This paper considers the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA), long out of use in the United States. It was developed by Sir James Pittman in England in 1959 as a plan of reading instruction with a simplified phoneme-grapheme correspondence that stressed consistency between symbol and sound. The paper lists the advantages and disadvantages of the ITA and provides some historical background on its use through the "Early to Read" series (7 books) produced by the Initial Teaching Alphabet Publication Company. It also explains how ITA works and presents some vowel sound illustrations. The paper discusses what was missing in ITA and sheds some light on what graduate students in language arts education thought of ITA when they used it for a classroom exercise between 1966-76. (NKA)