Hello, Im Paul Lewis Bohrer and this is my Audiobiography for multimodal writing. I was born in 1996  in the suburbs of Morris County NJ to my mother, Ruth Jane Bohrer, a middle school teacher, and my Father, Kenneth Joseph Bohrer, a working man and small business owner. Three years later my little brother Joseph Lewis Bohrer joined us completing our family of four. My Childhood was pretty normal, i grew up riding my bike, playing video games, goofing off with friends and all the other ways suburban kids find to keep themselves entertained.

Something that always stuck out to me in my childhood memories was my passion for the past. My first obsession was with dinosaurs, i remember my mom bought me some cheesy VHS documentary for kids, the kind of lame thing your grade school teacher throws on during a half day, but i must have watched it a hundred times over. Infact one of my most vivid childhood memories was laying on the floor of my bedroom with my dad assembling a puzzle of the US trying to learn the names for all the states.  

 

My love for all things old really started to develop during my family trips. I was lucky enough to have an aunt who lived just outside the town of Gettysburg PA, the site of the bloody three day battle during the civil war. Every summer my family would take the short trip over the delaware to visit for about a week or so. I always loved the idea of crossing the same fabled river General Washington did with the continental army, although it was probably a lot easier in my family Ford.  

 

If you’ve never seen Gettysburg i promise it's worth the trip. Even if you're not a history buff the amount of unique shops in town alone are enough to keep anyone occupied for a weekend. But for me nothing compares to touring the rolling green hills of the battlefield or sites like the Jenny Wade house,Cemetery Hill, and little round top. There are reenactors dressed in authentic uniforms and clothing all over the town too. Them coupled with the archaic buildings really gives historic Gettysburg a special life of its own, the kind i’ve never experienced anywhere else.

My brother and I loved climbing the stones at Devil's Den, that was the name given to these massive rock formations out on one of the battlefields, and i mean these things are the kind of massive where if you fell off the top it would be about the last thing you ever did, they had all kinds of nooks and crannies to climb in and out off. And Although we drove our mother crazy just about every time, my brother and I bonded playing soldier on those stones like nowhere else. Mom would actually give us this whole speech every time before we got out of the car about how we couldn't get out of her sight and not to stray too close to the edge..but of course we never listened.

 

Going through grade school history was one of the only subjects i never struggled with. Faculty at my elementary school realized earlier on that i was dealing with learning disabilities. They told my parents i had ADHD and Dyslexia, i never felt any different but the school said i needed the extra help. On account of my dyslexia i was only reading at a first grade level when i started fourth. In fourth grade i was enrolled in special education classes and got all the stigma that came with it. I didn't like being told i was different, what kid does? And nothing was as frustrating as the dismissive looks other students gave you when you told them you were in SPED. So excluding my history and science classes i spent a lot of my time in grade school separated from the bulk of my peers. Thus i developed as a bit of a recluse throughout elementary and middle school. While most of my classmates spent their free periods socializing with friends i’d often find myself in the library of all places.

 

See being told i would struggle with reading as a kid sprued a deep desire in me to be “normal”. So i started with a simply written book for pre teens called “Heros Never Run” by Harry Mazer, a novel about a young man's experience in the second world war. The historical subject matter captivated me. This was the first book i ever finished entirely on my own and i loved it. I tried to read it again recently but it wasn’t nearly as interesting as i remembered it. To me this is just a sign of how far i’ve come. I became an avid reader after that first book report on Heros Never Run, today my favorite authors are HP lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe. Both of which use vocabulary and language many of my peers still find challenging! I’m proud to say that not only was I able to get out of special education classes by high school, but i was even able to complete county college in two years and have come here to RWU to pursue a major in Historic Preservation and am even considering a minor in professional writing