He has read through a couple different book series and has his own subscription to SportingNews magazine.
One can't depend on the schools for everything.
Guess I was lucky to have been raised in a reading family. My sisters and I were read to by nearly everyone in the family from an early age and we all read at a very early age.
I do think the internet causes people to read differently than they would read a book.
Whether writing about privateering off the New Jersey coast during the War of 1812 or railroading in the Appalachians during World War II, Meader displays a thoroughgoing knowledge about the subjects he addresses in his novels.
Meader wrote his last novel in 1969. At the time, the world of "young adult" literature was changing, with more emphasis on sex, drugs, gangs, etc., and Meader refused to change his style to accommodate these new trends. His books soon went out of print, and many are now collector's items. However, the Southern Skies publishing company has reissued all of his titles. Some of them can also be found in public libraries and can be located using the Worldcat library catalog.