How My Mom Scammed Pizza Hut’s BOOK IT! Program to Feed Our Family
If you went to public school in the late 80’s, you remember the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program. If you were a fat kid with no friends, it was a defining moment of your childhood. The concept of BOOK IT! was simple: READ BOOKS — GET PIZZA. All you had to do was read ten books, get a parent to sign a form, and your teacher would reward you with a certificate for a Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizza.
My family moved around a lot. We struggled to get by, and there was always a reason to leave — a parent would get a new job, we’d get evicted from an apartment, or simply be trying to get away from those pesky bill collectors. Between kindergarten and fifth grade, I went to six different schools. I was ALWAYS the new kid. At some point, I stopped trying to make friends. What was the point? As soon as I got to know anyone, we’d have to move again. Books became my friends. Instead of running around the playground, I’d sit on a bench and hang out with Encyclopedia Brown, Amelia Bedelia, and Superfudge.
I don’t know if I became a fat kid because I liked to read, or if I liked to read because I was a fat kid. I do know reading is a solitary activity that doesn’t burn a lot of calories. It’s something you can do while eating. Pizza Hut’s Personal Pan Pizza is a perfect companion for the avid reader. In a world full of pizza parties, the Personal Pan Pizza is meant to be consumed by a single diner. It’s a pizza just for you. Sad, lonesome, you.
I was being rewarded for something I loved WITH something else I loved. In my entire adult life, no job has ever given me the satisfaction I received from BOOK IT! It also showed me my mother wasn’t the untarnished, moral standard-bearer I believed her to be.
There is a moment in every child’s life when they first catch a parent in a lie. For a lot of kids, it’s the moment they learn the truth about Santa Claus. For me, it was the day I watched my mother look a teacher in the eye and lie to her face.
The flaw in the Book It! program is the trust it places in parents. Pizza Hut considers the word of a parent to be as valid as a standard notary public. They claim their child did the reading, and that’s good enough. My sister was a couple grades below me, and books were NOT her thing. But, she liked pizza, too. So, she would say she’d been reading, and my mom would sign the form. According to those forms, she read twice as much as I did. There was no way! It worked, though, and the free pizza started to pile up.
My mother might lie to Pizza Hut, but she wasn’t about to lie to me. “I know she didn’t read all those books, but it’s free pizza. For ALL of us!” Who could blame her? We were in a constant struggle to make ends meet, going on and off welfare and food stamps for most of my childhood. When you’re barely paying the rent and see an opportunity to feed your kids, you go for it.
She went for it, alright. My sister was getting a pizza certificate every few days, and hardly ever actually cracking a book. My mom wrote down the titles of everything in our house — even the grown-up novels. According to one form, my second-grade sister read The Omen, Flowers in the Attic, and How to Win Friends and Influence People. When she ran out of books in our house, my mom would just make up titles. Nobody was checking. I refused to participate, but I was no snitch. My sister was bringing home so many free pizzas I stopped turning in my own forms, because the con was providing enough for the whole family.
At the end of the year, the pizza fraud culminated at our school’s Open House. This was an event where the school opened at night, and parents got a chance to meet teachers and see the classrooms. For kids, this night was always terrifying, because you never knew if your teacher would make good on the threats to tell your parents about all the hair-pulling, note passing, and booger flicking that went on. In retrospect, I know the teachers were just as scared of our parents as we were.
The trip to my classroom was uneventful. I was one of those kids that blends into the middle of the pack. I wasn’t disruptive enough to be a bad kid or outgoing enough to be a star student. It was when we went to my sister’s second grade classroom that things got interesting.
Her teacher, Mrs. Patterson, was thrilled to meet the mother of “her brightest student.” What? MY sister? She beamed, announcing my sister had NOT ONLY read more than anyone else in class, she had set a SCHOOL RECORD for the most books read in a single year. There was a chart on the wall, and my sister’s name shot out above the competition, with the number 392. She had read nearly 400 books that year. In reality, she may have read four, and that’s a generous estimate. But, like I said, I ain’t no snitch.
I stood there and watched my mother smile and lie right to this lady’s face about how proud she was of my sister. She talked about how much her little girl LOVED to read. And my sister just played along. It was almost like they had rehearsed it, but I know they didn’t. Their instincts just kicked in. I was living in a white trash version of Ocean’s Eleven. My mom was George Clooney, my sister was Brad Pitt, and I was, I don’t know, Julia Roberts?! The heist was complete as Mrs. Patterson presented my sister with a certificate for “Academic Reading Excellence.”
I’d known my mom wasn’t truthful on the forms, but to hear her lie out loud with such confidence kind-of shook me up. It was the first time I realized she wasn’t perfect.
Looking back at my childhood with some perspective, I see that moment differently. I realize I had a mother who was willing to do whatever it took to take care of her kids. That’s why we moved so often. She was always trying to find a better job, a less dangerous neighborhood, somewhere that our lives would be better. She lied to Pizza Hut for us, because feeding her kids was more important than telling the truth to a multi-million dollar restaurant franchise. We should all be lucky enough to have a mom that would lie to Pizza Hut for us. By the way, the BOOK IT! program is still going strong, so if anyone from Big Pizza reads this, I hope you’ll be cool enough to let it slide.
