Hats Off To Dolly
By Margery McCurdy Plummer

I read an article recently titled “Why are we closing the book on the printed word?” The writer said, “People who read books are different from other people. They’re smarter, for one thing. They are more sensual for another. They like to hold, touch and smell what they read. They like to carry words around with them, take them on vacations and read them in bed.” Among other things, she also said that readers are a dying breed.

Those statements are her opinion, and I’d have to agree with some of them, but when one says that people who read are smarter, I’d have to think that person isn’t very smart, that “smarter” depends on what one reads and for what purpose.

I grew up with books. My mother was a constant reader, and it rubbed off on my sister and me. I, too, like to touch books, carry them with me, and yes, smell them.

We took two newspapers until The Nashville Banner folded. The Tennessean came in the morning mail, and the Banner came up on the Greyhound bus, was dropped off and delivered around town by carriers.

Reading is almost something I have to do, but not everyone does, and if they miss some of my pleasures, it doesn’t seem to me to make them less smart. They may have other desirable pleasures that are important to them.

I “caught” reading from my mother, but my father read too, only different and less. I don’t remember seeing him immersed in reading a best seller or one of the classics. He was a selective reader. He read newspapers for what he wanted to learn, and he read Drug Topics and American Druggist, magazines that had information to supplement the information he received from salesmen who updated him on new pharmaceuticals. In addition to his newspapers and professional publications, Daddy read the comics. That’s right, and they were called the “Funny Papers”. They didn’t seem funny to him, or at least he didn’t laugh at them. Daddy had a pretty inquisitive mind, and I sometimes thought he could be wondering if Dagwood would get down the stairs with his lunch box and out the door held open by Blondie. And then there was Dick Tracy and his two-way wrist radio (which our son checked out on his computer and found had been updated to two-way wrist TV). What a shame!

If Daddy didn’t read volumes or deeply, I don’t think it meant that he was a less smart person. He was a professional who owned and operated his own drugstore for forty years and managed to be a pretty knowledgeable man.

It’s true as the writer of the article wrote, that some newspapers are folding and once large magazines have become miniature. Maybe television is partly responsible. Sometimes it’s easier to see the news than to read it.

In this same article, the writer stated that there are fewer bookstores now and fewer book customers. I think I read somewhere else that there are still plenty of bookstores and an abundance of new books being written but maybe not as many desirable ones on the shelves but an oversupply of “how-to” and “self-helps”.

Maybe we as a society don’t read as much as we once did, and that’s a shame, but as long as words are being written and printed, our public libraries keep supplying us with good reading material and as long as Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library gives a book a month to a child from birth until its fifth birthday, and parents read to the child until it can read, we will come a long way in starting new generations of readers. What a great legacy Dolly Parton, who grew up in a home not filled with books and without much formal education, has left to so many parents and children!