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Wednesday, Oct. 07, 2009

So many happy endings

She has an audience every night, even though she cannot see their faces.

When Portia Lake is in front of a camera as co-anchor for Fox 24 News, she is being beamed into living rooms across Middle Georgia.

Of course, she is not always able to tell viewers the kinds of stories they would rather see and hear.

Urban crime, rising rivers and wrecks on the highway take up a lot of her time.

By the next day, however, you can often find her telling stories again. This time, she is holding a book, not reading a monitor.

Her audience sits at her feet or quietly in their desks and chairs. Words connect them, like links on a chain.

In the six years she has been at WGXA-TV, Portia has been asked to read to classes at nearly every elementary school in Macon.

No wonder she is a popular choice. She has seen it make a difference.

Reading to kids is her passion. It’s also why she will be the local “celebrity reader” at Southside Community Church on Roy Avenue in Lynmore Estates (also known as the Peach Orchard) at 4:30 p.m. Thursday.

She will take part in “Read for the Record,” an international campaign that began three years ago. The object is to read the same book, on the same day, in communities all over the world. Last year, more than 700,000 children participated. This year’s book is “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”

(I am convinced if everyone would spend 20 minutes a day reading to a child, the world could be transformed.)

Portia considers herself blessed that her parents, David and Mattie Bailey, of Birmingham, Ala., surrounded her with books.

Her mother majored in English literature in college. Her father has always loved classics like “Moby Dick” and “The Call of the Wild.”

Even her name, Portia, comes from characters in a pair of Shakespeare plays — “Julius Caesar” and “The Merchant of Venice.”

“It had nothing to do with a car,” she said, laughing.

At LSU, she graduated with degrees in English and psychology and worked at the campus TV station. Her first broadcasting job was in Greenville, Miss., where she witnessed firsthand the extreme poverty of the Mississippi Delta.

When she was first asked to read at a middle school, she forgot to take along a book. All the teacher had to offer was a biography of Thurgood Marshall.

“The students were bored, and I can’t say that I blamed them,” she said.

One day, she was sent on an assignment to tiny Ruleville, Miss., where a fire had destroyed the small town’s library.

She was so heartbroken she returned to Greenville, packed many of her own books into eight crates, then drove back 48 miles and donated them to the library.

In Macon, she has been engaged in the lives of children, many of them from families where the written word is not a priority.

Portia remembers reading at her first local school. It was a kindergarten class at Tinsley Elementary, which has been torn down and replaced with the Butler Early Childhood Center.

She was in a department store the other day when a young man, about 6 feet tall, came over to her. Tiny Portia is only 5-foot-3.

He asked if she remembered him from Tinsley.

“You read to my kindergarten class,” he said.

There have been many happy endings.