When I was a kid, I didn’t like to read.

At the time, lasting until probably last week, I would have rather been at a basketball court, riding my bike, playing a video game, or fighting with my siblings.

However, I was always told the importance of reading, so I adapted what I thought I should be doing, reading, to what I liked, sports, video games, Batman, and adventures. Believe it or not, as an elementary school kid, I read Sports Illustrated, the local newspaper, Batman comics, video game magazines, Animorphs (Google the series, it was my favorite), The Boxcar Children, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Goosebumps on a regular basis without taking tests for Accelerated Reader or whichever program an English teacher used for giving grades.

I look back and think, ‘Man, I read all of those and still played basketball, still saw my friends, still finished The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on Super Nintendo (the first game I ever fully defeated) and remained the No. 1 antagonist in the family.’

Life was good.

I never realized how good literary life really was or the advantages I had by reading so much until the last few years.

I’ve read articles about how words and books give you a leg up, in not only school, but the adult world after you step out of a classroom.

When I found out about the Dolly Pardon Imagination Library, which is now in a large part of LaSalle County, and neighboring counties, as it increases its range across the United States at a lighting pace, I was amazed by the studies and why the program was formed.

I spoke to J. Burt, president of the North Central Regional Betterment Coalition, about the library and why reading is so important.

“Back in the early 2000s, the Feds (Federal Reserve Board) paid for a study of LaSalle, Bureau, and Putnam Counties to determine what was economically going to hold the area back from advancing,” Burt said. “The study found this area has an overabundance of low-skilled and low-wage jobs, a lack of people with a degree or certificate beyond high school, and at that time, there was a heroin problem. This study is why the NCRBC was formed.

“We’ve had numerous projects over the years. Several years back, five or six, we read University of Chicago’s “Thirty Million Words” study. This study found children of wealthier families, by the time they’re 3- or 4-years old have had 30-million more words go into their ears than children in families in a lower socioeconomic status.

“Words are running through these infants’ minds. They can’t understand them, but their brain is acting like a computer and processing to a point that by time they are three or four, it’s like a switch and their brain starts to put it all together.”

The study showed these infants and then young children who have had more words travel through their ear canals were able to communicate, follow instruction, engage at a much higher level than those who didn’t ear eat alphabet soup.

It also said once a child is ahead in the word count, it stays ahead because the individual is now hungry for more words and information.

NCRBC has a program called Words Matter in which it hands out a set of books and advocacy pamphlets to suggest parents reading to their children. The organization distributes the books and pamphlets when a mother and her child leave the maternity room at a local hospital in the Illinois Valley.

Since 2020, the NCRBC has given over 2,300 books and pamphlets to new mothers and new humans.

This stemmed the interest in Dolly Pardon’s Imagination Library.

“When a child is enrolled in the Dolly Pardon’s Foundation, the Dollywood Foundation, it will mail the child a brand-new children’s book once a month every month from birth until they are five,” Burt said. “The idea is if we’re flooding children with books and we have parents reading to them, the hope is economically we can wiggle the needle.

“It may take 20 years, but we could move the needle to improve three things. We want to improve the lives of these children. In theory, there should be less need for homeless shelters, drug rehab services, and mental health clinics. Also, if we’re improving children’s lives, we would be improving the quality of the human talent pool for not only our existing employers but also new employers who may bring a business to this area.”

In other words, we should all be reading.

We should all be digesting as many words as possible.

We should all be vying to improve our betterment, the betterment of our family and friends, and the betterment of our community.

It’s as simple as reading a few pages a day.

I got to go now.

A Stars Wars book awaits.