At 98, once-illiterate US lobsterman Henry is now an author

James Arruda Henry autographs a recent article in a magazine about him at his apartment in Mystic, Conn. on Wednesday. 

(PHOTO ap, Jessica Hill)

30 March 2012 / AP, NEW HAVEN, CONN

James Arruda Henry had plenty to be proud of as a lobster boat captain who managed to build his own house and raise a family. But he kept a secret into his 90s, one that forced him to bluff his way through life by day and brought tears at night.

Henry was illiterate. He couldn’t even read restaurant menus; he’d wait for someone else to place an order and get the same food. Sometimes he’d go hungry rather than ask for help. Most of his family was none the wiser. Now he’s 98, and his self-published collection of autobiographical essays is being read in American elementary schools. “In A Fisherman’s Language” details his barefoot beginnings in Portugal, life in a tenement in Rhode Island, boxing as a young man and his adventures at sea.

“I didn’t think it was going to go too far,” Henry told The Associated Press in a phone interview this week from his home in the Connecticut seaport of Mystic. “I couldn’t read or nothing. I tell you, it makes me a very, very happy man to have people call me and write me letters and stuff like that.”

Henry said he was taken out of school around the third grade to go to work making concrete blocks, baking bread and doing other jobs. He recalls getting a dollar from his father on the Fourth of July. “I was so happy that I went straight to the ice cream parlor,” he writes in his book. “I got a glass of milk, a piece of apple pie, a dish of ice cream. After I finished eating I had just enough money to buy a small pack of firecrackers. I lit one and they all went off!!”

When he applied for his driver’s license, all he could do was put down his name. When a friend told the inspector he was talking to a local “lobster king,” Henry managed to take his road test without finishing the application.

Throughout his life, he yearned to read and write but never found the time or opportunity. His nephew, he said, made Henry write him a letter, which took him a month. He found inspiration in a book about the grandson of a slave who became literate at 98. His granddaughter had read him an excerpt of the book, “Life is So Good” by George Dawson. “I said if he can do it, I can do it,” Henry said. “That’s when I started to learn.”

Henry would stay up until midnight trying to make sense of words. Sometimes he’d fall asleep, the book crashing to the floor.