Cassie Moore spoke with the Missouri on Mic team at the Daniel Boone Regional Library in February.
She spoke a little bit about her relationship to reading and about a unique family tradition – a family club that continues to be a foundation of her relationships to this day.
Missouri on Mic is an oral history and journalism project documenting stories from around the state in its 200th year.
Cassie Moore: Sometimes it's just nice to get out of your own head and to I don't know, just to kind of imagine a whole different type of existence.
I mean, I read books that are fiction or read books that are nonfiction. It's just it's always been fun for me, even as a kid.
I like to read both nonfiction and fiction. So before I go to work, I read different pages in my nonfiction book. Or it might be nonfiction self help. Sometimes it's biographies. Right now. I'm reading a biography in the morning.
So it's just because I want to learn more also, in addition to having the fiction part where it just is kind of a getaway and from your regular everyday life.
You know, if you get yourself in a place where you know, I'm only reading, like, let's say romance novels, there's just so many various books out there that could help you or it'd be influential to you, or even just, you know, humorous books that'll make you laugh that you're not opening your mind to, because you're just stuck in this one set genre.
I mean, my, my childhood was average, you know?
I didn't come from like an affluent family or anything like that we, but we were a very close knit family, and we, we had our own family club.
"We had this family club where we each actually had officers were my mom was the President, my dad was the Vice President and we had to pay dues."Cassie Moore
And so, we had this family club where we each actually had officers were my mom was the President, my dad was the Vice President and we had to pay dues.
And, you know, when we were kids, we thought, “okay, this is just so stupid.”
Like if somebody called the house, we had to say we were in a meeting. I'm like, “Okay, this is dumb,” but I realized that that was one of the things that really bonded our family, and even now as adults, I mean, my siblings are darn near 50 and they live far enough away from me, but we're just as close as we ever were when we were kids. And I know that has a lot to do with my upbringing.
And nobody that we were friends with whether it was my friends, my brothers and sisters’ friends had ever done anything like that, and which a lot of people thought was weird because I grew up with a lot of friends that were from one parent families, and I was not.
So that was a lot different. So people called us like, the brain, not the Brady Bunch, but like the Cosby's, or, you know, different things that they see on TV or the Partridge Family because we all sand.
but it was important for me like how I grew up because I liked, you know, having a mom and a dad and I couldn't imagine, you know, growing up without one of my parents.
It was just something that my parents came up with. And the funny thing is, my brother does it with his kids.
They don't have to collect dues, but they you know, have family meetings and different things like that and talk about things and get things out in the open as a family, and it just keeps you bonded. It really does.
