Dolly Parton's father grew up poor and never got the chance to learn to read. Inspired by her upbringing, over the past three decades, the 78-year-old country music legend has made it her mission to improve literacy through her Imagination Library book giveaway program. And in recent years, it has expanded statewide in places like Missouri and Kentucky, two of 21 states where all children under the age of 5 can enroll to have books mailed to their homes monthly.
To celebrate, she made stops Tuesday in both states to promote the program and tell the story of her father, Robert Lee Parton, who died in 2000. “In the mountains, a lot of people never had a chance to go to school because they had to work on the farms,” she said at the Folly Theater in Kansas City, Missouri. “They had to do whatever it took to keep the rest of the family going.
” Parton, the fourth of 12 children from a poor Appalachian family, said her father was “one of the smartest people I’ve ever known,” but he was embarrassed that he couldn't read. And so she decided to help other kids, initially rolling out the program in a single county in her home state of Tennessee in 1995. It spread quickly from there, and today over 3 million books are sent out each month — 240 million to kids worldwide since it started.
Missouri covers the full cost of the program, which totaled $11 million in the latest fiscal year. Most of the other states chip in money through a cost-sharing model. “The kids started .