This is an excerpt from Chapter Seven of The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease (Penguin, 2006, 6th edition). For a list of all topics covered here and in the print edition see Chapter Seven list.

Chapter 7: The Print Climate in the Home,
   School, and Library—continued

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cross the continent in Ithaca, New York, Brigid Hubberman was encountering similar problems with some of the families she was working with at WIC sites (Women, Infants, and Children, a federal assistance program). While families were in the WIC waiting rooms, it was Brigid's part-time job to demonstrate the reading of books and how to interact with them. Even with children as young as one and half-years of age, she could tell if the child had any book experience and most had not.

When she asked the school district what percent of incoming students had essentially no book experience, the response was 20 to 25 percent. Worth noting is the fact that Ithaca is the home of Cornell University, an Ivy League institution, yet nearly a quarter of the community was at risk for literacy. Soon Hubberman became adamant that every child in the community, not just the ones at WIC sites, deserved a healthy book start.

In 1995, she convinced a local bank, Tompkins Trust Company, to fund a book for every newborn in the county, something they continue to do to this day. The following year, she saw the holidays as another opportunity to get books into the homes of at-risk children. She secured funding for new books that WIC parents could choose and have gift-wrapped at the site that could be taken home as gifts.

In 1997, various county community agencies had a brainstorming day and Hubberman asked for a breakout session on how to create a community-wide "culture of literacy"—connecting every family and every child to print in a pleasurable way. "Hey," someone suggested in the session, "what about free bus tokens for families going to the library?" The eight committee members soon grew to 30 and became the Family Reading Partnership. Ideas and projects began to flow.

One member, Jim Crawford, noted, "People who use libraries use them, not because they don't have books but because they do have them and want even more." In other words, the book you own is a kind of seed that leads to more. This concept became the Bright Red Book Shelves. Collection crates were sprinkled at 12 sites (like Wegman's grocery stores) throughout Ithaca, where people could drop off lightly-used books. These were collected, cleaned and divested of annotations, and then placed on bright red book shelves in centrally located sites for social services, even police stations and juvenile courts.

Soon a community-wide Literacy Vision Day was convened with representatives from every sector—schools, police, social services, hospitals, and librarians. Another local bank began contributing enough funds to give every incoming kindergartner (1,400) a free book at registration at the start of school.

One of the billboard posters decorating
facades in Ithaca, NY.

A decade old now, the Family Reading Partnership (FRP) resides rent-free in a school district building, the model has been adopted by two neighboring counties; the New York State family court system has incorporated the Bight Red Book Shelf idea in its locations; FRP is used as the coordinator to deliver books to various social agencies that use books to connect with families in counseling; it also funds books so every pediatrician (30) in the county can distribute a book at wellness visits. A visitor to Ithaca, New York, cannot remain oblivious for long that reading is a community-wide habit: billboard-size banners hang from buildings and rooftops, reminding adults to "Read to me—any time, any place."

eaving Brigid Hubberman's campaign, we drive east to North Adams, Massachusetts, where one day in 2000 David Mazor, was visiting his daughter at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Mazor had been an independent film distributor for 20 years, and now residing in Amherst, the town he grew up in. He'd also been doing some writing on the subject of futurism and now, finished with the subject, he looked around for someone who might be able to use one of the brand new books he'd used in his research. He wondered if the college's library could use them.

"Absolutely," declared the librarian. "We haven't been able to buy a new book in two years because of budget cuts. All the money goes for online periodicals." And thus was sparked an idea that became a consuming fire in Mazor's mind.

"If you want books, I'll get you books," Mazor told him. And he meant it. "I was living in Amherst, surrounded by all these professors from five colleges —Amherst, Smith, UMass, Hampshire, and Mount Holyoke, people who have more books than they know what to do with," he explained to me one day. He ended up gathering so many books the college had to send a truck to collect them.

And then one night Mazor thought, if a state college in a state like Massachusetts is short of books, what about needy elementary and high schools? He Googled "poorest county in the poorest state" and came up with Durant, Mississippi (population 3,000, average income $19,600). "I was so excited about the idea, I could barely sleep. In the morning, I called Durant High School and asked if they needed books. The librarian told me they hadn't been able to buy a book in 40 years. All their funds went to repair the building. So when they built the new school in 1960, if they brought over the books from the old school, most are still there and not much has been added. She told me if a kid wanted to read a book on the Apollo moon mission, it would be impossible in that library.

"Books aren't like basketball backboards," Mazor explains. "If the backboard breaks, the school runs out and fixes it because they've got a game scheduled in the gym for Friday night. But when a book is lost or damaged, it doesn't get replaced because there's nothing coming Friday night that requires it.

At this point Mazor's mind was doing something he learned to do back in high school. He grew up in a family of readers, his father a law professor and his mother a social worker, and there were books everywhere. But one book stood out then and still does. It was a little paperback—-Go Up for Glory, the autobiography of basketball great Bill Russell. It transported Mazor from his privileged circumstances in Amherst to Russell's segregated Louisiana and left an indelible impression. And there was another point in the book, a section in which Russell described his psychological breakthrough—when he started to "visualize" game situations before they happened and then how he would respond in the game. By the 1990s, this concept would be a staple of sports psychologists.

"Even as a kid, I got the point immediately and it shaped my life," he recalls. "All these years later, I'm thinking, if that book could make that big an impression on me as a kid, what about the book that's supposed to bring some kid to the far reaches of the world, the book he's never going to see because it's not in his school library. Somewhere there's a kid who's never seen a Van Gogh or a Michelangelo but if he reads a biography there's a chance his life could change. The right book ... the right kid." And all this time, Mazor is doing his Bill Russell thing, visualizing possibilities.

'It's like having all these oil wells in your backyard.'

He soon had boxes of books for Durant and was "Googling" through the south, Indian reservations, colleges, high schools and elementaries. Here was a roadmap for his dream. Talking with librarians at various sites, he began to tailor the shipments: "What kinds of books do you need most? Listen, if you find a kid who is really interested in a particular subject and you haven't a book on it, email me and I'll get it." One school asked for children's books in English and Bengali—he got them!

He was soon supplying 10 to 15 schools around the country, and not just single shipments. "I realized this was becoming too important to be a hobby. So I sold my business, formed a nonprofit called "Reader to Reader, Inc.," and Amherst College donated space in the religious life center. By 2005, he was supplying 160 schools in 27 states from Maine to Mississippi, and he had more than a dozen volunteers cleaning, sorting, and packing—including a retired college admissions officer. A grant from Daimler-Chrysler paid for all his shipping costs, special purchases and wish lists for one year. Cash and check donations began to pour in along with books, the local Barnes & Noble asked customers to donate a book when they bought one at Christmas time and it brought in 1,500 books. As of 2006, Reader to Reader had shipped 200,000 books to some of the book-neediest places in America. When Katrina struck New Orleans, he led one of the largest restoration efforts in the nation to replace the damaged books. In 2009, Mazor provided the 70 tons of books to Arizona's Navajo Nation. In 2010, he added 37,000 new books to one needy district in New Mexico.

Danny Brassell, Robin and Brandon Keefe¹, Brigid Hubberman², David Mazor³ —four people who saw things as they were and asked why, four people who dreamed things that never were and asked why not? Forget the debates about cloning dogs and sheep—-clone these people and you could change America.

FOOTNOTES for Four Who Changed the Print Climate:

1. Robin Keefe, BookEnds, 6520 Platt Avenue #331, West Hills, CA 91307, online at: www.bookends.org.
2. Brigid Hubberman, Family Reading Partnership, 54 Gunderman Road, Ithaca, NY 14850, online at:      www.familyreading.org.
3. David Mazor, Reader To Reader, Inc., 24 Mt. View Circle, Amherst, MA 01002, online at: www.readertoreader.org. To hear a three-minute interview with Mazor from Marketplace (American Public Radio, September 7, 2005) go online to:

     http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/start/00:00:04:56.0/end/
       00:00:08:17.0/marketplace/morning_report/2005/09/07_mktmorn0850.ram.

Topics covered in Chapter 7 of print and Web editions of The Read-Aloud Handbook:

• What's the connection between access to print and literacy scores?
• Three case studies connecting print to school scores.
• If government won't recognize the print problem, what can anyone do?
• With the Internet in place, what’s the role of libraries?
• How do I make my school library more successful on a limited budget?
• Where do I get the library shelf space for face-out books?
• How do I find out about good new children’s books?
• How can I find a copy of a favorite book from my childhood?

NEXT: Chapter 8 — Lessons from Oprah, Harry, & the Internet

Chapter 7 — p. 1   p. 2   p. 3   p. 4   p. 5   Footnotes