Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, December 25, 1993 TAG: 9312280002
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV5 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MARA LEE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PEARISBURG LENGTH: Medium
Johnston, the winner of an award for Appalachian volunteers who promote literacy, would rather offer her guest a sticky bun and some tea than talk about her $1,000 Kirkus Award.
The Kirkus Award rotates to Virginia every three years, and is donated by the publishers of the Virginia Kirkus Book Review in memory of their son, John Kobak, a VISTA worker.
``I like to do my things and not be recognized for them,'' Johnston says. ``I just like to be in the background.''
But Johnston wasn't in the background in 1962, when she was the first librarian in Pearisburg.
When the library opened that year, it was a 12-by-20-foot room off the town hall with 1,000 books. It's still essentially one room, but has 30,000 volumes.
The town is in the process of renovating a Mormon church for an expanded library, and Johnston plans to donate her prize toward that goal. She retired in 1986.
Johnston received the recognition because of her role as one of three creators of the Literacy Volunteers of the New River Valley, begun in 1979. She recalls, ``We had nothing to go on. No statistics and no information.''
Nearly one-sixth of the 11,000 Giles County adults quit school before 10th grade, according to the 1990 census.
But Johnston didn't become overwhelmed. ``I'm not the type of person that gets frustrated with things. If there's a problem, I take it and look at it.''
It's only natural that she'd want to spread the joy of reading. Johnston, born and raised on a Giles County farm, began reading at age 4. And her father read Bible stories to her from her earliest memory.
``I always have to have two books beside me,'' she says. The two in the antique and old-photograph filled parlor are ``Scarlett,'' the sequel to ``Gone With the Wind,'' and a biography of the first ladies.
She works as a spokeswoman for the area literacy programs and said part of her job was getting the program off the ground. ``The part that I did had to be done before you could have tutors.''
Johnston was never a tutor, so she gets her rewards vicariously. She tells of a story she heard about one man studying to get his high school diploma by examination. ``I remember this gentleman, he drove from Bluefield down here once a week for three years.``
Eventually Princeton, W.Va., set up a tutoring program, and he shortened his commute. ``I don't know what happened to him after he went. I hope he got his GED [General Equivalency Degree].''
Johnston says being removed from the students helps distance her from the frustrations as well as the joys. ``The more you train, the more you have to train,'' she says. She tries not to think about how the size of the group's effort matches up to the size of the problem, she says.
Ann Fisher, head librarian in Radford's public library, co-founded the organization. She said of Johnston, ``She pushed to have it a part of what the library was doing even though it's a small library.''
Despite a chronic shortage of willing students for the number of trained tutors, Johnston doesn't regret a moment of her volunteering. ``If we could help one person to learn to read better, that was reward within itself,'' she said. ``That's what kept us going.''
by CNB