As we tragically lose Dolly Parton, lets us remember the good she put into this world and help keep this lifechanging charity alive!
A toddler in Sevier County, Tennessee sprints to the mailbox the moment she hears the Dollywood train whistle, genuinely convinced that Dolly Parton is driving the locomotive up the mountain to drop off her book. That image captures something true about what Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library has built over three decades: a program so personal, so consistent, and so rooted in one woman’s own childhood longing that millions of children have come to treat a monthly book in the mail as a private friendship with a country music legend. In February 2018, that program delivered its 100 millionth book, and the story of how it got there runs straight through the hills of East Tennessee. Help keep Dolly Parton’s dream alive helping children read : Donate here: https://donate.imaginationlibrary.com/
A kid who felt crippled, and a daughter who remembered
Dolly Parton was born on January 19th, 1946, the fourth of 12 children, in a cabin on Locust Ridge roughly 10 to 12 miles from downtown Sevierville. Her father Robert Lee Parton was a farmer and occasional construction worker who never learned to read. Dolly watched him navigate the world without that skill and never forgot how diminished it made him feel. When the Dollywood Foundation launched in 1988, she put college scholarships and teacher’s assistants into Sevier County schools. But the research kept pointing to an earlier problem. Kindergarten teachers, asked what single factor predicted a child’s success, answered without disagreement: whether the child had been read to regularly before ever setting foot in a classroom.
That consensus led directly to the Imagination Library, officially launched in Sevier County in 1995. The design had Dolly’s fingerprints on every detail. Books had to be new. They had to arrive by mail. And each copy had to carry the child’s name on it, because Dolly remembered exactly how large and important she felt the first time she received a piece of mail addressed to her personally. The very first book in the collection was ‘The Little Engine That Could,’ a choice she made herself based on its place in her own childhood. Enrollment begins at birth, a book arrives every month, and when a child turns five, the final volume, Nancy Carlson’s ‘Look Out Kindergarten, Here I Come,’ arrives with a letter from Dolly that reads, in part: ‘This may be your last book from my Imagination Library, but you have to promise me that you’ll keep on reading.’
From one county to every kid in Washington DC
The first affiliate outside Tennessee was not a neighboring county but a bank marketing director in Pratt, Kansas, who called the foundation after hearing Dolly mention the program. The foundation was so cautious about growth that they initially would not even let him call it the Imagination Library. From that single hesitant outpost, the program grew. When Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen decided to take it statewide in the early 2000s, splitting the per-book cost with local affiliates and reducing each copy to roughly one dollar, all 95 Tennessee counties joined within two years. More than 35 million of the 100 million books shipped have gone to children in Tennessee alone.
Today, 80 percent of children in Knox County are enrolled, and a Knox County study found that Imagination Library participants outperformed non-participants on letter recognition in the fall of kindergarten, with those gains still measurable when the same children reached third grade. A council member in Washington DC heard about the program when his niece, living in Johnson City, Tennessee, ran in from the mailbox waving a book with her own name on it. That moment seeded a DC affiliate that now reaches every child in the district from birth to age five, delivering more than 430,000 books in its first two years. In Ceylon, Minnesota, a town of roughly 369 people with no library and no bookstore, a nonprofit launched its own affiliate aiming simply to reach 100 children.
The program ships more than 1.3 million books every month. The only organizations buying more children’s books are companies like Walmart. Books are processed through a single mail house in Knoxville, Tennessee, where seven dedicated staff members on the Imagination Library line prepare each monthly shipment. The Dollywood Foundation covers all administrative costs; affiliates pay approximately two dollars and ten cents per book. In partnership with the American Printing House for the Blind in Louisville, Kentucky, the program also produces print-braille editions, placing dots over the printed text so that sighted and visually impaired family members can share the same page simultaneously.
As Dolly put it at the Library of Congress ceremony where the 100 millionth book was formally presented: ‘My dad is the one that inspired the Imagination Library. I could honor my mom and dad today. This was kind of a family affair.’
The child who learned the word ‘dandy’
One child told a reporter she loved Dolly’s book ‘I Am a Rainbow’ because it taught her new words, including ‘dandy.’
Somewhere in Tennessee, a parent still tells a child each morning that a book from Dolly might be in the mailbox, carrying on a tradition that began with a mountain girl who grew up just close enough to the Dollywood train to imagine it was bringing something for her. Help keep Dolly Parton’s dream alive helping children read : Donate here: https://donate.imaginationlibrary.com/
