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Mrs. Miller was right.

Kids texting or scrolling when they should be reading? Here’s an answer just in time for the Fourth of July.

Robert E. Oliver is not a Reluctant Reader.

It wasn’t smart to bet against Dorothy S. Miller, my fifth-grade teacher at Washington Grade School in Bloomington, Illinois. She said many memorable things, including one day in civics class: (sic) “It’s the duty of good citizens to read a daily newspaper.” Every day at 8.20 a.m. we had “current events” and that meant you could be called on to “stand and deliver.”

“Bobby, what did you find of interest in yesterday’s paper?” That meant I had to stand up and paraphrase an article from memory from The Daily Pantagraph. It had to be right too. Mrs. Miller had a copy at her elbow and she seemed to have memorized every story.

During a field trip to an art museum, she said, “Museums like these belong to all of us, not just people who already know about art.” Fifth-grade teachers talked like that in the ’50s.

One library day (our class visited the school library every Wednesday) Mrs. Miller singled me out, summoning me to a table strewn with the worst kind of books: big ones with lots of words and few pictures. Talking so everyone could hear, she said, “Boys love adventure stories, Bobby. Which of these wonderful books will you choose for your next book report?”

My next book report? I was more likely thinking about riding my bike, climbing trees, watching trains or shooting baskets at the hoop on our garage.

But I knew there was danger for those like me who didn’t always see books as “wonderful.” Some of them, Mrs. Miller warned, might even fall into the lowest order of humanity in her world — the Reluctant Readers.

So I carefully, yes, even reluctantly approached the table where other students had been cowed into selecting “an exciting, enjoyable book.”

Suddenly, Mrs. Miller grabbed a giant door-stopper of a volume and said, again so everyone could hear: “You’re not yet an eager reader, Bobby, and that could affect your entire academic future.”

Academic futures figured prominently in Mrs. Miller’s world and she talked about them as casually as ordinary people talked about the weather.

That evening after supper, I faced what Mrs. Miller called “the hardest part of reading any book — opening the cover.” The title was just two words, “Johnny Tremain.” I didn’t know Johnny, but he was wearing a military uniform and riding a horse.

Things were looking up.

After a few pages, I learned the story was set in Boston “on the eve of the Revolution.” There was open conflict between Loyalists and Patriots; there was growing pressure to choose a side.

Although 14-year-old Johnny was fictitious, he met people who played a bigger-than-life role in the Revolution, most of them Whigs, the party of patriots. There was the political leader, Samuel Adams; wealthy John Hancock; and Paul Revere.

But the best characters are fictitious. There’s Rab Silsbee, typesetter by day, clandestine member of the Sons of Liberty by night. He’s Johnny’s best friend and mentor. One fateful night Rab and Johnny, dressed as “Indians,” boarded the giant British tea clipper Dartmouth and throw chests of tea into the water, protesting “taxation without representation,” the ideal behind the revolt and American independence.

Rab drills with the Minutemen and fights the British in the battle of Lexington, the skirmish that ignited the Revolutionary War. If author Esther Forbes, who wrote Johnny Tremain in 1943, wanted to write a “page turner” for teenagers, she certainly succeeded. Mystery, suspense and intrigue are dripping from every page.

Betrayal plays a big role in this novel. Dove, younger, lazy and stupid, is an apprentice in the same silversmithing shop as Johnny. Out of resentment, he hands Johnny a cracked crucible that spills molten silver on Johnny’s hand, ending his apprenticeship and condemning him to a life of menial work.

Desperate, Johnny takes work stabling horses for the British generals, carefully noting their plans for military action. He also begins delivering The Boston Observer, the seditious paper for patriots printed by Rab.

In the end, Johnny does his patriotic bit and even marries the lovely Cilla Latham. Enough to qualify as a happy enough ending for any book, but that would be missing the point.

Got a Reluctant Reader in your family? Give them Johnny Tremaine this Fourth of July. They’ll be so preoccupied they just may miss any fireworks set off by present-day “patriots” in your neighborhood.

But your young readers can’t, won’t miss the big idea: We’re a free people today because real-life Johnny Tremains still exist.

Robert E. Oliver is a freelance writer who lives in Webster City. He is a regular contributor to the Daily Freeman-Journal.

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