Enfant Savant : Boy, 11, Wins National Honors for Entry in Poster Contest to Promote Reading

LA HABRA â€”  He expounds on the virtues of Dickens and Twain. He actually wants a new dictionary. And he knocks fright writer Stephen King for being too gory.

All of which would be unremarkable except that Jonathan Westerfield is 11. He’s supposed to like “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,� not “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.�

Standing there in his size 6 1/2 Charles Barkley Air Max sneakers at the Boys and Girls Club, where he is itching to return to a pickup basketball game, Jonathan takes a little time out to shed some light on the subject of literature.

“Reading is fun,� he shrugs. “Even if your life is full of sadness, reading can bring you happiness.�

That is vintage Westerfield, a Kierkegaard-in-the-rough who sees the world through the untainted eyes of a child, but who also has a knack for leavening answers to the simplest queries with sage observations. They are attributes that have recently helped earn him national distinction.

Jonathan, the product of a single-parent home whose mother and older sister bred in him a love for tales, recently became one of 50 young people nationwide singled out for honors in a contest sponsored by Reading Is Fundamental, a Washington-based group that promotes the benefits of books.

Thousands of schoolchildren from across the country submitted posters to the contest, depicting the importance of books in people’s lives. Jonathan’s entry--done with dark and dreary water colors--depicted an elfin, shoeless boy kneeling before a trash bin and reading a tome he had fished from the garbage. In the background: the skyline of a dark, forbidding city.

“I chose a lot of gloomy blues and grays,� Jonathan says. “It’s a little homeless boy, it’s a slum. The message? It means that reading can be fun for all people . . . even if you have no home or anything or anyone to turn to.�

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For the record, Jonathan’s mother, Marie Angers, and workers at the Boys and Girls Club, where Jonathan goes every day after school, swear Jonathan hatched the idea and crafted the piece himself. In fact, his recognition comes as no surprise to those at the club, where he has distinguished himself as somewhat of a reader-artist-philosopher savant.

“Jon can come up with some really amazing things sometimes,� says Erin Madeiros, the club’s educational director. “He was talking about his sister the other day--she was having a problem of some sort and he was doing something to help her out, and Jon said, ‘Well, that’s OK. She’s family, and there’s nothing more important than family.’ �

“Most 11-year-olds don’t talk like that,� Madeiros says.

So disturbing and provocative was Jonathan’s poster that the Boys and Girls Club, which chose local entries to submit to the national contest, nearly withheld his submission.

“We all thought it was the best one, but it was pretty heavy,� Madeiros says. “We thought they would be looking for the cute 7-year-old’s drawing with bright colors.�

Tom Jones, one of six judges in the national contest, viewed 4,000 entries over a span of two years. He says Jonathan’s, by far, stands out as most memorable.

“All the others were butterflies and bright colors and flowers and blue sky,� says Jones, creative director at a Washington-area art design studio. “His was from the heart. It was like, if you live in the ghetto, reading is your way out.�

Jonathan’s portrayal of a child with limited means addresses a subject matter with which he is not entirely unfamiliar. While Jonathan’s mother says she has provided him, his three brothers and sisters, all in their 20s, and an adopted sister with a home filled with love, theirs has otherwise been a mostly no-frills existence. The older children have chipped in to help pay the bills. Child support from Jonathan’s father pays for his “fancy tennis shoes,� his mother says. And fortunately for Jonathan, he can get free books through the Boys and Girls Club.

Once a month, Jonathan and his mother make sandwiches that their church passes out to the homeless.

If art is Jonathan’s dalliance, reading is his passion.

“When I was like 5, my mom would read me Encyclopedia Brown books,� he remembers, referring to the series of children’s mystery stories. “And my sister Kelly--she read like two books a day growing up.�

By his own tally, the Imperial Middle School sixth-grader now reads four books a week, although some are “those 49-page books by Judy Blume which I finish in a day,� he confesses.

He is familiar with, and can analyze, the works of a number of authors many 11-year-olds wouldn’t know from a distant cousin.

Of Mark Twain, Jonathan says: “When he writes a book, he really gets into it. Like if somebody is in pain, Twain writes that he’s in pain so bad his eyes are ‘glistening with fear.’ �

Of Charles Dickens: “Sometimes he uses a lot of details, so sometimes it’s hard to understand what he’s trying to say, but it gets your mind working.�

Of James Knowles’ “The Story of King Arthur�: “The lesson is, don’t ever underestimate somebody.�

And of John Grisham’s best-selling novel, “The Firm�: “It was really tense and thrilling.�

Did he see the movie?

“Why? I read the book,� he says.

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His toughest criticism is reserved for horror story writer Stephen King: “He just goes overboard. Like with ‘Cujo,’ it was just too much. It’s impossible for a dog to go crazy and go man-hunting. I didn’t even get through it. I was disgusted with it. I was sick. He talked about blood squirting everywhere and guts showing. It was gross.�

But lest you think Jonathan is a bookworm, or a geek, in the lexicon of his age group, that does not appear to be the case.

He watches the decidedly low-brow “Beavis and Butt-head.� He owns a boogie board. He can rattle off sports statistics about professional basketball stars Shaquille O’Neal and Michael Jordan, and possesses a card collection that includes All-Stars Sean Kemp and Dominique Wilkins. “When they slam dunk, they look really cool,� he says, sounding every bit his age.

He also plays video games, though he limits himself to a half-hour a day. “I used to spend three hours a day, but one day I heard that Sonic the Hedgehog will give you seizures if you play it too much, so I cut back,� he says.

On the one hand, says Robert Martinez, Boys and Girls Club program director, “Jon comes up with things out of the blue, weird things really, that you don’t think most 11-year-olds would come up with.� On the other hand, Martinez says, “he can be an 11-year-old and mess around like any other kid.�

As if to illustrate that very point, Jonathan relates that he recently attended a Mighty Ducks hockey game, where he, upon seeing the team mascot Wild Wing frolicking in the crowd, decided he wanted to be a mascot when he grows up.

When told that your garden-variety sports mascot typically doesn’t make a big salary, he muses, “Happiness is better than money, so I don’t care about money. You can get money from an envelope, but you can’t get happiness from an envelope.�

Ahh. The world according to Westerfield.