On Christmas Day 1962, twelve‑year‑old Elwood Curtis receives a Martin Luther King Jr. album from his grandmother Harriet, the only record he owns and the source of his daily moral lessons. He also receives modest clothing gifts. The record’s speeches, replayed on a turntable, become his window to the national civil‑rights struggle. Elwood’s grandmother, a former hotel cleaning staff member, lives in the Richmond Hotel, where the family has taken in cast‑off furniture. The hotel’s manager, Mr. Parker, promises Elwood a future porter job, though he later fires Elwood’s mother for stealing. Elwood spends afternoons in the hotel kitchen, reading comic books while adults cook and work. He befriends kitchen staff—cook Barney, busboys Cory and Harold, and a gray‑haired waiter Len—who treat him like a mascot and teach him informal lessons. As staff turnover brings new men, a Texas dishwasher named Pete challenges Elwood to a dish‑drying race. Len acts as referee, and after a tense contest Elwood wins by a single plate, earning praise and a reward: a box of Fisher’s Universal Encyclopedias. Elwood proudly transports the heavy volumes home, only to discover that all the books are blank except for the cover. Harriet dismisses them as dummy copies. Elwood suspects the kitchen staff staged the contest to humiliate him, but keeps the encyclopedias as symbols of achievement. This episode becomes his last kitchen memory before leaving for high school and eventually the Nickel reform school, where the truth of those contests will later surface.