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Dear Friend of Reader To Reader, I hope you enjoy this newsletter about the Reader To Reader Book Project. Our success is very much due to your donations of books, postage money, and most of all your generous spirit. Please forward this newsletter and help us spread the word. The books keep coming for our Hurricane Katrina Book Drive and sometimes in the coming and going they leave us with quite a story to tell. Last Monday Heidi Rankin drove down from Canada in a truck laden with 300 boxes of books that she had collected over a period of months from five towns in the Chateauguay, Quebec area. It was a five hour journey that she started in the wee hours of the morning. Our plan was to transfer the books in Springfield to a tractor-trailer that we already had loaded for another large shipment to Ellisville, Mississippi. The truck was set out to pull out at 3pm and it all looked to be timed to perfection. Unfortunately, perfection being what it is these days, like a lot of good plans something sometimes goes a wry and her truck broke down in the Adirondack mountains near Schroon Lake. Heidi managed to get some radiator antifreeze and made it down to a shopping plaza just off the highway in the Amherst area in the late afternoon but unfortunately long after the Mississippi-bound tractor-trailer had started on its journey. The only upside to this was the fact that the tractor-trailer driver had confessed that his truck was so loaded down due to the weight of the books that he could end up being overweight if stopped in Virginia. Books have weight; this will become even clearer further on in our story. Now, since Heidi had to get the truck she had borrowed back to Canada that night, the question became where to put 300 cartons of books. These are the kinds of questions that are a bit like “would you like a last cigarette before the firing squad.” When you are standing in a shopping plaza parking lot. Luckily, John, our quick thinking Director of Operations, managed to find a truck rental place that was open for ten more minutes and raced like Mario Andretti to secure a truck--the idea being to transfer all 300 boxes to the truck and head down to warehouse space in Springfield in the morning. This was a fine idea and with a lot of backbreaking lifting to transfer all the boxes worked just fine. However, if you have ever wondered what happens when the contents of a large 30-ton truck get loaded into a smaller 15-ton trucker, I’ve got the answer. The 15-ton truck can’t move! So, now we had a sagging 15-ton truck, loaded with 300 cartons of books, stuck in the Hadley Village Barn parking lot. This was not Heidi’s problem as she was enjoying another pleasant 5-hour drive through the bucolic Vermont countryside on her way back to Quebec. Eye-balling the truck’s sagging springs, John and I pondered our next move, which was either to get out of the books to school program and hide out in an obscure Mexican village, or to start shuttling the books in a series of van trips to Springfield until the truck was light enough to move. Not having permission from our wives to go out of the area, lot less Mexico, we made a number of fully loaded van trips to Springfield, which seemed to make the 15-ton truck much happier. The truck eventually decided to move and we got the boxes into storage to be shipped out in the very next Hurricane Katrina shipment. All in a day’s, or in this case, two day’s work. Thank you to Heidi Rankin for all her dedication in collecting and driving down the books from Canada. Thank you to the Springfield Kiwanis Club for securing from Sarat Ford the loan of a mighty handy Ford E-350 Super Duty XL Van (which seems to hold quite a bit in its own right), and thank you to my trusted assistant, John Hooks Davis, who without his supreme efforts this newsletter would have been written from the previously mentioned small town in Mexico. That’s how our summer started. By the way, did I mention that 160,000 more books are on their way to Mississippi? Until next month, Sincerely,
David Mazor
Please help us with a tax-deductible donation. Here are some of our recent books shipments: Bowe Elementary, Chicopee, MA
White Street Elementary, Springfield, MA
Tohono O’odham Community College, Sells, AZ
Memorial Elementary, West Springfield, MA
Washington Elementary, Springfield, MA
Navajo Pine High School, Navajo, NM
Hughes High School, Hughes, AR
John Essex High School, Demopolis, AL
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