Spencer Abrams is 4 years old. He's learning to read by reading the Charlotte Observer comics.

It's how his mother, Nancy, gets him to the breakfast table in Charlotte each morning. Together, they look at pictures, and she helps him with the words he doesn't know. If there's time, they'll do the word Jumble, too.

The rest of the Observer is for Spencer's parents, and as it always has, that newspaper not only brings the news of their world to the table, it tells them about the lives of the people in their community.

And sometimes, we become a part of your lives, with stories and pictures and moments we share.

At 8 years old, at his breakfast table, Frank Bauknight saw a story in the Observer: "Ex-slave looking back over 115 years." He ran to tell his mother that his great-grandfather, Frank Lee, was in the paper. It was Feb. 12, 1956.

Bauknight had heard his great-grandpa's stories first-hand - being freed, working hard and living a full, successful life. Now those stories were in print - his history, their history.

"He was always an inspiration to me," says Bauknight, now a mail carrier in Charlotte. He keeps the article each day in a bag he takes to work.

At 13, in July 1970, Rick Forbis was the starting pitcher for the Matthews Little League All-Star team in a tournament game against Starclaire. Forbis, pitching at Freedom Park, gave up just one run in nine innings, but Matthews eventually lost.

The next day, he went back to the tournament, and people started pointing his direction. He was in that day's paper, his face pinched purposefully, about to throw a pitch. "People said, 'Hey, there's the kid,'" says Forbis, laughing at a memory more enduring than the sting of a baseball loss.

At 22, Ken Johnson arrived at IBM Office Products on Morehead Street for the first day of his first full-time job. He had graduated just three weeks before from Wake Forest, and on the morning of July 1, 1968, he was eager and early to work. He stopped next door at the Red Carpet Inn for coffee and the morning newspaper.

Johnson, now executive director of the Greenville (S.C.) Symphony Orchestra, doesn't remember the Observer's headlines on that morning of July 1, 1968. But he remembers sitting at a restaurant where the waiters wore white gloves, with a metropolitan newspaper in his lap.

"I felt so grown up," he says. He is still a reader today.

At 36, Fred Brillante was a worried parent. His son, Frederick, was an elementary school student being bused an hour each way from their neighborhood near Providence Country Club to Billingsville Elementary off Randolph Road. On Jan. 26, 1989, Frederick's photo was on the front of the paper.

"A Long Ride Home," read the headline, one of many chronicling an issue that roiled Charlotte for decades. "I didn't have a problem with integrated schools," says Brillante. "But we just thought that was an enormously long ride to put a kid through."

Now that kid is 32, and he'll be completing his master's degree at UNC Charlotte this year.

Says Brillante: "When you have kids that age, you think things like this are the end of the world. Now I think, 'Gee, it wasn't that bad.'"

At 64, Effie Eudy told her daughter, Melinda, that she was cleaning the house for a visitor. Observer food writer Helen Moore was coming to Eudy's Kannapolis home for a story. "It was like the second coming," remembers Melinda Eudy Ratchford.

Already, Effie was well known around Kannapolis for the more than 250 cakes she sold for charity each December. Moore's profile of her appeared April 16, 1990, on the cover of the Food section, which then and now celebrates the food and the cooks that nourish us.

"She had a third-grade education," says Melinda of her mother, who died in 2000 at age 93. "Cooking was her life. (The profile) meant the world to her because it recognized her cooking ability."

At 94 years old, Beulah Wylie sits on the couch in her living room in the Plaza Midwood neighborhood, looking down at a century's worth of old Charlotte newspapers, in stacks on the floor.

They cover important news from afar - space missions launching, a president assassinated, a war in which her brother-in-law was killed. They cover events she remembers clearly, such as the integration of Central High, the school she had attended.

She treasures one clipping most - from 1929, about a contest the Observer held to see which Charlotte girl could sell the most newspaper subscriptions. Beulah, then 12, canvassed her neighborhood near Caldwell and McDowell streets. "I went out and got those subscriptions," she says, and for that she won a 2-foot-tall doll with a music player inside.

"It was beautiful," she says. "I remember that doll."

The doll has been gone for a while now, but she's been an Observer subscriber for more than 70 years. Each day, her grandson gets the paper from the front yard, and Beulah reads it all, front page first, then Local and Living and Sports. She'll check the obituaries, of course, to see if there's anyone she knows.

And also, she'll read the comics. It's what she's always enjoyed, she says - not only at 12 but as a younger girl, when she learned to read by reading the Charlotte Observer comics.