly says, “I remember the old doc who put them in—Whittaker, Dr. Whittaker, George A. Whittaker. I remember him well. I broke one of my teeth out and the other one was rotten; it got a little speck in it and I never did think much about filling teeth—I thought I’d just have it ground and crowned. Doc Whittaker, he didn’t have much mercy on mankind at all, it didn’t seem like. He wouldn’t let you shut your mouth or swush your mouth out; he’d just want to get through. Never will forget him. George A. Whittaker.”
Ramey moved into Unit 2, still under Mrs. Harpel, on May 2nd. At the end of each unit, the men take an examination. In the test before going to Unit 2, Ramey scored thirty-two out of a possible thirty-five points. “Private Pete” appears in Unit 2, which is mostly concerned with military drill. “Integration” is one of the catchwords of the Special Training Unit; reading is integrated with writing, and the students never do one without the other; arithmetic, which students begin in Unit 2, is integrated with both, for the problems are written out, and the students must read the problems, solve them, and write the answers in words and numbers; and the reading matter provided them is all integrated with Army life. So, in Unit 2, Ramey read all about drill, and learned something, too, about military courtesy. On page 59 of “Private Pete,” he read, “The captain came to our drill field on Saturday. Our sergeant gave the command, ‘1. SQUAD, 2. HALT!’ Then we stood at attention while the sergeant saluted the captain. We did not move or talk.” Ramey and his companions were still drilling every afternoon. One of the greatest handicaps for most illiterates is lack of confidence. The drill at S.T.U. eventually gives them confidence, for after graduation, when they move on to another camp for ordinary basic training, they find they are smarter soldiers than some men who have been to college. The school gives the men a new and exciting sense that perhaps they are not so dumb after all. In class they compete with fellow-illiterates; everybody is in the same boat. One man in the Pennsylvania S.T.U. recently said, “I thought I was the dumbest man in Virginia until I came here and saw all my friends and neighbors.” The camp life also gives the men a group spirit. Ramey wrote me a letter a while ago in which he said, “Drill make you keep your mind on what you are doing it make you think it keep you on the alert. I like to drill whith other men.”
After he had been in Unit 2 a week, Ramey wrote his second letter to Joyce. His progress was certainly measurable. This time the letters were much better formed and much bolder, and the breaks between letters were less frequent. He wrote:
May 9, 1945
My love I will write yow a fuile line to late you yeare forme me Joyce have yow got your Mone and the Boond Joyce i have 35 day to stare yere then i will Be coming home sune i maeste you all vere muche Till the baby bihaves and Be good BaBy ontal i come home, Joyce how are they gating a lorne out home i gate a lettre frome home May 4 and toled me how they wirre at home Joyce you ort to see me in my uniforme it looke good on me i hope you will sune Joyce write me sune your love John Ramey.
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The next day, Ramey wrote his father-in-law a short postcard, and two days later he wrote his wife another letter. Both were in the same vein, the same hand, the same grammar, and at times the same words as the earlier letter, except on the postcard Ramey said, “Kinle write me a fiver good Pop.” Evidently the $13.30 Ramey got from the Army after deductions was not enough. Ramey had his father-in-law much in mind during his stay at the school. The two had been on excellent terms ever since Mr. McFall’s flare-up about John’s walking home with Joyce that first night. Ramey now has great admiration for his father-in-law. “Better man never did breathe, to my notion,” Ramey says. “Now, some other people may have their minds made up different; otherwise he’s liked by everybody in that country. He preaches more funerals than any man I ever guess I saw. He’s always preaching a funeral—every week, sometimes a couple. They send for him from everywhere; everybody knows him from a hundred miles square, everyone picks him for their funerals. It’s because he always do come out pretty plain, says what he feels, hit or miss, hurt or feel good.” On the day Ramey graduated, with a score of thirty-one out of a possible thirty-five, from Unit 2 to Unit 3, he wrote his father-in-law, with a skimpy but nevertheless respectful number of kisses and hugs at the bottom of the page, as follows:
May 23, 1945
Dare Pop I am geting long fine and hope you are geting long fine at home Pop I have time to write you a fule lines to lite you here fom me I like to get litter forme home you write me sune and lite me no how you all are at home now I get might lonesome up here Pop I hope you are haveing good meatings do that now how are you geting long whith your mine now are you mining it now you sed you had not been mining it Pop do not forget to Pare for me Pop I pare for you I will stay your friend love to all of them left at home, John Ramey
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Units 3 and 4 seemed to go fairly fast. Ramey had reached his “plateau,” the point at which his rapid accumulation of words stopped and he leveled off to a brief period of forgetfulness and despair, in Unit 2; once he was past that, he was in good shape. Most men reach their plateau in Unit 3. In Unit 3, Ramey and “Private Pete” took up the question of money, which Private Ramey had been discussing in longhand since his first letter. He read about how Private Pete drew his pay and about the sensible things he did with it. There is a high moral tone about Technical Manual 21-500, and at times even Mrs. Harpel gets tired of such a goody-goody soldier as Private Pete, who never sees the inside of a guardhouse. In Unit 3 arithmetic, Ramey took up division. In Unit 4, he read about world affairs, about citizenship and freedom and the reasons for the war, about the qualities of a good soldier, about living with other people under the Golden Rule, about the United Nations and global war, about George Washington and Tom Paine.
While he was in Unit 3, Ramey went to Harrisburg with Red Rutherford one day. Red wanted to walk up and down the streets and find a girl or two, but Ramey wanted to drop in at the U.S.O. There was something he had heard about that he wanted to try. He went to a table, picked up a magazine, and sat down, like any other man, to read it. He was so excited that he can’t remember what magazine it was; he thinks it may have been Look, or perhaps Collier’s. Later, on the street, he bought a newspaper. He has done that several times since, but he doesn’t like papers. “I don’t know whether it’s the words or the way it’s printed up or what those countries are always doing in there,” he says. “Don’t know what it is. Seem like I can’t hardly stand to read it.”
During Unit 4, Ramey began “remedial work,” which is actually no more than a review. The Army wisely gives the men a second teacher for remedial work; this serves as a check on any weaknesses of the first teacher, and is an attempt to make certain that all gaps are filled. Ramey’s teacher for remedial was Dorothy Over, the pretty young wife of a soldier who fought across Europe with the Third Armored Division. Her background for this job was teaching home economics in a junior high school in Harrisburg. Mrs. Harpel carried on with new material in the mornings and Mrs. Over’s remedial class took the place of two hours’ drill in the afternoons. Mrs. Over says, “The only way to make people remember is repeat, repeat, repeat, and then sometimes repeat.” Roughly, that describes remedial. One day, Mrs. Over started class by asking, “Can you tell me the words we had yesterday?”
“Bet I can tell you every one of them,” Ramey said. “ ‘Loyal’—you had that yesterday.”
Mrs. Over didn’t wait for him to finish. She picked up a piece of chalk and wrote on the blackboard, saying the words as she wrote them: “ ‘Alert,’ ‘determination,’ ‘surprise,’ ‘praise,’ ‘loyal’—here it is, Ramey, that’s for you—’faith,’ ‘teamwork,’ ‘know,’ ‘defend,’ ‘training,’ ‘production,’ ‘property,’ ‘route,’ ‘rugged,’ ‘protect,’ ‘strong.’ ”
For fifty minutes she drilled the class on those sixteen words. She had each man read them. She analyzed them. She erased them and had the men write them. She repeated, repeated, repeated, until the men had learned.
At last, on June 14th, Ramey came to his final examination. This he passed as he had his previous tests, with honor. Then he was indoctrinated for graduation exercises. The Pennsylvania Special Training Unit is very thoughtful about the morale of its men. Each Wednesday night a fresh class of literate men is marched to the gymnasium, seated in a triangular formation in the presence of guests, many of them proud families, and given a graduation address by Colonel Searls, the commanding officer. A West Point commencement has no more gravity and dignity. It would be easy for Colonel Searls to grind out the same speech week after week, but he takes pride in his graduations and makes a new speech every time. One week he used the analogy of seeds planted in the ground, from which fine flowers and huge trees would grow if proper care was taken; another week he used the laying of a keel, from which a Liberty ship or a battleship might rise if proper workmanship went into it; another week he used the digging of foundations. On each occasion he seems to make the men feel that they are educated, ambitious, and equal to other men in the land. After Colonel Searls’ address, the men step forward, salute, receive a diploma, shake hands, salute again, and move on. Ramey’s diploma says, “This is to certify that Private John Daniel Ramey has graduated from the Special Training Unit, 3384th Service Unit.” It is signed by Colonel Searls and by the master sergeant, W. Nace. At the bottom is a gold seal, embossed with incontrovertible words: “u.s. ARMY—OFFICIAL.”
The noncoms of the cadre are all in favor of morale, but they think that you can have too much of a good thing. Accordingly, their instructions for the graduation exercises are concerned not with the dignity but with the abasement of man. The process of saluting, receiving the diploma, handshaking, and saluting again is hard for some of the men to remember. An indoctrinating sergeant roared at a platoon of Ramey’s class, “Any you jugheads can’t keep that straight, you’re going to come over here after graduation, take a toothbrush, a butt can, and a cake of soap, and brush down that entire barracks staircase! You hear that, you fatheads?” Another cadre sergeant explained to me later, “He said that just so they won’t think they’re a bunch of Princeton men or something.”
On that last day, the morning before his graduation, I asked Ramey for a sample of his handwriting. What he wrote might disappoint a pedagogue; certain habits of nearly three decades of humble grammar could not possibly have been erased in ten weeks, and some of his spellings and punctuation needed further drill. Nevertheless, Ramey had come a wonderfully long way from his first letter, just two months before. And from another viewpoint—that of human hope and the satisfaction still to be had from a life already half spent in the uneasy shadows of illiteracy—the sample was good, very good. Here is what he wrote:
14 June 1945
the United States of America John D. Ramey
I come in the Army the date of 19 day of March as a civilian.
I had no education but now this is the first time that I have had in my life to get a education and I am glad to be in the Army to get a little education. I can tell what the Army have did for me. As a civilian I could not read anything and it made it hard for me to get a beter job. After the war I can get a job as lead man at the Place I Work befor. I want to learn some more. I would not take all the Furloughs in the Army for What I learned at STU. I tell you when they let me out of this Army they can take away my Gun also my Uniform but they wont ever take away how to read and write.
“The Brilliant Jughead,” The New Yorker, July 28, 1945.