Submitted by: Garrett Lenderman
I’ve read books my entire life, and I have my parents to thank for that. My mother was an avid reader of “grocery store” novels growing up, and encouraged me to read books with her on Sunday afternoons. And my father, whenever he would catch me with a book, would always make a point to tell me how proud he was of me for reading.
When I was young, my parents both left steady jobs to become business partners with a guy in New York, who was starting a company that managed recycling for shopping malls. The move, which eventually turned out to be extremely profitable, put our family on a shoestring budget for most of my childhood. But despite a shortage of cash, our family always found money for books.
I remember during a sample-bonanza, Saturday trip to Sam’s Club, I stumbled upon a three-pack of Hardy Boys mystery novels and tactfully asked my dad if I could have them, “Dad, can I have these books? I’ll clean out the toy closet and pull all of the weeds out of the front lawn for them!” Expecting him to say “no,” he took the books from my arms, threw them into our shopping cart, and said, “You didn’t have to ask—there’s always money for books.”
That was news to me—almost nothing came to me without getting my hands dirty first—but the invitation to read interesting titles was opened. I lost myself in a lot of books that were purchased at the book table in Sam’s Club: The Hardy Boys, Goosebumps, Animorphs, and various old-timey novels like The Lost Kingdom and Rising Star, just to name a few.
Name: Garrett Lenderman
Title: Researcher and Writer
Hometown: Roswell, Georgia
For the 2014 RED Day (renew, energize, donate) community service project, Keller Williams Realty International partnered with BookSpring. This blog is a part of a “blog-a-thon”, by KW volunteers, to create new content that shares the stories of book-lovers and their favorite books.
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