Reach Out and Read National News
Cleveland Plain Dealer
For this doctor, every child's checkup comes with a story
January 01, 2005
Diane Suchetka
In a town not so far away, in a time not so long ago, Dr. Robert Needlman walked into his job at a medical center in the inner city of Boston. The pediatrician looked around the waiting room and worried a bit.
Something was missing.
There were no storybooks, nothing for the children to read while they waited for him or one of the other doctors to fix their sore throats, their runny noses, their infected ears.
Why? he asked other workers there.
They told how they had been hauling picture books and fairy tales to the office from home. But they stopped.
Patients were stealing the books.
Why bother? they said. If we bring more, they'll disappear, too.
And they shook their heads the way people do when something bad happens.
Their words got Needlman thinking, not about the bad in people, but the good. And he came up with an idea.
He made phone calls and wrote letters asking for help. And before long, the people at Boston's his toric Old South Church came through with $6,000 -- enough money to buy books, hundreds of books, so many books that Needlman did exactly what he set out to do.
He gave them away -- one book to every child who came for a checkup.
With help, he rounded up volunteers to read in the waiting room, so parents who grew up without books at home could see how it was done.
And he talked to each child's parents, told them how important it is for children to grow up loving books. They'll earn better grades in school, he told them, and live better lives.
That love of books, he told them, comes best when parents and children enjoy them together from the start.
From there, Needlman's program grew year after year after year.
Today, thousands of doctors and nurses at more than 2,100 clinics and hospitals throughout the United States are giving away books, talking to parents about how important they are. And doctors who have come to the United States to complete their medical training have taken the program around the world, to Canada, Italy, Australia, Israel and Lithuania.
The program Needlman started back then is called Reach Out and Read.
Last year, it celebrated its 15th anniversary and gave away more than 3 million books.
By 2009, it hopes to double that.
Needlman works in Cleveland now; he has for years.
The 45-year-old pediatrician spends half of his time seeing patients at MetroHealth Medical Center. The other half he uses to write. He's the doctor whom Mary Morgan - Benjamin Spock's widow - hired to update the classic "Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care."
In between, he teaches pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University's medical school.
Of course, he heads the Cleveland chapter of Reach Out and Read, a partnership of dozens of people - doctors, librarians, college professors and others - from hospitals, libraries, universities and civic groups all over the city.
And somewhere along the way, he became his own children's story - a tale that begins with trouble, ends with happiness and already is being passed from one generation to the next.
The doctor gets help
To be sure, Robert Needlman did not do all of this alone.
Thousands of people have helped.
First lady Laura Bush and former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton have promoted the program.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Education gave Reach Out and Read $4 million to buy books. This year, it will expand that to $10 million.
From the start, specialists in educating young children helped design the program. And today, the nonfiction writer/novelist/short-story writer/pediatrician Perri Klass keeps it running.
Sometimes publishers donate books, adding to the millions Reach Out and Read buys every year. Boy Scouts, college students and little old ladies volunteer to collect them, box them up and deliver them to the doctors and nurses who hand them out.
Not so long ago, Needlman sat in his office surrounded by 700 copies of "Peter Rabbit."
"This happens all the time," he said of the donation that showed up one day.
It's just one example of how Reach Out and Read has spread.
Another is the number of medical schools across the county that make sure students learning how to treat children understand the importance of reading.
"In a few years, they won't realize it wasn't always that way," says Needlman, the man who inspired them with his medical-conference speeches, including the one where he stood up and just read a children's book to a roomful of pediatricians.
"What Robert brought to this was his passion for children and his commitment to make a difference in their lives," says Barry Zuckerman, co-founder of Reach Out and Read and the man responsible for much of its success.
Needlman took his idea to Zuckerman when he first noticed the bare waiting room back in 1989.
Needlman had just finished his residency in pediatrics and was starting a three-year study of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at what is now Boston Medical Center. Zuckerman was his mentor.
Zuckerman listened, then reached into a file drawer and pulled out a plan for a nearly identical program. Zuckerman had tried to get it started years earlier, but couldn't get the money.
"Serendipitously, we were both on the same page," Zuckerman says. "And now millions of kids have books in their homes who may not have had them."
Yes, he says, there's a lesson in the story of Needlman.
"We shouldn't be limited by our boundaries," he says. "We shouldn't be afraid to try something new."
The idea catches on
Dr. Susan Cooley wasn't exactly afraid to try Reach Out and Read. She thought it was a great idea when she applied for a grant to start a chapter at a University of Texas children's clinic in Spring Branch, a low-income neighborhood in Houston.
The money came through, and there she was, faced with ordering books and organizing the program in between treating dozens of patients a day.
We'll get these books and we'll just hand them out until we run out of them and that'll be the end of it, the pediatrician said.
On the day the books arrived, she was frazzled, thanks in part to a homeless woman who showed up - dirty and barefoot with dark circles around her eyes and three children who ran around the office yelling and climbing the furniture.
This is useless, Cooley thought, but she went ahead and picked up a copy of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," in Spanish, and started to read.
The children stopped running. They quieted down. They gathered around the doctor, practically climbed in her lap.
Still, Cooley couldn't see what good it was doing. Even when she got to the end of the book - the part where the big, fat caterpillar turns into a beautiful butterfly - and she heard the mother gasp and saw her face light up, Cooley thought a story was the last thing that family needed.
And she didn't think much about the woman and her children again until two years later, when Justina, the receptionist, called Cooley to the front desk.
You've got to come see this, Justina said.
There stood the woman from El Salvador, showered, wearing makeup and holding up a certificate from the literacy program she had just finished.
I read to my children every day, she told the doctor.
I sit on the steps of my apartment and I read to all the children as they come home from school.
And I want to start a class at the children's school to help teach the other mothers to read.
"You never know who you're going to touch," Cooley says. "You just never know."
"You know the funny things is . . . " and the doctor starts into one more story.
It was 15 years ago, she says, the same year Needlman discovered books missing from his waiting room in Boston. Cooley was working at a county hospital in Houston, and patients were stealing the books there, too. The hospital called a meeting, to figure out what to do.
"And you know what our solution was?" she asks.
They chained the books to the walls.
"We don't chain them to the walls anymore," Cooley says. "Now we have Reach Out and Read."
For more information on Reach Out and Read, go to www.reachoutandread.org or send e-mail to info@reachoutandread.org.