The Mayor Reads (and hopes you do too!)

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.” Dr. Seuss

Tomorrow – March 2^nd - is Dr. Seuss' 113^th birthday. The Good Doctor is no longer with us (he left us in 1991) but since 1997, the National Education Association (NEA) has used his birthday as a springboard to a national reading event called “Read Across America.” The NEA's website provides lots of ideas for educators how to make this day fun and memorable but essentially comes down to inviting members of the community to come in and read to kids at Roselawn.

I started volunteering at Roselawn when our oldest daughter Christine, now 28, began her kindergarten year. Like a lot of parent-volunteers, I would come in and cut out paper stars or whatever Mrs. Anderson needed me to do. It was pretty infrequently and certainly not regular at all. But it was when our son, Charlie, was a student in Mrs. Roth's kindergarten class a few years later and Mrs. Schaff was her aide that my career as a weekly Read Aloud guy really began. This is how I remember it happened: I was volunteering in Ingrid's room and Mrs. Schaff was about to read a book when one of her charges needed some attention. So she turned to me and said, “Here read this, ” and left me with a room full of kindergarteners. It was Erica Silverman's Big Pumpkin and I had no idea that my life was about to change.

This book changed my life

What's so significant about Big Pumpkin? It's just a fun story about a witch, a ghost, a vampire, a mummy and a bat that work together to get a big pumpkin off the vine in time for Halloween. But sitting in front of those children, with a book I had never heard of before let alone read, I decided to have fun with it and quickly came up with voices to go with each character. Well word got around and before long I was invited to read to all kinds of classes and my side-gig as dramatic reader began. That's how it started. That was twenty years ago and our four children have long since left that building and graduated from high school but I'm still reading at Roselawn to kindergarteners, first and second graders. (In years past I used to read in all six grades but with keyboarding and whatnot, the older grades don't really have a slot for me to squeeze into now.)

Suffice to say, I've been reading at Roselawn for awhile now and somewhere along the way I became in charge of securing readers for “Dr. Seuss' Birthday.” It's really not too much of a hassle. I just need to find a couple dozen individuals who love to read to kids to come in and read to a class for fifteen minutes. It usually takes me about a week to fill out the schedule. The readers will come in at their designated time slot and either read something they've brought from home or their choice from Roselawn's “Dr. Seuss' Selection”. They don't need to read Dr. Seuss – it's a celebration of reading more than anything else – but it has to be something they can pull off in fifteen minutes (I usually dead-pan it by telling perspective readers, “So War and Peace or Anna Karenina is out”.) Over the years we've had school administrators, police officers, members of the fire department, soldiers, engineers, pastors, mayors to say nothing of homemakers and lots of high school students come in and read. Even now-retired Police Chief Mark Pedersen got into the fun of it as he always wanted to read to Mrs. Roth's kindergarteners. This year is pretty much a sampling of previous years with the exception that for the first time ever we'll have the City Clerk, Carmen Newman, reading to a class. Are they in for a treat.

Tomorrow I'll arrive at Roselawn at 7:30-ish, don the Cat suit and head to where the buses drop the kids off to welcome them all to school on “my” day. Every year there's always a few who try and pull my tail off (and one of these years someone is going to be successful at that) but it's all in good fun. And like the Cat said in his first book (The Cat in the Hat) - “It's good to have fun but you have to know how.” The Cat will read to the Bright Beginners as well as prowl about the Roselawn hallways in hopes of catching some of our guest readers in action – Acting Chief Ron Ambrozaitis,

Calhoun Memorial Librarian Carol Burhnam, Pastor Josh Toufar from New Hope Lutheran in Sand Creek (who once upon a time used to don the Buster the Bulldog get-up and chase the Cat around the playground before school began much to the delight of all the kids), and C-WHS Seniors and dramatic personae Amira Lunderville and Sarah Chuchwar – to name a few.

If you happen to catch this week's Chetek Alert, go to Page 10 (the back page of the first section) and you'll see the Mayoral Proclamation exhorting all kids in town to read something good in honor of the day. Of course, the magic of Seuss – if that is your preference – is that he usually wrote his stuff with the notion that his books would be read by children while sitting in the lap of a

A classic

caring adult. But it need not be Green Eggs and Ham or One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish tomorrow. It could be any number of Childrens' classics like Frog and Toad, Cows That Type or any of the Ian Falconer's Olivia books. Read a chapter from one of the Narnia Chronicles or my personal favorite chapter from The Hobbit, “Riddles in the Dark.” Or read a chapter from the Bible.

I'm thankful for audio books. I've listened to quite a number of them on many of my runs or on long road trips. But nothing quite replaces the immediacy and the intimacy of taking a book from the shelf, sitting down in a comfortable chair with cup of hot coffee at hand and reading to your child or grandchild. Here's hoping you'll make time to do this sometime tomorrow on the Good Doctor's day.