William S. Gray Jr.: The man who taught millions to read

“Look, look.”

The golden-haired little girl beckons her brother’s
attention. The boy is watering deep green grass. Wearing her mother’s large and
loose-fitting black shoes, the girl is splashing through a puddle. The boy
smiles.

Then the worst possible thing in a child’s world happens.

The girl despairs:

“Oh, oh, oh.”

One of the big shoes has come off. The girl hovers on one
foot over the puddle. The foot will have to drop. The sock will get wet. Mother
will be mad.

The boy sees his sister’s distress. His eyes are lit with
determination.

On the next page, deliverance. Quick-witted Dick had raced a
red wagon to Jane’s rescue. Smiling and dry, Jane rides out of the puddle.

It is one of hundreds of stories in “Dick and Jane” books,
which from their appearance in 1927 were the instrument that taught 85 million
children to read.

The stories and books were the inspiration of William S. Gray
Jr. of Coatsburg.

Born June 5, 1885, and an Adams
County school student, Gray is credited with changing the way children in
America over five decades learned to read. By the time of his death Sept. 8,
1960, Gray was recognized as the country’s foremost authority in literacy and
reading education.

School readers before Gray’s “Dick and Jane” books were
mostly text with excerpts from literature or the Bible. Illustrations were few.
Gray’s classroom experiences in Adams County had taught him that children could
learn to read more easily by reversing that equation. He saw the value of
illustration rather than description in telling stories in a way to interest
children in reading. Simple stories. Few words. Large, color
illustrations.

So when colleague Zerna Sharp at Scott Foresman, with which
Gray affiliated in 1929, suggested the creation of such a reader, Gray was
ready to promote the idea.

Gray was well acquainted with the power of an illustrated
story to capture children’s interest. His cousin Harold Gray’s brightly
illustrated serial “Little Orphan Annie” had become the most popular weekly
comic strip in America.

In William Gray’s books, Dick emerged as the older brother to
an inquisitive Jane. Scrambling through the pages with them were their pet
cocker spaniel, Spot and yellow cat, Puff. Their world, as a recent “Dick and
Jane” sampler suggested, was a place “where night never comes, knees never
scrape, parents never yell and the fun never stops.”

The series was reading fare in elementary schools across
America from the time of the Great Depression to “X-Men” comics. The popularity
of the series declined in the mid- to late-1960s as other experts began to
challenge the “Dick and Jane” series for its lack of cultural diversity and
other factors.

In its library, the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams
County has several Elson-Gray readers, which were early illustrated versions of
“Dick and Jane, “donated by retired Adams County teachers Paul and Jane Moody.
The Moodys’ interest in Gray’s work began when they learned he was from Adams
County. Paul Moody taught in Camp Point schools for 34 years, “Dick and Jane”
continued to use Dick and Jane to teach reading through most of her
teaching career. Both are now retired but still active in promoting the
county’s school history.

Graduating from Camp Point High School in 1904, Gray taught
in Fowler elementary school and was its principal until 1908. Gray wrote to his
students, who were gathering for a 50-year reunion, that his time in Fowler was
“the most valuable in my career of more than a half-century of teaching.”

Gray earned his bachelor’s degree at the
University of Chicago in 1913 and established
his credentials in literacy education reform as a graduate student at Columbia
University in New York. His master’s thesis developed a reading skills
assessment system that was published in 1915 and used for the next 40 years. It
also was the foundation for teaching reading with “Dick and Jane.”

Gray returned to the University of Chicago, where he
wrote three doctoral dissertations on reading and earned his Ph.D. in 1916. He
spent his academic career at the university, serving as professor and dean of
the College of Education for 14 years.

Gray led an international literacy initiative for the United
Nations and in 1955 was elected president of the International Reading
Association, which he co-founded. Gray’s credits include several books and
hundreds of articles and essays on literacy.

Mildred Schone of Quincy, who is a cousin once removed,
remembers Gray returning to Coatsburg for annual family reunions. As a child
she knew he was an important member of the family, but “he never let you know
it. He was nice as he could be, always polite, always nice to all of us.”

“We would meet in the big yard at Coatsburg,” she said, “and
he would always give a little talk and we enjoyed that. He would talk
about educational things and about the family. We would sit there cross-legged
in the grass in the summer and listen to him. “

Schone was personally familiar with the first of Gray’s
famous books. Her cousin’s first series of readers, the Elson-Gray Basic
Readers, were the books with which she learned to read. But she is just as
grateful for the research that Gray and his sister Lillian Reaugh Gray did into
the family lineage in America. Their three years of work resulted in “The
Record of the Family of Isaac and Sarah Hawkins Gray,” a genealogy that traces
the family history from their arrival in America 1829 and 1830 and their
migration to Adams County in 1836. Isaac Gray bought 160 acres just north of Coatsburg in Honey Creek
Township the next year.

The Historical Society owns a copy of the Gray family
genealogy.

Reg Ankrom is executive director of the Historical
Society. He is a member of several history-related organizations, the author of
a history of Stephen A. Douglas and a frequent speaker on pre-Civil War
history.

Sources:

Ahern, Kevin. From Rails to Roads . . . The Story
of Fowler, Illinois. Davinci Press Ink, 2007.

Gray, Lillian Reaugh and William S. Gray, Jr.
“Record of the Family of Isaac and Sarah Hawkins Gray.” 2nd Edition,
1955.

Jane and Paul Moody, interview by Reg Ankrom,
November 14, 2011.

Kismaric, Carole and Marvin Heiferman. Growing Up
with Dick and Jane: Learning and Living the American Dream. San Francisco:
Collins Publishers, 1996.

Mildred Schone, interview by Reg Ankrom, November
15, 2011.

“The Most Famous Man Ever To Live in
Fowler.” (Publication information unavailable).

“William S. Gray.”

“William Scott Gray (1885-1960) – Influence
of Reform Movements, Literacy Efforts.”