Dolly Parton had one reason to mail books to millions of kids — it wasn't PR, and it wasn't the money: it was her father
Dolly Parton has sold everything sellable, built a theme park, and written more hits than most labels' entire rosters. And the achievement she treasures most involves zero rhinestones.
Since 1995, her Imagination Library has been mailing a free book every month to enrolled kids from birth to age five — more than 285 million books and counting. The reason it exists is one man in East Tennessee.
The smartest man she knew couldn't read
Robert Lee Parton never went to school. He raised twelve children in a one-room cabin in the Smokies, and his daughter never got over the gap between what he was and what he was allowed to become.
"He was the smartest man I ever knew, but he couldn't read or write very much. He was a good provider for us, but I often wondered just how far he could have gone if he could read or write," Parton has said.
So she didn't build a monument or name a wing after him. She built the thing he never had, and she brought him along to help run it.
"The Book Lady"
Here's the detail that gets me every time. The kids who receive the books often see Dolly's photo inside and know her not as a superstar but as "The Book Lady." Her father lived long enough to watch that happen.
- "He took so much pride that little kids called me the book lady," she said.
- Before he died in 2000, he told her he was more proud of the Imagination Library than anything else she had ever done.
- Her verdict: "If you make your Daddy proud of you, then you must be doing something right."
Why this isn't a PR story
PR stunts have end dates. This thing has been running for three decades, quietly, one mailbox at a time, in multiple countries. The first order was 1,760 books for one Tennessee county.
Somewhere between there and 285 million, it stopped being charity math and became the longest love letter a daughter ever sent.
