SuperReader’s origins weren’t very superhero-like.
He wasn’t jettisoned from an exploding bookstore, bitten by a spider that crawled from an unabridged dictionary, or endowed with great wealth after the death of librarian parents in a tragic bookslide.
SuperReader was born in 2000 because Floyd Stokes wanted to do something with kids. He was running a music business in Carlisle and deeply involved in community causes—too many to have a real impact, he realized.
“I wanted to focus on the importance of education, so I narrowed it down to reading,” Stokes says. “I wanted to create a character who would stand for something positive and tell kids they could start using their brains.”
And so along came SuperReader, in blue cape and yellow mask, encouraging pre-K and elementary students to read books.
Today, SuperReader has hung up his tights, but his alter ego Stokes has evolved into a children’s book author and a force for literacy throughout central Pennsylvania and nationwide.
He founded and directs the American Literacy Corp., which designs supplemental literacy programs that promote the importance of reading. Through family festivals, 15 published books and counting and the annual 500 Men Reading Day, Stokes and the ALC have created a reading culture that attracts devoted fans and supporters.
Stokes started writing books because SuperReader’s presentations involved fairy-tale skits that students would stage. Always seeking feedback, Stokes heard from a teacher who asked why the skits didn’t include a literacy element. A light bulb went off. The boy who cried wolf suddenly did so because he ran out of books and got bored. Goldilocks tried reading Papa Bear’s book first, but it was too hard. Then she read Mama Bear’s love story, but it was too mushy.
“Everybody always cracked up at that,” Stokes says now. “The next book was on her level. She could read it. It was just right.”
The skits became books that Stokes published and began to read for the kids. But, by 2008, he still felt that one guy, promoting literacy on his own, couldn’t do enough. He remembered all the encouragement he got as a boy, an African-American kid growing up in Mississippi, and wanted to “create an opportunity for men to get some face time with children, so children will see one more positive role model.”
“For some reason, I came into contact with a lot of people who believed in me,” Stokes recalls. “It was confusing, but the encouragement I received fueled me. Those positive contacts motivated me to want to reach higher and do more and be the best person I could be.”
Of course, recruiting other men to read to classrooms meant asking them to do something very scary—“as scary as the scariest Halloween costume out there.”
So, Stokes created 100 Men Reading, building strength in numbers by bringing together men to read to classrooms in school-wide events. As more and more men signed on, the event became 500 Men Reading, spanning a week in March, in Harrisburg-area schools and in York.
George Nahodil co-chaired 500 Men Reading in 2013 and 2014. Nahodil, the Members 1st executive vice president for retail delivery and marketing, met Stokes through financial literacy events and thought, “Wow, this is pretty awesome.”
“He was so passionate about reading to the kids, preaching the gospel of literacy,” Nahodil says. “You gotta read. You gotta learn to read. You gotta educate yourself.”
Nahodil is a former high school teacher, but he jokingly thanked Stokes for assigning him to read, not to cute second-graders, but to middle school students “taller than I am.” They asked questions about his job, his salary and his career path.
“The kids were awesome,” Nahodil said.
When students are exposed to adults “from all walks of life and all different career types,” who stress that they owe their jobs to their reading abilities, they realize that it’s not just their teachers who want them to read, Nahodil says.
“When they’re looking at you and really digesting what you’re saying, then you’re definitely having an impact,” Nahodil says. “These kids want to be successful. They want to do well. To me, if Floyd changes one kid’s life, it’s worth it.”
Stokes also teaches parents around Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Schuylkill County how to bring reading into the home. It’s part of the National Institutes of Health’s massive National Children’s Study, a longitudinal study tracking the well-being of children from birth through age 21.
“I’m grateful for this opportunity to reach parents and to share my passion for reading to children and just teaching the lessons learned throughout the years, and not just from reading to schoolchildren, but reading to my children,” he says. “I’m a parent, and that’s the angle that I share from.”
Harrisburg School District Superintendent Sybil Knight-Burney says she so loves Stokes that she will “stop, drop and read” whenever he calls. It’s not just about 500 Men, with “all of these multi-racial, multi-colored, multi-talented men” coming to city schools, jumpstarting conversations about reading and life goals, she says. It’s about Stokes himself, who has adopted a third-grade class and will help whenever the district needs it—for instance, soliciting food donations to feed volunteers building a new playground.
“It’s a wonderful thing to see African-American men and an African-American man who’s taken on literacy, where so many kids don’t know the importance of reading,” says Knight-Burney. “They see it through him, and he lives it and breathes it 24 hours a day.”
An emphasis on literacy helps the district raise achievement rates, Knight-Burney says. Many students start school far behind in grade level, so they need to be encouraged that “even though it may seem difficult to do, once you master reading, the more you do it, the more you want to do it,” she says. “That’s the message that Floyd gives. As many different entities as that message can come from, it helps. It’s all around. It’s pervasive.”
For the future, Stokes expects to “just do more of what we’re doing. Try to learn as much as possible how to reach children and get them on the right path and developing a love of reading. That, to me, is more important than teaching kids to read early.”
And the now-retired SuperReader? He accomplished the mission he was put on earth to do. As Stokes walks around town, people still call him SuperReader. Many don’t know his name, “and that’s fine.”
“When they see me now, they know what I stand for, and it’s reading,” Stokes says. “It’d be hard to think of me and not think of reading. That was intentional.”
Learn more about the American Literacy Corp. at www.superreader.org.
