I have no picture with Dolly Parton, who died today at age 80. But I have tons of pictures of our trips to Dollywood. That's a stretch, reaching for a theme park, but how much people stretch when you die is a sign of the scope of what you’ve left behind. Both the impulse to respond and the fact that you’ve lived a life that gives people so much to choose from.
We went to Dollywood a lot with the kids. It’s easy to write off a theme park with a rich woman’s name on the gate as a vanity project. It wasn’t. Not shabby, not cynical. Clean, available to everyone. Close to her roots. (It’s built in the part of Tennessee she grew up poor in and run by the people she grew up among.)
It wasn’t a monument. It was a place families saved up for. The squeak across the seats on the tram from the parking lot. The sit-down after too much funnel cake. The locomotive whistle. Thunderhead.
This isn’t in the top five (ten?) things Dolly accomplished. Still, it affected a lot of people anyway.
Most of what success leaves behind is objects that testify to financial wealth — houses, yachts, jewelry. Dollywood testified to a different wealth. She built somewhere a family could afford to be happy for a day, and made sure it stayed that way for forty years.
Besides her music, her most important legacy is the Dolly Parton Imagination Library. Thousands, if not missions of young children get a free book every month. It’s a wonderful program.
Thank you. I grew up in Sevierville, Tennessee and knew many of Dolly’s family but never met her. She was light in a dark world. She did so much for my hometown such as Dollywood and so much more that nobody will ever know because she did it without fanfare. A tremendous loss for my hometown and the world 🩵😢