BY THE BOOK

Howard looked on with pride as his happy wife placed the books on the shelf of the library. He'd never had much of an education himself, but under Pauline's watchful eye, he, too, discovered the joys of reading.

Even with Howard's postal job, it was tough making ends meet, and Pauline occasionally had to drop her classes for a semester to work full-time at the library. When she was in school, she rode a bus to the DU campus in south Denver. Every morning, a black woman who worked as a domestic servant for a white family would sit down beside her and ask, "Are you still in school?"

For three years the woman sat down and repeated her question until one day, Pauline had had enough. Before the woman could open her mouth, Pauline asked, "Are you still a servant?" She never saw the woman again.

The university itself wasn't free of prejudice. Pauline was one of only five blacks in her freshman class, and it didn't take long to discover that some administrators, instructors and even fellow students weren't thrilled that blacks were being admitted to DU.

Most of the prejudice was subtle. On a physiology test she would have scored 100 percent except for one misspelled word. The professor had never said anything about docking points for spelling. At the end of the quarter, she had a total of 95 points out of a possible 100 because of that one test. The professor gave her a B for the class. When she asked him why, he shrugged and said, "An A starts at 96."

Still, there were many more white students and instructors who reached out to help her, particularly her advisor, Elizabeth Fachkt. The woman not only counseled Pauline about her education, she was her friend.

end of part 1