(Editor’s Notes by Christina Myer – Photo Illustration – MetroCreativeConnection)
Ohio announced last week it is now offering a new specialty license plate. It features Dolly Parton, but is not necessarily for country music fans. It’s for supporters of Parton’s Imagination Library.
“I’m excited to see Ohio as the second state to offer a specialty Dolly Parton license plate to support her program, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, in Ohio,” said Ohio First Lady Fran DeWine. “With each purchase, $25 will go back to supporting the local program, helping to ensure the program remains available to all families in Ohio.”
Every plate will bring in enough money to mail one child’s books for one year.
What a wonderful prospect.
For 30 years, Parton’s program has been helping families who might not otherwise be able give their children the gift of learning to love to read.
“Inspiring kids to love to read became my mission,” Parton wrote, in a letter on the Imagination Library’s website. “In the beginning, my hope was simply to inspire the children in my home county but here we are today with a worldwide program that gives a book a month to well over 1 million children.”
Thank goodness she took those first steps.
Even if you don’t love her music (and, just as a reminder, if you’re a Whitney Houston fan, you probably love Dolly’s music), there are lots of other reasons to love what Parton stands for as a person.
She understands the value of reading and education; and that children should be supported in reading and learning as much as possible. She understands there doesn’t have to be a big fuss made about changing the way things have always been done, treating people properly and doing the right thing.
Her Dollywood Foundation works to decrease school dropout rates through efforts such as the Buddy Program, it offers scholarships in her home county and supports the My People Fund, which distributed more than $12 million that had been raised for families in Sevier County, Tenn., who had lost their homes in the 2016 fires.
When she learned use of the word “Dixie” in her “Dixie Stampede” dinner attraction was hurtful to some people, she used what she was learning to make things better.
When “you realize that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a d—a–,” she said.
Rather than wanting to continue to offend and be hurtful, she simply called the attraction “The Stampede,” and moved on.
Easy enough.
(Or, it should be.)
“That’s where my heart is. I would never dream of hurting anybody on purpose,” Parton said at the time.
When COVID-19 reared its ugly head, Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center to help with research toward a vaccine. That money helped fund the early research that eventually led to the Moderna vaccine.
Whether you were a fan of “9 to 5,” “Rhinestone” and “Steel Magnolias,” prefer to turn on “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors” or “Islands in the Stream,” or know her only as Miley Cyrus’s godmother, almost everyone can find something to love about Dolly Parton as an artist.
What’s kind of amazing is how hard she works to be an even better person.
If someone with those standards for helping others finds such value in making sure kids love to read and giving them the books to do it, maybe the rest of us should — ahem — take a page out of her book.
Christina Myer is executive editor of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. She can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]
This post was originally published on here
