TORRINGTON – Pete the Cat is coming to town to help kick off a nation-wide literacy program here in Torrington.

The StoryWalk Project was created in 2007 by Anne Ferguson in Montpelier, Vt., a collaboration with the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in Montpelier. According to the program website at www.kellogghubbard.org/storywalk, the program is “an innovative and delightful way for children – and adults – to enjoy reading and the outdoors at the same time.” 

Locally, StoryWalk is a collaboration of the Goshen County Library, the Library Foundation and the city of Torrington. But how it came to eastern Wyoming is a bit of a whirlwind tale.

“We’d been trying to figure out a way to access literacy in Goshen County,” said Ellen Creagar, president of the local library board.

“I just talked to (Mayor) Randy Adams and said, ‘Do you think we could collaborate on something like this? We would love to do this but thought it would be really neat along one of the city walking paths.’”

Adams was excited about the project, Creagar said. Prior to Tuesday’s regular meeting of the Torrington City Council, he urged residents to take advantage of StoryWalk.

“We erected 16 storyboards along the walking path between West C and East D Streets,” Adams said. “So, when you a get a chance, go for a walk and get a little exercise and read a story along the way.”

The StoryWalk concept is not new to Wyoming. Several libraries and communities around the state – even around the country – host the program. In a nutshell, the text of a book is printed onto signs, anything from paper on cardboard with wooden stakes to hold them in the ground to repurposed yard signs, similar to those realtors use to advertise houses for sale. 

The signs are placed at intervals along a walking path or around a park or other public space. Readers start at one end of the path, with page one, and make their way along to the end of the book. 

The local library board was going to go with the yard sign concept for its first year with the program. Until, that is, Rod Hornbeck of Torrington decided he could do one better.

The signs “were going to cost about $3,000 to buy,” Creagar said. “Rod said, ‘I can build those.’”

What he came up with consists of a steel post, its base buried in concrete, with a metal plate welded at a 45-degree angle on top. The plate is covered with a sheet of polycarbonate plastic, which both holds the pages of the book in place and protects it from the elements.

Hornbeck built a single prototype to show to city fathers to get approval. Once they gave the nod to the design, it was full steam ahead. Hornbeck ended up building 16 of the stands total, Creagar said.

“Rod finished them a week ago last Monday. On Friday, I ran into (city building official) Dennis Estes and they were putting them in along the city path already,” Creagar said. “it just been a really fun collaboration with the city.”

And, starting at 10 a.m. on Tuesday at the head of the path near the basketball courts on East C Street and East 27th Avenue, that project will come to fruition when Mayor Randy Adams and the library board host a ribbon cutting, followed with Adams leading the group along the path and reading the first story on the list: Pete the Cat: Rocking In My School Shoes, by Eric Litwin.

“Pete the Cat stories are pretty epic,” Creagar said. “All the kids know them.”

The book is already in place. The Library Board ended up purchasing two copies of Rocking In My School Shoes, which were carefully disassembled and the pages secured under the polycarbonate coverings on the stands. The beauty of the design is, it’s a simple matter of unbolting the cover, removing the old pages and inserting the new ones when the board wants to change out the stories.

The plan now is to offer a different story every two or three weeks while the summer lasts, Creagar said. Once winter sets in, they may not be changed as frequently. But the city clears snow off the paths during the winter for walkers, so there should periodically be new stories offered, year-round.

“We’ll change out the books pretty routinely so families can take their kids along the path and read it,” she said. “We have grand ideas of maybe expanding this to other Torrington paths and we’d love to do it in Lingle and maybe Yoder on their paths in their parks as well.

“I don’t actually know what this is going to look like (Tuesday),” Creagar said. “Mayor Adams is going to kick us off. I told him to be ready to read. We felt, during COVID, we needed something positive. So many families are spending time outside right now, we needed to seize that moment.”