Elroy Chinn - Winner of the Ruth J. Colvin and Frank C. Laubach Award for Student Excellence 2006

The only school in Elroy Chinn’s hometown of El Campo, Texas, was “whites only,” so instead of learning to read, Chinn and his siblings spent their childhoods picking cotton on the family’s sharecrop farm. He spent 30 years running sandblasting equipment at an airplane motor manufacturing company, where he applied for a better job just once. “You can’t get this job,” Chinn was told when he admitted to the foreman that he had never been to high school.

Just as Chinn gave up on getting a better job, he gave up on ever going to school. At age 84, he thought he was too old to learn. Chinn’s wife, Sharon, was the one who encouraged him to contact the Twin Lakes Literacy Council in Mountain Home, Arkansas. “Elroy, you can learn how to read. Age ain’t got nothing to do with it,” she told him.

Now age 87, Chinn reads at a fifth grade level. One year ago, he got his first library card and the first book he checked out was To Kill a Mockingbird. He speaks on behalf of his local literacy organization at local organizations and in interviews for newspapers, television, and radio stations. Marie Bruno, of the Arkansas Literacy Councils, says Chinn is like a celebrity at these events, talking to everyone there, making jokes, and telling audiences he couldn’t read his name before he was 84. His obvious pride in his achievement tickles him, and it tickles his audiences.

“You’ve got to wants to learn,” Elroy says. “I wants it.”

Chinn was selected from among adult learners nationwide to receive the Ruth J. Colvin and Frank C. Laubach Award for Student Excellence, given in October 2006 at ProLiteracy Worldwide's annual conference in Atlanta, Ga.