Alphabet Blocks
by Dan Willmore
How many people still remember "alphabet blocks?" The "Greatest Generation" had them, and "Boomers" still had them, and I know "Generation X" must have seen them, floating around in the corner of the Kindergarten, with the last of the "Lincoln Logs" and the plastic zoo animals; but for people who got here late, I will go ahead and try to explain the idea at the start.
Alphabet blocks were cubes of wood with letters and numbers printed on the sides. The letters on the blocks were bigger and more colorful than the letters in books, so the blocks were easy for small children to see and to understand, and mothers and fathers could use the blocks to teach children to recognize the letters in the alphabet and even to put together simple words and sentences. When I was small our father got a set of alphabet blocks for my brother and I and my dad got us started on reading with them. That was a very pleasant memory for me, so when my sons were born I was eager to do the same thing for my children.
I will be the first to say that the blocks were useful at the start. My son, Arthur, liked picking up the blocks and looking at the letters, and I showed him how to put together simple words like 'house' and 'cat.' Arthur learned to spell his name with the blocks, and he even learned to spell words like 'dog' and 'good.' I felt just as 'good' about watching my son spell those words as I did when he first learned to walk or eat with a spoon, because at that age everything a child learns feels like another medal in another important event, but before very long we started to have problems, because we kept running out of letters. I went back to the store and I bought another set of blocks and I added it to the first, but even that was not enough to spell all of the words and sentences that I thought we should be spelling. I felt like I was playing 'Scrabble' with a losing hand, or maybe I had pulled seven vowels and no consonants from the 'Scrabble' bag and I had no way to spell anything that would get me any points in the game.
I could never buy enough alphabet blocks to teach my son, so I needed to find a new way to make simple words with letters that were large enough for his small eyes to see easily. I already had a job in the computer industry back then, so I started typing my letters on the screen of a computer. Arthur liked reading on the screen better than reading the blocks, and that solved the problem. Arthur learned to read quickly and well.
The blocks were still good for absolute beginners, so we kept the blocks and we used them to teach my second son how to recognize letters. Michael made the next step into reading on the screen of a computer the same way his brother did, and then Michael started reading picture books the way children still did back when I was small. After that, the kids stopped treating the blocks as special cubes with letters on the side. Instead they treated the blocks just like any other blocks; that is to say, they used the alphabet blocks as bricks for building houses for their other toys. For example, they used the blocks to build repair shops for their cars or barns for their dinosaurs. After a few years Arthur and Michael got tired of toys completely, and we put the alphabet blocks back into the bucket and the bucket went back on the shelf.
Over the years I taught Arthur and Michael a lot of different things. For example, I taught my sons how to play chess and Monopoly and backgammon, and we had a great time playing those games together. As they got older Arthur and Michael started playing video games, and they tried to teach me to play video games too, but I am sad to say that video games never made any sense to me. In fact, watching someone play a video game still feels like watching somebody drag a rag doll across a kitchen table while cussing at the salt shaker. Then both young men went to college and nobody played video games in the house anymore.
The day finally came when we got to bringing some sense to the house and we went into the backs of the chests and the closets. I was astonished at how many old socks and coats we had, and I took those to the charity store to recycle. I also realized that we had a lot of games and children's things that no one in the family will ever use. I took the Monopoly game and the backgammon set to the charity store along with another load of old clothes.
I also found our old chess sets. One was a wooden chess set, and the other was made of glass, and each had a story. I stopped for a moment to think about why I still had those big board games. I realized that I have always liked the whole idea of playing chess and I still like the beauty of the chess pieces themselves, but I also knew that I had to be honest with myself and face up to the fact that I was keeping those chess boards just because I felt good about having chess sets in the house, but nobody else was getting any benefit from the sets. After all, not a lot of people play chess anymore, and when they do, they play chess on the internet, and not on top of a table. I made up my mind and I loaded both chess sets in the back of my car along with another load of old clothes for the charity store.
I also found the bucket of alphabet blocks.
I took the alphabet blocks to the sidewalk and I put them in rows just the way I did when Arthur and Michael were small. I liked the way the sun made shadows on the sidewalk and I liked the way the grain of the wood seemed to make even simple thoughts seem deeper than they are. I took a few photos of the blocks, and I shared the photo I liked best with some friends on the internet. You can see that photo below.
My sons have graduated from college and at this point there is no one in the family who needs to learn to spell. All the same, I have always liked to make pictures, and Silicon Valley has now invented a variety of computer programs which allow people to create images just by entering a series of words or "prompts" into a keyboard. I created a lot of images with the new applications, and I got my ideas for the designs from a wide variety of places. I was particulary interested in ways of bringing words and people and objects together into images that looked real and even 'natural'. Of course I could put billboards into my pictures and put words on the billboards, or carve words into the sides of cliffs and so forth, but I also got to thinking about the old alphabet blocks, and I made some pictures to see what I could do with cubes with letters on the sides. I told the computer to create a series of pictures with alphabet blocks, and I have added eight of the pictures to this website.
Copyright © 2025 Dan Willmore