It was late one night last spring, and I was Googling cultural phenomena that would mark milestone anniversaries in 2024, as a sleepless reporter does.
Fifty years old, as in things that had arrived in 1974? The Rubik’s Cube. Skittles. Dungeons & Dragons.
From 1984, 40 years ago? “Ghostbusters.” The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Pizza Hut’s Book It! reading program, which offers pizza as an incentive to entice kids to read.
Huh, I thought. I wonder how long that thing lasted. I had been a Book It! kid growing up, reading half a dozen books in a week, filling up a punch card and earning a certificate redeemable for a sweet, sweet six-inch pepperoni personal pan pizza (never plain cheese, I had standards).
I was shocked: The program was still around.
Of course, it had undergone some changes since my elementary school days: Gone were the punch cards; certificates were now digital. There was an option for home-schooled students to participate. Book It! even had accounts on Instagram and X.
But what other literacy program — started by a restaurant, no less — had lasted 40 years?
This, I knew, was a story.
I pitched the idea to an editing resident on the Books desk, Wilson Wong, who had also grown up with the program, and shared my enthusiasm. He assigned an article about what the program had meant to some of its alumni, and the relationships with books it had nurtured.
Now the challenge was figuring out how to find them.
At first, I thought I would interview people who had posted about the program on TikTok and X, where nostalgic readers have shared their love for its signature buttons, bookmarks and stickers, as well as some of the authors Book It! got them hooked on, like R.L. Stine and Judy Blume.
But then, amid a series of emails with a press representative for Pizza Hut about arranging an interview with the chain’s president, Carl Loredo, along came a better idea: Pizza Hut would be staging a pop-up solo dining experience in a miniature hut on Long Island in October to celebrate the personal pan pizza’s 40th anniversary.
People could book 15-minute slots to enjoy a free six-inch pie. Did I want to talk to some of them?
Surely, I thought, at least a few of these pizza lovers had to be former Book It! kids.
The 36 slots for the two days the pop-up would be open were scooped up online in two minutes, or as one lucky diner I talked to, Robert Ries, put it, “half a second.” (He ordered plain cheese to enable him to submit the form faster, as opposed to selecting multiple toppings. Smart.)
I traveled from my apartment in Manhattan to Long Island for parts of both days, encountering, on the second day, a line that stretched down the sidewalk, an hour before the pop-up was to open at noon.
And my hunch was correct: I found half a dozen Book It! alums who remembered the program’s signature punch cards, and recalled how it had helped them discover books like Donald J. Sobol’s “Encyclopedia Brown” series and Ann M. Martin’s “Baby-Sitters Club” books.
Most shared my surprise that the program was still around.
“It never went away?” Frank Torok, 37, said as he waited for his turn in the miniature hut. “Oh, wow.”
Though the pop-up was not an official Book It! event, the hut’s walls were lined with Book It! buttons, and one of the chain’s Tiffany-style lamps glowed above a single-seat booth with a red-checkered tablecloth.
“I feel like I’m back in fourth grade,” Torok told me as a whiff of fresh hot mozzarella wafted out of his miniature pizza box.
Of course, I didn’t need pizza to make reading fun. I was that kid for whom the gravest punishment — worse than “no dessert” or “no TV” — was being sent to her room with the solemn pronouncement: “No reading.”
But the free pizza was a sweetener, a pot of gold at the end of what was already a rainbow, which for others served as the rainbow itself.
I read my way through the Magic Attic Club series by Sheri Cooper Sinykin, the Nancy Drew novels, and the “Adventures of the Bailey School Kids” books by Debbie Dadey and Marcia Thornton Jones. As a kid, I could spend hours reading, without being tempted by the lure of the social media scroll, Candy Crush or TikTok videos.
My idea of a perfect summer day was laying out on my bed, cracking open a novel and barely stirring, transfixed, for the entire afternoon.
Though 40 years may have passed, the program’s premise remains the same: Meet your reading goals, get free pizza.
May the next generation find inspiration in tasty pizzas and whatever Gen Z’s version of “Goosebumps” is.
The post Reading, With Extra Cheese: Remembering Pizza Hut’s ‘Book It!’ appeared first on New York Times.
