Letters to the children of Troy
In 1971, Marguerite Hart, the first children’s librarian at the local library in Troy, Michigan, began a letter writing campaign to many famous people asking them to respond with an open letter to the town’s children about the importance of libraries and reading. She received 97 letters from people such as “First Lady Pat Nixon; Michigan Governor William Milliken; then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan; Michigan State University President Clifton Wharton, Jr., the first African-American president of a major U.S. university; first-man-on-the-moon Neil Armstrong; Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown; authors Isaac Asimov, Hardie Gramatky, Dr. Seuss, Dr. Ben Spock, and E.B. White; and actors Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Vincent Price, and Dan Rowan and Dick Martin.” Issac Asimov’s response above is pretty wonderful.
You can view all 97 letters at the Troy Library’s website here.