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Homes

Front Porch: Rolling out for reading

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published August 5, 2005

By day, Jennifer "Jen" Pierce helps people find the perfect home.

The assistant manager for Davis Island Apartments shows property to prospective renters, draws up leases and makes sure that tenants' leaky faucets get fixed.

But about a year ago, Jen, 34, who holds a psychology degree from the University of Florida and specializes in working with troubled children, experienced nothing short of an early mid-life crisis.

"I started feeling so unfulfilled spiritually and emotionally," she recalls. "I loved my job, but didn't feel like I was giving enough. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and draw in my journal."

What she drew was an old Volkswagen bus named "Bess." Looking out the windows of the bus, were Jen and her two dogs: Daisy, a chocolate lab; and Finn, a golden retriever.

Hmm, she remembers thinking. I'll call this middle-of-the-night musing "Bess the Book Bus."

Push back the clock for a minute. Bess was Jen's maternal grandmother, a big-hearted woman who never said "no" to a book. Once a week, Bess let Jen pick out a book at the general store in the small Massachusetts town where they lived. Jen still keeps some of those books - packed away in a trunk at her Ballast Point home - and occasionally pulls them out just to remember.

"They still smell like her," she says. "Books maintain the smell of wherever they've been."

When Jen's father moved the family around the country for construction jobs, Grandma Bess's books arrived faithfully by mail.

As she got older, Jen continued to nurture a love of reading. She also developed a soft spot for old VW buses, the kind with the smiling grids on the front, aging automotive symbols of the 1960s hippie culture.

"So, that's how I think I got the idea of a book bus and giving away free books to anyone who asked," she explains.

But there was one hangup: "Finding a bus was hard," remembers Jen, who combed newspaper ads and eBay. She finally found one in South Tampa, a 1972 emerald green model, a gem in need of a little polishing.

A year later, "Bess the Book Bus" sits parked in front of the Davis Island Apartments leasing offices at 29 Davis Blvd.

The bus is painted Merry Prankster's style in colorful poster paint with slogans such as "Free Books!" and "Look inside!"

It's motto: "Explore the world cover to cover."

In recent months, Bess has undergone an extensive makeover. Exhaust and fuel leaks have been repaired, brakes overhauled and the rear window sealed "so the books stay nice and dry."

During her lunch break and on her day off, Jen drives Bess to Head Start sites, USF Pediatrics, the Ronald McDonald House, Tampa General Hospital and area shelters and nursing homes. She targets children and adults who might need something to read.

"I wanted to provide books to people, who, because of mobility or economics, can't get books to read," she says.

Penguin Books is a sponsor.

So is Simon and Schuster.

Both send boxes of books, posters and audio books each month.

But the biggest donor is Jen's mother who lives in Fort Walton Beach and combs thrift sales and used bookstores in the Panhandle for popular paperbacks and children's books.

Lately, complete strangers have taken to calling Jen "The Book Lady." Regulars stop by the apartment offices to stock Bess with more books. At shopping centers, she's mobbed.

"People say: "Where are the books?' and "Are they really free?' " she says, laughing.

And yes. They are free. Always. No matter who you are.

Period.

"They're yours to do with as you wish. Keep them. Give them away to a friend. Donate them back."

But most importantly, urges Jen:

"Read them."

For more information, go to www.bessthebookbus.org

[Last modified August 4, 2005, 08:43:14]