When I was a kid we never went anywhere, except once every two or three months we would pile into the Volkswagen beetle and drive the 180 miles or so east from my hometown of Selma, Alabama, to visit my maternal grandmother and uncle in Columbus, Georgia. They lived in a house on the outskirts of Columbus that my uncle Lowell built himself after World War II. He was a veteran who drove a supply truck behind the lines in Italy during the war. I never saw him do anything but sit in an easy chair smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee and reading paperback novels. There was a closet in that house that was filled literally floor-to-ceiling with the paperbacks he had read.
During those weekends I spent in that house there wasn't much to do besides a little homework I brought with me, watch television on a black-and-white console with a roof antenna that only brought in two or three stations, and read. I would help myself to the paperbacks in that closet. That was 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963. I was 10, 11, 12, 13 years old. There were several different genres in that closet: mysteries, crime thrillers, adventure novels, but mostly science fiction. That was the pulp-fiction era and there was lots of pulp fiction in that closet. That closet, more than anything else, was what got me started reading.
I still have some of the pulp-fiction paperbacks that came out of that closet. I found a couple of them in a box of paperbacks that I pulled out of storage recently. "Edge of Time" by David Grinnell was published in 1958, cost 45 cents, and is only 142 pages. I remember reading it 60-plus years ago and really enjoying it. I remember almost nothing else about it. I'm going to re-read it, largely as a reminiscence of my pre-teen youth. I'm going to start on it today.
-- Ron
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