Kids today may not read, but if the door of an idle day opened just a crack …

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A New York Times column reprinted in the Star Tribune (“For too many kids, books are uncool and unread,” by Pamela Paul, July 30) begins this way:

“Once upon a slow summertime, unburdened by homework and school reading assignments” — and smartphones, Paul explains later — “kids could be found lounging in hammocks engrossed in reading purely for pleasure.”

I surely wasn’t one of those — until one late summertime day a long time ago …

In August, after Little League, summer camp and family vacations had come and gone, along came those unencumbered dog days with not much to do.

“What’s up for today?” Mom would ask at breakfast.

“Dunno.”

“Be home for supper.”

Mostly, I’d pedal my Schwinn lazily around the neighborhoods, more often alone, without buddies and neighbor kids. No one took offense. By August, the unspoken understanding among us was we needed quiet, solitude and a breather from each other.

So when the Hennepin County Bookmobile stopped in our neighborhood, we welcomed Bookmobile Lady’s “Soft Voices Only!” rule from the moment she had us kids and the grown-ups form one straight, well-mannered line on the sidewalk before boarding.

Climbing aboard the Bookmobile was like entering another world. It was cool, cozy and hushed. Bookmobile Lady didn’t rush or have to shush anyone. We’d mosey up and down the narrow aisle and leaf through books shelved floor to ceiling in quiet contentment.

I remember the handmade poster she’d hung near her tiny checkout table. “Where do you like to read?” it asked. Book borrowers were invited to post their responses on small paper squares. Compared to the grown-ups’ ho-hum responses (e.g., my barcalounger, cabin deck, backyard hammock), the kids’ were otherworldly: tree forts, garage rafters, the back booth at Plitman’s Deli.

I wasn’t much of a reader back then until Bookmobile Lady handed me “Old Yeller” and practically ordered me to “Read this.” (For the few of you who haven’t read it yet, it’s about a boy and his dog. Have plenty of tissues at the ready.)

It might have been the first “fat book” (as kids back then called them) I’d ever read, and I was surprised at how the story made me feel. When it was due back a week or two later, I lied and told Bookmobile Lady I’d lost it. Somehow she caught on, called my mother, and banned me from renewing it to teach me a lesson. That turned out OK. Instead, she made me check out “The Mystery at Devil’s Paw,” my first of many, many Hardy Boy “fat books.” I devoured them.

Gutsy and adventurous Frank and Joe Hardy inspired me to invent dangerous mini-adventures during those waning summer days. The last one was sleuthing whether “Big Tiny” was a giant hobo the older kids swore lived between the steep 10th fairway at Theodore Wirth golf course and adjacent woods. I built a hideaway there out of leafy branches and dead logs, mapped escape routes and composed “Read this in Case I Don’t Make It Back,” bequeathing my baseball cards, comic books and a Wilson A2000 infielder glove. I made it back, but my Hardy Boys-inspired “Mystery of Big Tiny in the Woods” went unsolved. In the end, I decided Big Tiny had hopped on a freight train for faraway places.

Toward August’s end, the days had become noticeably shorter. The bookmobile ended its summer runs. Labor Day was right around the corner. Like every kid, I knew what that meant.

But things were different now. I was a reader. Thanks to Bookmobile Lady. That fall, my teacher, Mr. Brown, encouraged me to join his after-school Junior Great Books reading group. A “seminar,” he called it. I said sure, thinking it meant I could read “Old Yeller” again. Instead, Mr. Brown gave each of us a boxed set of the Junior Great Books Foundation abridged classics. I still have it: Shakespeare, Dickens, Chaucer, Kipling, Hawthorne, Aesop. I remember being mostly clueless and pretending so hard not to be. I underlined random passages and made meaningless “notations” in the margins like Mr. Brown taught us. To further impress him, I nodded my head a lot during “seminars.” Mr. Brown saw through all this, took me aside and encouraged me to “Hang in there — it will begin to make sense soon.” It took a while, but he was right.

Pamela Paul’s commentary ends this way: “It’s hard to develop a reading habit when you have no time left to open a book.”

None of this would have happened without the Bookmobile Lady and those August days with nothing to do.

Dick Schwartz lives in Minneapolis. Find more of his frequent essays for Opinion Exchange at tinyurl.com/schwartz-essays.