Joe Kennedy

Joe Kennedy is routinely named the region's best writer by readers of The Roanoker magazine.

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Take two community-minded women with an unexpected lull in their lives and a yen for reading and what you’ll get is likely to be an idea for a way to help others.

Violet Tucker and Barbara Martinet are that kind of people.

Out of their friendship and free time has come the Crate Library, a zero-revenue book-providing project for five Roanoke schools with a high proportion of children who live in low-income households.

Each fall, the women deliver crates of books to classrooms at Fallon Park, Hurt Park, Garden City and Forest Park elementary schools, plus Oakland Intermediate .

They buy the books, “gently used,” as Martinet says, at book sales, yard sales, from locally owned bookstores and through eBay.

Each crate represents an individual library.

Teachers use them to provide extra reading for children when they finish their work or when they want a book to take home.

Supplemental reading

Classrooms are not devoid of books, of course, and schools are not without libraries. But the Crate Library saves teachers time and money out of pocket that they might spend for additional books.

Greg Johnston, the principal at Oakland Intermediate, heard about the crates from reading specialist Pam Wilson. She met the women at a Goodwill store, where all three were gathering books for their libraries.

The women talked, the crate ladies offered to provide books to teachers at Oakland, and Wilson spoke to the principal.

Sure, he said .

Teachers do a lot on their own. As a former teacher, Johnston looks for ways to reduce their stress.

Martinet and Tucker used to retrieve the crates of books at the end of the school year and return them in the fall. But now, with some 6,000 books in circulation, they leave them at the schools because neither has storage space at her home.

Nor do they have as much time as they used to. Tucker has a new grandchild and Martinet has ailing parents near Cincinnati whom she visits often .

Low-key

Wilson likes the convenience of the books in crates, which actually are plastic storage boxes bought from business supply stores.

“The crate ladies don’t require us to keep up with them or replace them,” Wilson said.

If students don’t bring the books back, neither they nor teachers are pressured — although the lending library concept is preferred.

“We’re in about 100 classrooms altogether,” Martinet said.

She worked in management for Dominion Bankshares before retiring to rear her children. Tucker is a retired reading teacher who worked in Roanoke schools and had the contacts to set their grass-roots project in motion.

“We tried to pick the schools where there was a greater need,” Martinet said. “She just called people she knew.”

Johnston was quick to point out that in the past two years his school has added about 1,000 new books to the crated ones.

The school also uses grant money to provide a book per month for each child. The kids read them and share them.

Fallon Park and Oakland are the only two of the five schools that get the crates to receive state accreditation, the latter for the first time this year.

Johnston said the heavy emphasis on reading played a role in his students’ achievements, and the crate ladies share in the credit.

Martinet said that, with the exception of one $500 grant from the Salem Rotary Club, they’ve used their money to buy the books.

It’s their community service.

When they met, they both had volunteered to help disadvantaged kids with their homework. Tucker bought books and sent them to her daughter, a teacher who works in another state.

“We were bemoaning the fact that she was getting books for her daughter’s class and I was giving books to the kids I tutored, but we were not hitting a whole lot of kids,” Martinet said.

They came up with the crate concept and proceeded slowly, with no thought of recompense.

“Don’t look for us to go public at any time,” said Martinet, the former banker, with a laugh.

“My numbers are very, very bad.”

But the good — and the good will — she and Tucker have generated may be beyond measure.

Joe Kennedy’s column runs

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