Dictionary drop off

Enthusiastic third graders at Northwest Expedition Academy were in awe as Coeur d'Alene Elks Lodge member Patrick Braden unveiled the longest word in a dictionary.

"Now, see this page?" Braden asked, directing their attention to what looked like a paragraph on page 373. "That's one word."

Students gasped.

“What?” many asked out loud.

The word takes up nearly half a page and is 1,909 characters long. Beginning with "methionylglutaminylarginyltyrosylglutamyl" and ending many letters later with "serine," it is the term for the formula C1289H2051N343O375S8, a protein that consists of 267 amino acids.

“And your teacher will pronounce that for you,” Braden said.

He and his team of five Elks delivered 745 dictionaries to local third graders Monday. Each class was full of wide-eyed students like those at NExA.

“I’ve never read something with this much pages,” third-grader Blake Budd said.

The students' favorite part is always the longest word, Braden said.

But the dictionaries include loads of other useful information, like the conversion ratio for Celsius to Fahrenheit, or an imperial measurements table.

“You’ll find every state in the union, their capitals and their size,” Braden said to Chris Cahoon’s class of second and third graders. “You’ll find a bio of every president. You’ll find all the countries, their capitals and sizes, all the flags...”

Braden has been an Elks member since 1954 and distributing dictionaries to third graders in Kootenai County since 1986. He recalls the early days, when the lodge would deliver boxes of books to the school districts, which would then distribute them.

In 2010, the Elks Lodge partnered with Project Search, transforming their approach by hand-delivering each book to individual students.

“We had names before,” Braden said. Elks members used to place printed stickers with each student's name inside the cover and deliver them. “That was a little more complicated.”

Now the sticker reads, “This book belongs to (blank) and was donated by the Elks Lodge.”

Kids can write their own name in their own book, and Lodge and Project Search members get to see the kids' delighted faces as part of the experience.

“For all the years we’ve been doing Project Search, it’s just been kind of a neat community activity to connect our interns,” said Theresa Moran, head instructor at Project Search. “And it’s kind of fun to think about how some of our interns got to receive books when they were kids.”

Project Search Intern Piper Benzon, 18, volunteered to place stickers on the inside cover of each dictionary and still has her own at home.

“I remember in third grade I spilled chocolate milk on mine,” Benzon said.

For her efforts, Benzon and two other interns will receive an updated version of her dictionary, without chocolate milk.

“We’re learning, so that’s nice,” Benzon said.

Around a dozen volunteers stuffed the books with two Elks bookmarks and a red ribbon that reads, “Drugs … Be smart, Don’t start,” for red ribbon week.

The young interns made short work of loading boxes full of dictionaries.

“My back is starting to give,” Elks member and volunteer Karen Magner said. “It hurts to stand up, but I can’t do it sitting down.”

Despite the challenge, Magner is happy to do the work.

“The kids are so fun, and they ask such interesting questions,” she said.

The team completed stuffing boxes by 10 a.m. to deliver them at 11 a.m. at NExA.

Braden, 80, hoisted boxes of books onto a dolly and wheeled it into NExA. Alongside him, Magner and other Elks members, including Bob Shaw, Joan Braden, Nadine Aiello and Project Search Communications Director Jon Mahn, handed out each dictionary to eager students.

It only takes a few minute to give away dozens of books, but the students and teachers get a lot out of it.

“There’s a teacher in Rathdrum that still has hers,” Magner said. “And her daughter still has hers.”

"We'll be back next year for you," Braden tells the second graders in Cahoon's class.