Margaret McNamara Pastor is the daughter of RIF Founder Margaret McNamara and a current member of RIF’s Board of Directors. Today on RIF’s 43rd birthday she shares memories of her mother and RIF.
My mom, Margaret McNamara, loved to read to me, my brother and my sister, and everyone else. By reading to us, my mom transformed us into voracious readers. She worked in the poorer communities in Washington tutoring young people, and she began to notice they were bored and had no motivation to read on their own.
One morning, a simple idea leaped into her brain, and RIF is the child of that idea. If children were going to have fun in the world and become contributing members of society, they needed to enjoy a lifetime of reading. These books should relate to their daily lives, and most importantly, the children needed to have their own books. She believed that if you put books in the hands and the homes of children, this would lead to a life-long love of reading and contribute to a fulfilling life.
Mother had a great love of people, particularly children. She was full of life and energy and felt anything was possible. At base, she believed people were good at heart, and she felt that misfortune and deprivation could be altered. On top of all this, she was persistent to the point of being relentless, particularly on behalf a good cause. RIF is here today because of her determination, and it has grown over 43 years, recruiting thousands of volunteers and millions of RIF kids, because its staff has demonstrated the same striving to improve young people’s lives as she did.
At the beginning, there were few children’s books in paperback. Few books had stories of children of different ethnicities and cultures; few books told the narrative of different families; and there were few publishers or distributors who believed that a free book could make a whole lot of difference in motivating children to read. It was a long slog in the early years. Doors were not easily opened, and a new way of approaching reading motivation was not immediately embraced. But Mother had many crusaders at her side that gave their energy and time to the creation of RIF: Kay Lumley, Barbara Atkinson, Mary Schuman Eddy, Ruth Graves, Lynda Johnson Robb, Jean Sisco, Anne Richardson, Loretta Barrett, Arthur White and so many others.
The “RIF bookmobile” was my mom’s dream brought to life. In 1967, Ford Motor Company donated a white van fitted with bookshelves. This allowed the books to be shared with several schools during the summers. I never was able to see her with the bookmobile, but I thought this was a wonderful photo of her with Barbara Atkinson and a local musician. Children and volunteers joined together to paint the first bookmobile with a V and a child sitting in the middle reading a book. The RIF bookmobile became almost as well known as the ice cream truck. Malcolm Taylor, one of the drivers, was like the Pied Piper. When the children heard the “ooga ooga” of his horn, they’d run behind the truck to the next stop. Initially he did the distributions without much help, and he cared for the children like a father, sometimes dipping into his own resources to provide for special needs. Later, he’d do five locations a day, and volunteers met the van and would read with children and sometimes do arts and crafts as well as other special projects.
Mom loved children. She wanted to open their lives to the world through reading and fun. She was a prankster and loved a good time. She had a great sense of humor and like the seven dwarfs, she loved to whistle while she worked. She filled my early life with stories; every night before bed we would read a Golden Book or children’s classic that she had ordered through the mail. Mom was always full of ideas for plays, building sets and making costumes. We sold tickets for our plays to the neighborhood. On my Halloween birthday she would appear in costume, generally as a witch or ghost, and tell stories with props, including grapes for witch eyes, cold spaghetti for hair and on one occasion she dressed as a Charles Addams character with a live baby alligator on her arm. Mom loved the written word. When away from home I would receive manila envelopes filled with articles, which I “must read” with Mom’s comments in the margins about people, politics, the arts, poverty, children, poetry, and quotes from all manner of people.
When she was not with children and family, she was working as a volunteer for the PTA, the Polio Foundation, the League of Women Voters, the Juvenile Court Advisory Council, and many other national and public service groups when she moved to D. C. This work strengthened her belief that volunteers can be as productive as any business or government professional. Her belief was validated. Thousands of RIF volunteers have become the centerpiece of 18,000 RIF sites in 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the territories. She would be particularly proud to know that many RIF kids have passed along their love and dedication to RIF to their children and grandchildren. It is an amazing legacy.
In celebration of RIF’s 40th birthday in 2006, when I spoke with Michel Martin on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, many RIF kids now in their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s called in to the station to tell their stories and to say they still have their RIF books. Now that is a statement about the power of one woman’s idea that bore fruit and inspired thousands of people to plant new trees of books for millions of children.
Ruth Graves served as RIF’s President from 1976 to 1997.
Ruth recalls:
When RIF’s founder, Margaret McNamara asked me to take on the management of the organization, I was reluctant. I was quite content with what I was doing. What I did not know was that this sweet, gentle petite woman was not one to whom you easily said “no.” She proposed that I as least do one thing for her: visit some RIF programs and report to her my opinion as to whether her “modest experiment,” as she called it, was really helping children. At the time RIF had about 400 programs.
I agreed and off I went to several states to see for myself what RIF was all about. The journey took me to places large and small, urban and rural. Everywhere I was overwhelmed with admiration for the volunteers who so freely gave of themselves to the children. The children were, of course, irresistible in their serious deliberations over the book choices and the joy upon finding just the right one. But the story didn’t stop there, for RIF had effects quite beyond what I expected.
This was brought home to me in a small, rural town where recent integration of the schools had not been especially welcomed. I observed two little boys, one white, one African American, arms casually slung across each other’s shoulders, heads together, giggling over a passage in the RIF book one had just selected. In a book they found common ground that transcended the community tensions surrounding them.
On my return to Washington I had no trouble telling Margy McNamara that her “modest experiment” was indeed succeeding. I agreed to take on the RIF management, but only “temporarily.”
Margy had a favorite Emily Dickinson poem in which the poet referred to books as “a bequest of wings.” My “temporary” assignment stretched into 21 years, each one more satisfying than its predecessor, thanks to the awe-inspiring work of RIF volunteers and the “bequest of wings” they bestowed on children across the country.
Ruth Graves and Margaret McNamara at a RIF book distribution. (Source: RIF Annual Report 1981.)
Arthur White is vice-chairman of Yankelovich Partners and a founding member of RIF’s Board of Directors.
Arthur recalls:
I have had the opportunity through a 60-year career in consulting to work with over 200 private sector, government, and not-for-profit organizations. I consider RIF a candidate for “the best” because of its extraordinary record of increasing contributions to improvement in children’s literacy. I became involved after a friend in the White House called to ask if I could come meet with Mrs. McNamara, who needed help with an education program. She was tutoring elementary school children and had to bring books in from home because the school had very few. She was exhausting the McNamara children’s supply and had turned to her husband for help. He suggested she obtain a measure of the problem not only in her school but in others and he would try to provide a remedy. I provided speedy research and he obtained seed money. Forty-three years of intense progress and outreach have developed from Mrs. McNamara’s project.
Lynda Johnson Robb is a founding member of RIF’s Board of Directors.
Lynda Johnson Robb
Lynda recalls an early RIF experience:
I joined Margy’s volunteers for RIF when I was pregnant with my first child. Now 40 years later my daughter has three children of her own.
One of my favorite RIF experiences was on a visit to a school in Arlington. It was a very diverse school. I was trying to help children find books that interested them as they came in with their classmates. One little girl was very selective. I was sure that her class would move on and she would be left without a book. Against RIF policy I tried to guide her to a book. “Do you like fairy tales, animal stories, biographies? What kind of book do you want?” I was pressing her. Finally she looked at me and said “I am looking for a book in English and Spanish. I am teaching my mother to read.” RIF can change the life not only of the child who gets the book but the family as well.
-Lynda
MEMORY MONDAY is a month-long feature in anticipation of RIF’s 43rd birthday on November 3. Each Monday until that birthday Rasco from RIF will feature RIF memories from someone affiliated with RIF from the very earliest days.
Anne Hazard Richardson was a founding member of RIF and served as Chairman of RIF’s Board of Directors from 1981 to 1996.
Since 2002, her daughter Nancy Richardson Carlson has directed a district-wide mentoring program in Vermont that supports middle school youth to achieve their potential through close personal and supportive relationships with caring adults.
Nancy Richardson Carlson
Nancy recalls:
I was only twelve years old when our mom started volunteering in Washington during the first years of RIF. She would help plan the book distributions, organize teams of volunteers, ask people for donations. She did everything. And she loved it! For 15 years she chaired RIF’s board. I remember her saying how lucky she felt that the perfect cause had found her. Our father understood the meaning and reward that she derived from her connection with amazing RIF volunteers around the country. He wrote, “I am not aware of any other voluntary organization that, in proportion to its size, does more for the future of our children and country.”
When our mother retired from her role as Chair of the RIF Board, my two sons and my brother Henry’s daughter spoke from a podium they could not see over to thank their grandmother for all she’d done to inspire in them a love of reading. In looking through files at home in hopes of finding a record of their words that day, I found instead a journal entry my younger son had written at age 10, a couple of months after his grandmother had died, about his earliest memory. From hearing the rest of us reminisce about his Gammy, he had realized that he had not had the chance to know her fully before she had become sick at the end of her life. In his journal, he described sitting in his grandmother’s lap in the loft of the Richardson’s home in Eastham, Massachusetts while she read aloud to him. He wrote about the “bright, dazzling light…filtering in through the windows’” and went on to say:
I’ve never really known Gammy as her entire and complete person, but I have been able to piece together a perception of her, using memories just like this one. She has always struck me as a woman who feels the need to spread her light, to fill in every dark recess with all the goodness within her – which justifies her leadership of organizations such as RIF (Reading Is Fundamental), and for that matter her desire to assist anyone in need. Indeed, her personality seems to be very similar to the light that was brightening the room we were reading in.
I have in a frame on my desk at home a quote from my mother that summarizes her commitment to improving the lives of children: What we do may be as small as helping a child learn to read, or as big as founding a large organization that will serve children for years to come. But there is no greater satisfaction than freely giving our time and talents to make life better for someone else.
Her passion for RIF and its mission inspired hundreds of people that she met over the years. She also instilled in us a deep appreciation for the work of volunteers and what they can accomplish. It is no accident that my own work involves building a community of over one hundred volunteer mentors.
-Nancy Richardson Carlson
Anne Richardson with D.C. RIF kids at John Adams Elementary School in 1986.
The Anne Richardson RIF Volunteer of the Year Award was founded in 1998 by a gift from her husband, the late U.S. Attorney General and Ambassador Elliot L. Richardson. Many friends of the Richardsons have since generously contributed to the endowment to honor Anne Richardson’s lifetime of volunteer service and salute the hundreds of thousands of RIF volunteers who inspire children to become lifelong readers.
MEMORY MONDAY is a month-long feature in anticipation of RIF’s 43rd birthday on November 3. Each Monday until that birthday Rasco from RIF will feature RIF memories from someone affiliated with RIF from the very earliest days.
Loretta Barrett, president of Loretta Barrett Books, Inc. is a founding member of RIF’s board of directors and secretary of the board.
Loretta recalls the early days of RIF:
I remember vividly when the phone rang and the publisher of Doubleday asked that I meet with Mrs. Margy McNamara concerning a program she was developing in the Washington, D.C. schools. I had recently come to Doubleday after being a teacher in a Philadelphia high school that had a 5th grade reading level and over a 50 percent dropout rate. I was nervous because this was the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s wife and I was very young and new to the publishing world.
Mrs. McNamara arrived in my office and almost immediately we found ourselves speaking the same language: a language of books for children who often had no books in their homes. There were very few, if any, paperbacks in those days and the prices were way too expensive for many families to ever consider buying books. The other problem was that many of the children we were working with never saw themselves in any of the books that were being published. This was the late 60’s and Margy McNamara was way ahead of the publishers in understanding the needs of the children she was working with. That day began a long friendship and journey which led to the founding of Reading Is Fundamental.
Margy worked in the schools in Washington, D.C., as a volunteer and she was beside herself that there were no books for the children in her classrooms. She came to New York to talk to publishers, and she returned again and again and again. At first it was difficult for her to be heard. She was sent to talk to young editors because people really didn’t understand her cause. I was too young to understand all the problems myself, but what I did understand was that we spoke the same language, and before I knew it I was recruited in the Margy McNamara campaign to get books to children and have been here ever since.
The early days of RIF were both exhilarating and frustrating, but Margy never stopped or paused or considered failure. She just kept going and brought the rest of us along with her. Margy McNamara is a woman I will never forget. I will always be honored that she invited me, a young, inexperienced editor but experienced school teacher who was thrilled to meet someone who knew the world I have come from to join her crusade—and a crusade it was.
Look what one person can do if they never stop trying. This is what Margy McNamara taught me and taught all of us at RIF. Millions of books later in the hands of children, all because Margy heard those kids’ voices and went to battle for them in every publishing house in New York and never took no for an answer.
Margaret McNamara Pastor is the daughter of RIF Founder Margaret McNamara and a current member of RIF’s Board of Directors. Today on RIF’s 43rd birthday she shares memories of her mother and RIF.
Ruth Graves served as RIF’s President from 1976 to 1997.
Arthur White is vice-chairman of Yankelovich Partners and a founding member of RIF’s Board of Directors.
Loretta Barrett, president of Loretta Barrett Books, Inc. is a founding member of RIF’s board of directors and secretary of the board.