"I was told that this particular gentleman got amorous when he drank so I had been forewarned! Our rule here is that if you have been drinking, you have to come back when you are sober. Max stood at the door the other day motioning me to come into the corridor with him. I could smell the alcohol on his breath as I got closer. All he said was that he couldn't come for a lesson today but could he please have a hug? We hugged and he went on his way. It was all at once sad, funny and painful, as all his life had been."

"The people here may not have money or material things," Alice said earnestly, "but they still have a capacity to care and to love and to hurt and feel bad. Sometimes that gets forgotten."

One of the tutors who helps out on a regular basis at the Learning Centre is MARY NORTON. Almost everyone who works in literacy in Alberta knows Mary and the invaluable contributions she has made to the field but few know that she also volunteers her time as a tutor at the Learning Centre.

Mary is a trained librarian who, through her library work in the early 70's, started seeing that there were people in the community who didn't read well. She later joined the Movement for Canadian Literacy and became part of a group of concerned people in Edmonton who started talking about the need for a literacy program in Edmonton. "We wrote a proposal and submitted it to what is now Community Programs and eventually got the funding to start up the Prospects Literacy Program."

I was surprised to learn that Mary's initial involvement in literacy was as someone who applied to the government for money to start a program. The first time I heard Mary's name was in connection with her role as a consultant with the Department of Advanced Education. the Department through which most literacy programs in the province are funded.

"At the time that we applied for the funds for Prospects." Mary explained. "I was actually thinking about going back to university to do an education degree because I was getting more and more interested in reading. Then Advanced Education decided to create a position for an ESL/Literacy Consultant. I applied for the job and was hired in 1980."

"I think my job description had to do with developing policy for literacy projects. What I actually did was help Further Education Councils set up literacy programs in their communities. The literacy project in Ft. Vermilion and Prospects in Edmonton had already been funded as special projects when I was hired. I then helped Lakeland and Red Deer College get started - then Grande Prairie. Ft. McMurray and Medicine Hat."

In the spring of 1986. Mary left her consulting position with the government to go back to school to do her Ph.D. in literacy. There was a government freeze on hiring so no one was hired to fill Mary's position. This prompted the people who were coordinating volunteer literacy programs at the time to band together for support - thus the first formal meeting of the Alberta Literacy Coordinators Group (Chapter 1).

Many of us who started our literacy programs after Mary left Community Programs never knew her as a government employee but rather as a generous resource of information and innovative ideas.

While continuing work on her Ph.D. at the University of Alberta. Mary teamed up with Access Network to write Journey workers, the first comprehensive package of tutor training material available in Alberta. She did a great deal of study and program design for workplace literacy with Keyano College and Syncrude Canada in Ft. McMurray and worked in conjunction with Lakeland College to write Preparing Literacy Tutors, another resource for training tutors. Mary has remained deeply involved in the Movement for Canadian Literacy, travelling nationally and internationally while doing research, sharing ideas and teaching workshops. Given her outstanding reputation and high profile in the literacy field, it isn't surprising that not many people know that Mary also volunteers her time as a tutor at the Learning Centre which, as she says, "is where the real literacy work is."