In the summer of 1963, before he was to enter high school, Greg Johnson read To Kill A Mockingbird, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee published in 1960.

He was sitting in the sand on a New Jersey beach and read it cover to cover in one sitting.

The story, told from the perspective of a 6-year-old girl named Scout, was about racism, and set in the southern Alabama during the early 1930s.