You never know what influence a book may have

Aug 26, 2026

Yesterday in the wake of the sad news that Dolly Parton had passed away at the age of 80, this trend started going around on Bluesky: talk about a book that you read as a child that changed your life. I immediately knew what mine was as I have been thinking about it a lot over the last couple of months.

“Katy and the Big Snow” was published in 1943 by renowned Caldecott Award winning children’s author and illustrator Virginia Lee Burton. “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” and “The Little House” are her more renowned books — but Katy was the character that made a huge impact on my young self.

I don’t of course remember exactly the first time I read “Katy and the Big Snow” — although I do have a memory of reading it with my mom as well as my grandma who passed away in January 1977, so it was before that. I grew up in the St. Louis area, and along with much of the Midwest the 1970s was one of the coldest, snowiest decades on record. Four of the ten snowiest years in the 130+ year of climate records for St. Louis occurred in that decade.

Luckily for me, I loved snow. I loved playing out in the snow — I remember my mom saved bread wrappers to wrap my stockinged feet in to help keep my feet dry while out in the snow in my rubber boots. At night when it was snowing I would stand at our front window and watch the snow fall in the streetlights and gradually pile up.

So I guess it is not surprising that when I was about 7 and got my hands on a book all about snow — and with a protagonist snow plow named Katy — that I kind of became obsessed with it. Of course, it wasn’t just the topic — Burton’s art was so engrossing to me. I loved that she decorated the margins of many of the pages with little animations like the one on the page above.

Burton infused her anthropomorphized snow plow with real personality, and I loved that the focus of that personality was helping the people of fictional Geoppolis get through their blizzard safely.

Katy helped me understand that people were vulnerable to bad weather like blizzards — and that we needed people to perform tasks (sometimes really hard tasks) to keep us all safe. Reading Katy helped me become really interested in watching the weather forecasts on television and warning my teachers and friends about what was going to happen — especially when it came to snow and the possibility of us not having school the next day.

I have no doubt that reading Katy at a formative point in my childhood drove an initial interest in weather — and primed me for when I received a NOAA Weather Radio for a Christmas present (a story I told when my mom passed away) to become enthralled with the idea of working with the people that gave me all of the wonderful weather and science information I heard from that radio. This was particularly true when I learned enough about the National Weather Service to understand that these were the people that truly helped society get through bad weather — just like Katy.

Dolly Parton was a towering figure throughout my childhood, and I loved so many of her songs and movies. Her later work in literacy with her Imagination Library that has given away more than 300 million books to kids was just another reason for me to love her.

Books have always been an important part of my life, and as I grew up, married and raised kids they were an integral part of our family. As a teacher and passionate book lover, my wife has spent much of her time the last several years running her own literacy non-profit Little Read Wagon that has distributed more than 80,000 books in central Oklahoma. When I occasionally volunteer at one of the events where Little Read Wagon gives out books, I see the joy on the faces of people of all ages from getting a book to take home. We never know which book might be one that will provide a life changing experience like “Katy and the Big Snow” gave me — but just imagine how many opportunities for such an experience Dolly Parton provided.

Dolly said that she would rather be known as the “book lady” than the “Queen of Country Music” — she clearly understood the importance of what she was giving our world with her work.

I will have a more “traditional” post with weather updates by tonight.