Wilfred Levesque could eyeball a woodlot and tell you the value of the harvested wood. He was a hard worker who carried the Bangor Daily News around with him. Few people knew he couldn’t read it. He signed his name with an X.
In May 1969, this 60-something sat down at a kitchen table with co-founder Agnes Beckwith and became the first Literacy Volunteers student in Maine. In retirement, he reached his life-long goal: he could proudly read that newspaper.
We found Agnes’ notes from 50 years ago: