his next step was to find someone to help him obtain at least one of the many books surrounding him. Richard went up to “a pleasant and kindly [looking] woman,” who turned out to be the librarian, Mrs. Sessions. He quietly asked Mrs. Sessions permission to read one of the books. In response she explained the concept of a library card, telling the young boy he needed two property owners to sign for him. Richard did not clearly understand what the librarian said and thought perhaps it was a catch to prevent him from reading a book. Mrs. Sessions, clearly seeing the confusion and distrust on the boy’s face, said she would allow him to take away a book with him right away. “Instantly, I loved her,” McKenna recalled.
Richard now faced the difficult decision of choosing just one book. He found Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; at just this time a billboard in Mountain Home advertised a movie of the same name. Richard asked Mrs. Sessions if there was a connection between the book and the movie. The librarian said the idea for many movies came from books, and this proved an interesting discovery for Richard; he loved both books and movies. Richard had on occasion attended the local cinema but rarely had the ten cents for admission; the information Mrs. Sessions had just imparted led him to think of books as movies. Therefore, Mountain Home’s library contained all the movies he would ever want to see for no admission charge. Richard’s reasoning illustrates how the young boy had begun to display a lively imagination that would be honed over the years.
Mrs. Sessions, knowing the Ibáñez book was too difficult for a young boy, discussed a variety of books with Richard until he finally selected Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. McKenna came away from his first visit to a library believing if he could read all the children’s books on the shelves, he could then move on to adult volumes. The young boy did not care if the books were for boys or girls; he “read them all.” He eventually read “nearly every book in the library” but admitted he did not completely understand many of them. Mrs. Sessions never said whether a book was good or bad; she just set aside books for him. McKenna’s mother, however, thought so much reading might be harmful and limited her son to two books a week. Richard, of course, “never once thought of obeying her.” With Mrs. Sessions giving him all the books he wanted, Richard took to hiding them in various places; a favorite hiding spot was a wooden structure behind the library. Interestingly, he continued to hide books later in his life when he served in the Navy. The discovery of the Mountain Home library allowed Richard McKenna to start to quench his great thirst for reading, setting him on the road to becoming a bibliophile for the rest of his life.16
A black-and-white class photograph of Richard during his elementary school years shows a boy dressed in bib overalls with light-colored hair, starting to show deep-set eyes. Perhaps to accommodate more children in the back row, he is the only person standing at an oblique angle to his classmates. The school records in Mountain Home are not available, but at some time in the elementary school years, Richard skipped a grade, as one might expect of a young boy who devoured books. In any case, in 1927, at the age of fourteen, Richard McKenna entered his freshman year at Mountain Home High School among a class of thirty-four other students. He is the only boy without a tie in the school’s yearbook, The Prophet, hinting at the family’s financial problems.
That year saw a traumatic event in Richard’s life when his father, for unknown reasons, abandoned the family. Like the boy’s shyness and socioeconomic background, his father’s departure was just another strike Richard brought with him to high school. Despite these social stigmas, Richard soon began working on the school newspaper, Hi-Way. He was in charge of stories. This experience led him to write a literary article for The Prophet titled “The Broken Broadsword,” which described a fictional battle between Scots and Saxons. Writing for the newspaper illustrates the boy’s first inkling of a desire to write. Richard joined multiple groups in high school and was known by the nickname “Richie.”17
At the beginning of his sophomore year in high school, Richie’s English teacher asked those who had read a book during the summer to raise their hands. Richard had finished all the children’s books in the public library and was now reading the adult novels. When called on to name the book he had read, the young man stated Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Mrs. Sessions had not mentioned anything about the book when she gave it to him, as was her typical practice. She certainly did not tell him the work was regarded in the United States as one of the best books of the year. Thus, McKenna did not understand why the English teacher was so pleased with his reading choice. A new male teacher at Mountain Home High School heard that Richie had read Wilder’s work and invited him to his apartment to meet his wife and discuss the book. The teacher said he had a number of recent releases that he would be glad to loan him.
Ill at ease, McKenna met with the teacher and his wife. The adult couple wanted to discuss the book, but McKenna could not understand what they were talking about. Furthermore, he could not articulate how he felt about the book. Richard had found Wilder’s work “just another novel and not a very exciting one.” The teacher tried to show how the novel delved into philosophy, fate, and “the tragic sense of life.” Completely puzzled, the young man fled the apartment.
McKenna reasoned that the couple probably thought he had only claimed reading the novel to curry favor with the teacher. He did not understand one could gather philosophy, fate, and tragedy from reading a novel. The incident gave him a glimmer of understanding about reading books for more than pleasure, but the final awakening came much later in his life. While McKenna understood the new teacher meant well, he avoided him as much as possible. Richie also never read Thornton Wilder again.18
Still working for the school paper during his sophomore year, Richard became the joke editor, and he even penned a poem for the yearbook titled “To the Freshmen”:
Oh, the Freshmen! How we love them!
With their sweet and innocent faces,
And their wide rounded eyes a staring
At a life so strange and new,
All their cute little mannerisms,
And their simple childish graces,
With their happy prattling laughter all,
Of Childhood ringing true.
Oh, the girls are Elsie Dinsmores
And the lads are Fauntleroys all
As sweet and pure as morning dew
In heart and soul and mind;
Yet a few more years of high school
And they, the girls and boys, all will
Be wise and toughened and their brows
By study seamed and lined.
Heigh ho! They’ll twit the Freshmen then
For being as now they are:
But glance around the Annual
And see them as you may.19
Richard did not limit his time in high school strictly to academic subjects and reading; he also was involved in athletics, playing guard on the Mountain Home High School football team. The team was originally called the Bunnies but was renamed the Tigers in 1928. Taking on the name of a ferocious animal may have fired up the team as it went on to a 6-0 season, “crushing Middleton for the District title, 84–0.” A forfeiture of an interdistrict game caused the Mountain Home Tigers to become the champion of Southwestern and Central Districts, Class B. They received a cup to display in the school’s trophy case.20
McKenna entered his junior year of high school with twenty-five other classmates. On Christmas Day 1929 his family was evicted for being unable to pay “a $1,200 mortgage” (approximately $15,300 in 2010 dollars) for their five-acre Canyon Creek farm. The poor soil and lack of rain had finally defeated Anna McKenna. She and her boys moved into a tent while searching for a rental in the confines of Mountain Home. Anna broke horses, took in laundry, and cleaned houses to hold her family together. One woman recalled the “almost impossible early struggles [of Anna] hardened her fine determination