DAVID

PHOTO BY RANDY BACON

DAVID HARRISON

“It Made All The Difference”

The seeds of my belief in, and later my passion for literacy were planted early.

I remember, when I was three, my parents holding me close, reading to me and

making it so much fun. When I was four, I sat on my mother’s lap while she read the

Gettysburg Address, over and over, talking about the words, underscoring each one

with a long, graceful finger, until I could recite the speech from memory. It was our

secret. She sewed an Uncle Sam costume just for me. When I stood proudly and

performed President Lincoln’s poetic speech at Grace Methodist Church, I wowed the

crowd. A kid never forgets a thing like that.

My parents played cards with another couple. The wife was an artist. On nights when

we went to their house, she always had art paper and supplies laid out ready for me.

Before the adults started their game, my artist friend sat down next to me and showed

me some new skill I could practice if I wanted to. What a treat for a five-year-old! I loved

going to their house. At six, I wrote my first poem. I loved walking through the kitchen

to see it published on the refrigerator door. Imagine my pride when I started school and

discovered that not everyone could already read like I could.

Skipping forward twenty-six years, Little Turtle’s Big Adventure was published by Random House in 1969. It’s the story of a turtle whose quiet life beside a pond is ruined when road builders come through with big, noisy machines and replace the pond with a highway. The small turtle spends the rest of the story looking for a new home. The story ends with him sunning contentedly on a log beside the still water of a new pond. The idea probably originated from my boyhood when I was prone to wander along rivers and ponds. I met many a turtle in those days, wandering too.

The wandering turtle in my book landed me my first invitation to speak as an author. When I stepped on stage at a conference at Lindenwood College (now University), I was 32 years old. Later on, Mr. Green Jeans read my book to a national audience on Captain Kangaroo, but an experience 43 years later reminded me what literacy can mean to a child. After a talk, a mother brought her young daughter to meet me. “Two days ago, she was inconsolable,” her mother said. “She couldn’t eat, sleep, or stop crying.” The family had recently moved from their old home and school and friends to a new neighborhood. Their daughter was broken hearted. Nothing her parents could do helped. Then the librarian at her new school sent home a copy of Little Turtle’s Big Adventure. After reading the story, the little girl informed her parents that if a turtle could be happy in a new place, she could too. That night she slept with the book under her pillow. “Next morning, she was back to being our sunny little girl,” her mother said.

Children’s authors often see examples up close and personal of how books change lives, especially young lives. A six-year-old girl sat on her mother’s lap and listened while her mother read a new book over and over. Then the girl read the book silently to herself. She read it aloud. She asked an adult friend to sit down and listen to her read her new story. She asked the adult to take turns reading with her. The girl began acting out some of the parts, leaping and waving her arms and dancing in exuberant interpretations of what she heard and felt and saw in her imagination. Next day she took the book to school. There she organized her classmates into teams. As the book was read aloud, the children performed the girl’s choreographed movements. I had written the book, but the little girl had made my story her own. Another child loved a story (Piggy Wiggle’s Great Adventure) about a runaway baby pig so much that when she grew up, she had Piggy and the last verse in the book tattooed on her leg. When a boy who struggled with reading discovered poetry, his reading began to improve. He said once he felt the beat of the words in his head, reading them got easier. I’ve seen kids so excited they could hardly stand still, wait in long lines for a chance to actually see a favorite author and get a book signed. Some become so awed they can scarcely speak when their turn finally comes.

Thanks to my own great fortune when I was a child, it was an easy decision to start volunteering in various literacy efforts nearly 40 years ago. I’ve helped raise money for library books, helped introduce young readers to books written by hundreds of authors nation-wide, challenged students to read enough books to reach the sky, helped create free CD libraries of books recorded by well-known people (including their parents), helped bring Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library to Springfield to give free books to kids, served on school boards and university advisory councils, written articles and books about literacy, given speeches, and visited hundreds of schools and libraries. I feel blessed to have had so many opportunities. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for reading to me when I was little. It made all the difference.