Notes Shared with The NTL Board Members:

 

Working on a wonderful wish for a 70-year old man just learning to read with a First Grade class in St. Joseph, MO.  His wish - to meet Morgan Freeman.

 

I connected with Mr. Freeman's publicist today...she will talk with Mr. Freeman and let me know next week if the meet and greet can take place.

 

You will fall in love with this man whose B.H.A.G. wish (big, hairy, audacious goal!) is to live long enough to finish his college degree!!!

 

Bob

 

PS  Notice the title of the story as it appeared on The Today Show this past Wednesday!!!

Never Too Late to Learn 
70-year-old Attends First Grade

by Alonzo Weston, St. Joseph, MO

stjoenews.net 
 

Photo by Eric Keith / St. Joseph News-Press Alferd Williams gets a hug from a classmate in Alesia Hamilton’s first-grade class after getting wired for sound by “Today” show producer Laura McCabe while photographer Ben Chandler shoots video. Mr. Williams has received a lot of media attention lately from People magazine to “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

Photo by Eric Keith / St. Joseph News-Press Alferd Williams does the same work his fellow first-graders do, including this self-portrait.

Saturday, April 5, 2008: At the back of Alesia Hamilton’s Edison Elementary School first-grade classroom sits a blue plastic tote with the name “Alferd” hand-scribbled on it. A sign on the wall above in the same handwriting reads, “I think anyone could learn to read if they wanted to by Alferd.”

A coffee mug sits nearby, too.

Alferd Williams is one famous first-grader. He’s been on Oprah. He’s one of People magazine’s “Heroes Among Us.” He was on CNN Thursday and CBS Friday.

A sharecropper’s son, the blue-eyed black man with a bright, toothless grin is making good on a promise he made to his mother as a young boy. At 70 years old and a classmate of 6- and 7-year-olds, Mr. Williams is learning how to read.

“I can go to the store and get buttermilk now,” Mr. Williams said amid the youthful classroom din. “When I used to go to the store all the milk looked the same.”

His favorite book is Bill Cosby’s “The Worst Day of My Life.” His sudden fame he sees as a mission from God.

“I come to school to learn, then the Lord just blessed me with the Oprah show and different things because he wanted people to understand the same thing I understand, and that is all things are possible through Christ,” he said. “So I feel this is my time to show up, and the Lord feels like this is my time to show up.”

Mr. Williams showed up for class at the beginning of the school year in 2006, when he was allowed to join Mrs. Hamilton’s first-grade class. Before, Mrs. Hamilton spent a few hours a day helping the then 68-year-old man learn how to read.

She said Mr. Williams has since been an inspiration to her students and others.

“I think people are inspired by the fact that he was 68 years old and wanted to learn to read and he wasn’t ashamed of it,” she said.

One of Mr. Williams’ classmates, 7-year-old Jessica Lord, said she enjoys him being in her class. She said she sometimes helps him speak and read words correctly.

“I feel really happy because when he was little, he didn’t learn about that much, but when he growed up, he learned how to read and how to write,” she said.

Malik May, another classmate, said Mr. Williams sometimes helps him with words.

“He always listens, and he’s never mean or anything,” Malik said.

Mr. Williams is content in the first grade for now. When he feels he’s ready, he’ll move up to the other grades.

“I’m going to finish college if the Lord lets me live that long,” he said.

Mr. Williams added that he never gets tired of learning, and he wants others to know that they’re never too old to learn either.

“We don’t know how old God is, and we don’t know how old his son is, but both of them are still doing things,” he said.

Alonzo Weston can be reached at alonzow@npgco.com.

See additional follow-up to this story: Missouri Man a Reading Role Model

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