Robert Lee Parton never got a chance to go to school. He could not read or write, and by his daughter's account he was quietly ashamed of it. Dolly Parton, who died Aug. 25 at 80, said her father was one of the smartest men she knew and that he had decided reading was something a grown man could no longer learn.
The program she built in his name is called a library, but nothing in it is borrowed and nothing comes back.
Dolly Parton's Imagination Library mails one book a month to any registered child, from birth until the fifth birthday. It arrives addressed to the child, and the child keeps it. There is no income test, no card, no due date and no trip to town. A child signed up at birth owns 60 books before kindergarten.
That distinction is the whole idea. Public libraries matter, but researchers at New York University have found that books present in the home are separately tied to reading achievement, and that in the poorest neighborhoods children's books are close to absent. Parton grew up in one of those houses. Apart from the Bible, there were none.
The Dollywood Foundation runs the central operation and negotiates the wholesale book prices, while local partners raise the money for books and postage in their own counties. That is why the mailings did not stop when she did.
The program started in 1995 in Sevier County, Tennessee, and has since given away more than 300 million books. About one in six American children under five is enrolled.
Her father lived long enough to hear children call her the Book Lady. He died in 2000, the year the books went national.
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader’s money, real estate, and business coverage.
