Grooming minds.(The Goodness Of America)(Rueben Martinez lover of books)

For many years Rueben Martinez worked as a barber and hair stylist in East Los Angeles and Santa Ana, California. But even before he was a barber, Martinez had a love of reading. As a boy in Miami, Arizona, he would sneak over to his neighbors' front yard before sunrise to read their newspaper before they took it in.

After he opened his barber shop, Martinez started bringing some of his favorite books to the shop to read during slack periods. His in-store collection eventually grew to 200 books, and his enthusiasm for reading was so infectious that his customers frequently asked to borrow books. Martinez became a very successful hair stylist, yet he never stopped encouraging his customers to share in his literary collection, much of it in the prevalent Spanish language of his neighborhood.

In 1993, Martinez decided to open a bookstore inside his salon, selling mainly Spanish language books. Since he was already prosperous financially, he did not view his book-selling endeavor as a commercial venture so much as a mission to help improve the literacy rate of the Hispanic community. "If you become literate in your own language, that will lead you to become even more interested in the English language," he would tell people. His inventory included many Spanish translations of works originally written in English, such as El Viejo y el Mar (The Old Man and the Sea) by Ernest Hemingway, ...