Theodore Aldridge was born in 1969 in Erlanger Hospital, six blocks from the apartment his parents rented on Carr Street in Alton Park. His mother, Geraldine, was a cook in the hospital cafeteria; his father, Walter, ran the third shift at the Wheland Foundry. He was the youngest of five. He was also the only one who would, by 18, finish high school.
His grandmother Lillie Mae taught him to read at the kitchen table in 1974 from the Sunday bulletin of First Baptist Church East Eighth Street, three years before he started kindergarten. By the time he got to Howard School, the reading was a habit and the church was a second home. Both have stayed that way.
He went to Tennessee State on a partial scholarship and a Pell Grant and the rest in federal loans his mother co-signed in the kitchen of the same Carr Street apartment. He came home with a History degree and the conviction that the most political thing he could do with it was teach 7th graders to read a primary source. He has been doing it ever since.
He met his wife, Renee, at a 1998 voter-registration drive at the Bethlehem Center. They raised Karis and Marcus three blocks from Howard. Karis is now a labor and delivery nurse at Erlanger, in the hospital where her father was born. Marcus is in his third year at Tennessee State, on the same campus.
Renee says he announced this campaign over breakfast on a Tuesday in February with the sentence: “The seventh graders aren't going to fix this on their own.”