I was a heavy drinker. I did drugs, lost my family, lost two houses, and lost the respect of a lot of people, and one day I just woke up. My daughter just said it’s either us or the street. And it wasn’t a hard choice to make because there is nothing out on the streets except trouble and crime. You don’t know where you’re going to sleep from one night to another; where your meals are going to come from; where you’re taking a bath if you do take a bath; and it is just not worth it. I’ve done a complete turn around. I am very happy with myself. I couldn’t ask for anything better.

Childhood illness left two participants deaf and one crippled from polio. Later life illness and injury contributed to the paralysis, amnesia, visual, mental and physical impairment of six others. Three participants were abandoned by their fathers. Oscar, the child of his drug-addicted sister, had to adjust to the death of their father while he was in 6th grade. Isobel, whose father committed suicide when she was a baby, didn’t know her biological mother till she was seven. She was adopted as a baby and physically abused as a teenager by her adoptive father.

In all, nine participants were abused by their parents or spouses. Vu-Lin, after surviving the slaughter of her parents and siblings and her own torture as a child at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, enrolled in adult education to prepare herself to take her three children and flee the mental abuse of the elderly husband she had been forced to marry.

The academic “risk factors” are not as dramatic but equally unsettling. Of four male participants who had received High School diplomas prior to enrollment in ABE and literacy programs, two needed basic skills in order to enter vocational training and two were reading at less than a third grade level. Despite the fact that Peter graduated from High School and held a responsible job with a municipal department, he enrolled in a literacy program in order to help his four children with their schoolwork. He said: “I felt like a hypocrite, telling them to use the library when I couldn’t use it myself.” Testing showed that Peter had a second grade reading level upon program entrance.

There are eight additional cases of participants with learning difficulties who, as children, were assigned to Special Education classes or boarding school for the retarded. Enid, for example, was misdiagnosed at the age of one as having cystic fibrosis and was placed in a Children’s Home where she attended Special Education classes until she was released to a foster home at the age of sixteen. Nearly all of these participants dropped out of school along the way. Theirs is a legacy of anger and despair that remarkable later life achievements have not completely obliterated.

Conrad, now a staff member of his Intermediate Unit and a reader recruiter for the literacy council, hoped the military might help him since the school system could not. In 1968, at the time of the Vietnam War, he enlisted because he thought:

If I went into the military, that if they pushed me hard enough and long enough, they would be able to break whatever was wrong with me... I actually went in, and I did the physical training part okay. But when they came out with the Marine Corps Bible that I was going to have to be able to read and memorize, I couldn’t tell these guys that I forgot my glasses or I have to go to the bathroom so I can’t read right now. I was given an honorable discharge by the military, and they had told me that if it hadn’t been during war time, they would have sent me to school to help me learn to read; but being war time, they couldn’t do that.