Today is the first class in our new four class set. We will start class with a casual conversation. Next, we will have our news news and questions. Our reading today is about Apple Car. Please underline three words or sentences that are not familiar with you. If you are comfortable with everything then choose three sentences you thought were interesting. Finally I have included some listening material. I am focused on time not accuracy. Please listen and follow the transcript. This one is a big jump, but I am confident you will be able to handle it.
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It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program of course we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Backed Into a Corner, stories of people who are forced into making decisions they really do not want to make. We've arrive at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Don't Drive Like My Brother.
Like our story in Act One, this is a story about somebody who just needed a job. And that is what put him into the position where he ended up doing things that most of us would probably avoid. Charles Johnson had a wife and daughter. And he was out of work, and he looked around. And he was so desperate that he ended up in a job where he lacked one crucial qualification, a critical qualification you'd think. And yet somehow he made it work for years. Jonathan Menjivar explains.
Jonathan Menjivar
Charles Johnson was a trucker, a long haul trucker who went everywhere. And he did it without knowing how to read. Couldn't read highway signs. Couldn't read a map. It got him into all sorts of trouble, like when he was hauling stuff to New Jersey from New York and had no idea how to decipher the signs on the George Washington Bridge. Hundreds of feet in the air, 12 lanes of traffic, and he's hauling 80,000 pounds, enough weight that you never forget it's there.
Charles Johnson
So I got mixed up. So I had to call a truck, Mayday, mayday. I'm up on the bridge. I'm stuck. Get me down. Get me down. I'm trying to go Jersey. If I miss it, I have to go all the way back around. And I always thought of that, I said here I am up here and can't read. Would anyone believe this?
Jonathan Menjivar
He was just one of those kids who never caught on to reading. He grew up poor in Clarendon, Arkansas, where his family worked as sharecroppers. Charles had asthma, was a sickly kid. And he stayed home from school a lot. And by the third grade, it was pretty clear he wasn't keeping up. As he got older he was so good at sports, pulling in 30 points a game for the basketball team, they just passed him from grade to grade.
By his 30's, he'd moved to St. Louis and got married and did a bunch of different jobs. He washed dishes for a while. For about six months he ran a gas station his brother owned. But it never seemed like he could support a family on any of those jobs. His brother Paul was making good money as a truck driver. And it seemed to Charles like it was something he could do too. He found out that this trucking company, JH Ware, was training and hiring drivers.
So he signed up. The details he didn't understand, like the words on the truck's instrument panel, he just ignored.
Charles Johnson
The gauges, whatever they were saying, you really, really didn't pay that much attention. They was just there. You just know that you have to work and make a living. You know what I'm saying? I mean you aren't going to let no gauges stop $400 or $500 coming in your home for a week.
And I just knew I could do the manual part, how to shift a 21-speed, 9-speed. But then we'd go in the classroom and I would flunk. I would fail everything. I didn't know what they were talking about. How to get this stuff off of paper and put it down. I couldn't do it.
Jonathan Menjivar
What made this even harder is that at the time, no one knew Charles couldn't read. Not his wife, not any of his friends, nobody. So it's not like he could just ask for extra help from a teacher because he'd risk outing himself. Luckily for him, he did have an older brother, a really, really nice older brother.
Paul Kelly
A lady from the personnel office at JH Ware called me.
Jonathan Menjivar
This is Paul Kelly, Charles' oldest brother, the one who had always found jobs for him and helped him out. Paul's also been driving a truck for 30 years.
Paul Kelly
OK she says your brother is trying to get a job with us. And asked me if there was any way that I could come and attend the class that he was taking for a week. And she says, I would sure give him a job if you come down and help him. And I said well I'm working right now. So what I did, I took a week's vacation off. I got my gear together. And I went down to Fullerton, Missouri and I spent a week in class with him. The orientation did require some reading. I was sitting right there basically by him and making sure that everything that he checked was correct.
And what they would do is give you a world map and ask you the closest route to a certain place in the United States. How would you get there? And I had to teach him the straight line is the closest route to any place.
Jonathan Menjivar
Did it seem like he was reading along with you even if he was slow?
Paul Kelly
Exactly.
Jonathan Menjivar
Once the week of classes was done, Paul took Charles on a trial run down to Atlanta. They drove back through the Carolinas, up over Black Mountain in Tennessee, where Paul taught Charles how to ride the air in his brakes properly so that they wouldn't burn up. How to put it in grandma to slow down. Miraculously, Charles passed the written part of the driving test, which was multiple choice. He used a special technique.
Charles Johnson
I just guessed. Eenie meenie miney mo.
Jonathan Menjivar
He got the job. So there he was, license in hand and really no idea how he was going to pull it off. The job worked like this. The dispatcher gave him what truckers call a bill, which listed the address he was supposed to deliver to and when they expected him. That's it. No directions, no advice at all about how to get there. Sometimes if he had seen the name of the state before, Charles could make it out on the bill. Sometimes he couldn't but his dispatcher would say enough so they knew we had to go to Kansas City, and that he should head west.
Charles Johnson
And then you go around truck drivers and you say, I'm going to Kansas City. Anybody going? And then one person would say, yeah come over here. And so I'd say, man, when are you going to take off? He'd say, I'm going to take off in about two hours. I'd say can you wait on me? I'll try to go with you. He'd say, well yeah I'll wait on you. You'll be my back man. We'll talk on the radio all the way up. That's how you get there too.
Jonathan Menjivar
But still, those methods only work some of the time. And that's where his brother Paul came in.
Paul Kelly
So what Charles would do if he had a problem with his directions, well he would call me and say, hey Paul, I'm going to this place. How do I get there? The first time he called me, I believe it was about the second or third day.
Charles Johnson
I sad hello Paul. And he said, yeah, what's going on?
Paul Kelly
Paul, I have a load going to, I want to say, Philadelphia.
Charles Johnson
And then he said you going to Philly. Well you take route boom, boom, boom.
Paul Kelly
You're going to take Interstate 70 to New Stanton. New Stanton you pick up Interstate 76. And you take 76. You get over to Breezewood, Pennsylvania.
Jonathan Menjivar
All right, let's stop that right there. Now if you're a person who reads, you'd be writing all this down. And Paul always assumed that's what Charles was doing.
Paul Kelly
I want to say he was writing it down. Because he would repeat it. Let me tell you now, I'm sitting at home, I don't know. He got there.
Charles Johnson
I had my ABCs down.
Jonathan Menjivar
Charles couldn't read, but he knew his alphabet. He just had to coax someone into spelling the words for him.
Charles Johnson
Then I'd tell him, how do you spell that again? Or something like that. And he'd tell me, C-I-T-Y, city. I could write that down.
Paul Kelly
He wasn't a worrisome person that had to get me out the bed 24/7. But I got up quite a bit. So actually I was his man map by phone. Matter of fact, I had a map out just for him. Yeah I had a map at home just for Charles on my dinner table.
Jonathan Menjivar
Paul says Charles would call him three or four times a week. And sometimes as often as 10 times a week. But even with Paul's help, Charles had a hard time making sense of the route. He still had to make the place names correspond to what he was seeing on those big green signs over the highway, which he calls boards. He could read numbers. And sometimes he could recognize a word. But it wasn't exactly reading.
Charles Johnson
It was like matching up. Pennsylvania on my paper. Then it would be on the board there. You are now on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. And it would match up so I knew I was there. As far as reading it, no.
Jonathan Menjivar
But even when he got to the city or town on his bill, he still wasn't done. Now he had to find out the exact address. On his bill for instance, it would say 1925 Light Road. But Charles didn't know that, so he'd have to ask somebody. Usually his best bet was to find a cop.
Charles Johnson
I would give it to the police officer. And he would say, oh Light Road right down there. Then I got Light Road in my head and I don't forget it. And so he said go here. I said, could you write it down for me?
Jonathan Menjivar
So Charles figured out a way to do the job. But the way he was making it work was also making him fail at the job because he was always late.
Charles Johnson
And when you are late, they take late payments out of your check. And so I'd call my wife, say, you get to check? She said, yeah I got it. It was so small. I didn't say honey I can't read. I had to shut my mouth. It was a nightmare. I couldn't read. I was confused on the road. Wasn't bringing enough money in. The loads was always late. Confusion, confusion, confusion. What can you do?
Jonathan Menjivar
Did you ever feel like you should just quit?
Charles Johnson
Every day, no matter what Jonathan-- I'd say I have to do it. I took the bills. I told the old lady and my daughter that I would be going to New York. And I had to get to New York.
Jonathan Menjivar
So he was only driving a truck to keep his family together. But he never made good money at it. And being away from home so much ended up hurting his marriage. Before long, he and his wife split up. He quit trucking after he fell asleep at the wheel and drifted into a ditch. His brother Paul was glad he finally quit. He'd worried about him every day he was on the road. And when he looks back on it, he's not sure why he never figured out that Charles couldn't read.
Paul Kelly
And why I felt like that, I don't have a clue. That's strange, isn't it? Charles was-- I don't know if you spent much time around a person who's not that intelligent as far as books go and reading. Growing up in our environment, there was quite a bit of this around. And it was something that we didn't pay special attention to. So Charles is news I guess to your guys' ears. But like I say, I worked around it all my life. And these guys can fake you out. I mean you don't really have a clue that they don't really understand how to read. And he actually got away with it.
It frightens me more now than it did then because I didn't know much about it. But now when he told me that he was having such a problem, then I have feelings for him.
Charles Johnson
So where are we going to go? I know the direction. This is south we're headed. Charles reads now. So driving is different for him. And so he took me for a drive to show me what that was like.
Jonathan Menjivar
So before when you would drive down, would you be able to tell what--
Charles Johnson
I wouldn't notice any of those signs. All I did was notice my target from A to Z. Now as far as reading the signs like "For Sale" right here, I didn't read that. I didn't read no "For Sale," it just was a blank. Now when I travel along the expressway and I'm going down the road, which I've been down there blind. Now I got some eyes. I'm seeing some I'm reading like, Kentucky, 40 miles away. When you get there it says "Welcome to Kentucky." I said I passed this place over and over and I just came on in. So it's is so much different today. It's so much different today.
Jonathan Menjivar
We go to make a right turn, but then Charles sees a familiar black and white sign.
Charles Johnson
Now I see "One Way." That means I can't go there. I would have gone in there when I couldn't read. Yeah, I've been on plenty one ways. And it says "One Way." And the police come down. And I said, "Officer, I'm so sorry. I didn't see the signs."
Jonathan Menjivar
How much easier does it make getting around the city?
Charles Johnson
Oh man, it's just that you're alive. I don't know if it's so much easier, it's just that you are alive.
Jonathan Menjivar
After he quit trucking, Charles went through a really rough period. And then 10 years ago, he sort of pulled himself together. He applied for a civil service job, but he failed the entrance exam so badly that it was finally clear to someone that he couldn't read. He was 45 years old. That's how long it took. Instead of a job, they handed him an address for a literacy program. He still goes there all the time. He tells me he's reading this book for a class there. And when he pulls it out of his briefcase, it's not what I expected.
Charles Johnson
What book am I reading now? I have to do a report on this simple book, this simple book called Dr. Seuss. "One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish." If I were to show that to people, they will say, wow. I don't know. They would really try to embarrass you. But at home by myself, I'm happy with just reading this. This is better than reading anything at all. Just a simple book.
It says, "One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish." And then it has the colors. That's what helps me a whole lot. I look at the pictures. That, no. "The fat one has a yellow hat."
Jonathan Menjivar
Charles told me that his whole life he felt like a fake. And that that was frightening and exhausting. Now he says he feels liberated. And even just being able to read this little bit, or being able to make out his phone bill or follow the instructions on his prescription bottles, makes his life so much easier. Like he'd been traveling in a foreign country all this time and now he's home Everything is different. Now when he gets lost, he says, he can read his way back.
Ira Glass
Jonathan Menjivar in Chicago.