Jim Trelease
Bio Page
 graduate
of the University of Massachusetts ('63) and native of
New Jersey (Orange, Union and North Plainfield), Jim
Trelease was for 20 years an award-winning artist and
journalist before turning his career toward education
in 1979 when he began writing the first edition of The
Read-Aloud Handbook.
While working
for a Massachusetts daily newspaper (formerly the
Springfield Daily News, now the Springfield
Republican) as an artist and writer,
he began weekly volunteer visits to community classrooms,
talking with children about journalism and art as careers.
At the same time, he and his wife Susan were raising
their two children (Elizabeth and Jamie). A daily ritual
for Jim was reading aloud to his children, largely
at that point because his father had read to him. (On
the eve of retiring in 2007, he donated his personal
collection of 2000+ children's books to the library
at Mary A. Dryden-Veterans Memorial School, the school
where he made is first volunteer visit and now named
after the fourth-grade teacher who invited him to
visit her class.)
Soon, however, the
nightly ritual would coincide with one of his classroom observations.
Most of the students
he visited (about 40 schools a year) didn't read very much, but the
ones who did nearly always came from classrooms where the teachers
read aloud daily and incorporated SSR time (sustained silent reading)
into the daily routine.
Making Connections
Thinking
there might be a connection between being read to and
how much the child wanted to read, Jim investigated to
see if any research was available on the subject. Sure enough, there
was lots of it— but
nearly always published in education journals or written
in academic language that would be foreign to the average parent or
teacher.
Jim's proselytizing on behalf of reading aloud can be traced as far back as the
early 1940s, as seen in this photo of him reading a comic book to a neighborhood
friend. (Whether Jim had anything to do with the boy's broken foot is a story
for another day.)
The dearth of accessible material inspired
him to write and self-publish the first edition of The
Read-Aloud Handbook in 1979. "I self-published because
I never thought any of the major publishers would be
interested in it. At that point, 'reading aloud' was
too simple and not painful enough to do the child any
good. At least, that's what many educators thought," he
says in hindsight. But that mindset would soon change.
Discovered accidentally
by a then-fledgling literary agent named Raphael Sagalyn, the book
came to the attention of Penguin USA after six other publishers
turned it down. In 1982, they published an expanded edition.
Touted by "Dear Abby" in
February of 1983, it spent 17 weeks on The New
York Times bestseller list. (Covers and
details of all U.S. and international editions can
be found at Read-Aloud
covers.)
By 1985, the U.S.
Department of Education's Commission on Reading was calling "reading aloud to children" the
single most important activity one could do to raise a reader.
 he first
Penguin edition of the Handbook was
followed by five more U.S. editions, along with
British, Australian, Spanish (Manual de la lectua
en voz alta), Chinese, Korean, and Japanese versions. It
was the inspiration for PBS's "Storytime" series,
and is now the all-time bestselling guide to
children's literature for parents and teachers — nearly 2 million
copies sold to date world-wide. (The current
edition is
excerpted at this Web site.) In 1989, Trelease was honored
by the International Reading Association as one of the
eight people who made the largest contributions to reading
in the 1980s.
 The Handbook is now
used as a text for future teachers at more than 60
colleges and universities. In addition, the Japanese
edition introduced the concept of Sustained Silent Reading
(chapter
5) to public schools
there and it became the basis for more than 3,000 elementary
and secondary schools adopting SSR as a regular part
of the academic day.
In 1983, Trelease
left the newspaper business to lecture and write full
time. (He had founded in Reading Tree Productions in
1983, a company that oversees all of his lectures and products.)
Featured on "The Larry King Show," profiled
in Smithsonian (Feb. '95), Reader's Digest (July '95),
and U.S.
News & World
Report (Mar. 17, 1986), Trelease has been one of the U.S.'s
most sought-after education speakers, addressing parents,
teachers, and librarians on the subjects of children,
literature, and television. He's presented in all 50
states and was a frequent keynoter for national education
conferences. His final year of public lectures and seminars
was 2007;
he will present 20 teacher seminars for Bureau
of Education and Research in 2008 and retire completely, except
for his Web site.
Between 1979 and 2008, Trelease's work was a pivotal
force for numerous read-aloud
movements in both the U.S. and abroad. Delaware, Virginia,
West Virginia, Nebraska, and Hawaii launched state-wide
campaigns based on Jim's book and seminars, as did one
European country. The founder of that movement can best
explain the circuitous circumstances of that effort:
In years 1994-2000, my husband
served as the Polish Ambassador to the United States.
In Washington, DC, I was very involved in educational
and charitable activities. First, I started a Breast
Cancer Awareness Program for Poland, but, after
we initiated the Breast Cancer Coalition in Poland,
my foundation focused on emotional health of children
and adolescents.
In 1995 in a waiting room of my dentist
in Washington, DC, I read an article in the Smithsonian
Magazine about Jim Trelease and his teaching.
It was a turning point in my work. Reading aloud
to children seemed to me as a powerful tool of emotional
health, and I decided to start a national movement
on reading to children.
In 2001, the national campaign, "All
of Poland Reads to Kids" was initiated. It
immediately grasped the media and public attention.
Celebrities and the media were and still are eager
to support the campaign. In our work, we have used
posters, television ads, songs, series of short spots,
written materials, television, radio and press interviews,
as well as lectures and workshops.
After six years, we have over 2400 volunteers throughout
the country, over 1400 Reading Schools, which have
introduced daily reading to students, and over 1300
Reading Kindergartens. In 2007, over 1500 cities
and villages participated in our VI National Week
of Reading to Children , in comparison with 150 in
the year 2002. According to the polls, over 85 percent
of Polish people know our reading campaign and 37
percent of parents of preschoolers report they are
reading daily to their children. In 2006 in China,
our Foundation was awarded the prestigious international
IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award at the 30th IBBY
Congress.
— Irena
Kozminska
President, ABCXXI -
All of Poland Reads to Kids Foundation |
The origin of the article that inspired Mrs. Kozminska's
campaign is a story unto itself and can found here at
Smithsonian.
Now the grandfather of three boys and a
girl, he resides with his wife Susan in Springfield,
Massachusetts, a city in which he has lived since arriving there at
age 15 from New Jersey, and happily discovered the city
was the birthplace of both basketball and Dr. Seuss.
Using Internet audio player (RealAudio plugin, free),
you can listen to a two-hour discussion with Jim on Minnesota
Public Radio when he guested on the "Midmorning" show,
June 26, 2002. To hear a four-minute excerpt from Jim's
lecture recording, click on Trelease audio.
Jim retired from public speaking after three decades
in 2008. In his retirement letter here,
he offers a retrospective look at those 30 years, including the highs
and lows, his most harrowing moments, and the people whose friendship
and guidance were so important to him.
Trelease
also has compiled two popular anthologies (Penguin) of favorite stories for reading aloud (both excerpted
here):
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lthough
Jim Trelease remains a critic of sports-obsessed fathers
who think the purpose of school is to put a "ball in the
hoop" instead of a "brain in the head," he remains an
enthusiast for sports as coached by the John Woodens
rather than the Bobby Knights. From his former career
in journalism, his sports cartoons are included in the
permanent collections of the Basketball and Baseball
Halls of Fame. But his most enduring sports "achievement"
was with one of the most famous games
in NBA history: On Mar. 2, 1962, Trelease tape-recorded
in his UMass dormitory room the final quarter of the
radio broadcast in which Wilt Chamberlain scored 100
points.
Although he didn't
realize it until 30 years later, the tape would become
the "Zapruder" tape
of that historic game — the only recording of the game's
famous moments, which Trelease is given credit for in
Gary M. Pomerantz' book, Wilt, 1962: The Night
of 100 points and the Dawn of a New Era (Crown,
2005, p.203).
The tape's audio became available online when the book
was first published in 2005; it might still be available
at: www.randomhouse.com/crown/wilt/.
Trelease's personal explanation for his decades-long
association with Chamberlain can be found here at Wilt
and Me.
American Public Radio's "Weekend
America" interviewed
Trelease on June 4, 2005, about the historic tape; that
four-minute interview can be heard at: http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/programs/index_20050604.html#wilt.
If
you believe a person also should be known by his/her
excesses, then be it known that Jim Trelease is excessively enthusiastic
about the following:*
- grandchildren
- nuns
- cafeterias
- White Castle hamburgers
- chocolate layer cake
- Malomar cookies
- Starbucks' green tea lattés
- black & white photos
- biking in the park
- The Gettsyburg Address
- the Jersey Shore
- The New York Times
- Broadway shows
- reading while eating
- Golden Corral restaurants
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- Vin Scully
- Gene Hackman
- Eli Wallach
- Andy Rooney
- Robert Duvall
- Maya Angelou
- PBS, NPR, and BBC
- the "Car Talk" guys
- Daniel Schorr
- Susan Stamberg
- Scott Simon
- "60 Minutes"
- Apple computers
- podcasts
- Photoshop
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- "Readers" from
Recorded Books:
• Barbara Caruso
• George Guidall
- Pasadena
- New York City
- London
- Santa Barbara
- biographies
- Internet radio
- Courtyard Inns
- Michael Moore
- Jimmy Breslin
- David Halberstam
- David McCullough
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* Note there is no
mention of anything affiliated with "Fox News" (an
oxymoron, if there ever was one). |
