In a one-room cabin without electricity or running water, Dolly Parton was born on January 19, 1946, in Pittman Center, Tennessee.
Her father rode out on horseback in the middle of a snowstorm to seek help. Dr. Robert F. Thomas, a missionary doctor, arrived, and because the family didn’t have a penny, they paid him with a sack of cornmeal.
Robert Lee Parton, her father, worked land that wasn’t his and never learned to read or write. Dolly was the fourth of twelve siblings raised among the Great Smoky Mountains.
Decades later, she founded the Imagination Library, a program that sends free books to children from birth until they start school.
It has already surpassed 300 million copies delivered.
The girl who grew up without books at home ended up filling the homes of millions of families with them.