It’s a legacy that Parton built quietly in the background as she presided over pop culture for more than six decades.<\/p>\n
“The biggest thing that I like is the fact that she didn’t do anything for recognition,” said Geoff Blacklin, 67, of Manitoba, Canada.<\/p>\n
He and his wife signed up their grandchildren for Imagination Library after a local doctor brought the programme to their region.<\/p>\n
“She gave families more than books,” Blacklin said. “She gave children a love of reading, precious moments with loved ones, and opportunities to learn and dream.”<\/p>\n
Such family stories and gratitude would undoubtedly have been music to Parton’s ears; the expansion of the programme was truly a realisation of her own dream.<\/p>\n
“In the beginning, my hope was simply to inspire the children in my home county, but here we are today with a worldwide programme that gives a book a month to well over 3 million children,” she wrote on the Imagination Library site – also taking care to thank the partners “who have embraced my dream and made it their own”.<\/p>\n
At the centre of it, always, was her love for children – and her love for her father.<\/p>\n
“Before he passed away, my Daddy told me the Imagination Library was probably the most important thing I had ever done,” Parton wrote. <\/p>\n
“I can’t tell you how much that meant to me, because I created the Imagination Library as a tribute to my Daddy.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s a legacy that Parton built quietly in the background as she presided over pop culture for more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":753314,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-753313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/753314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}