RUSH: We have Tom in Columbia, Missouri. Hi, Tom. Great to have you on the program. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, I will say fellow former Overland Park, Kansas, resident. Dittos.

RUSH: Thank you. I used to live there — and you did, too, obviously.

CALLER: Yes, sir. Rush, there’s a hundred things I could to talk to you about, but I will tell you that I’m a grandson of Patrick Henry — a great, great, a lot of great-grandsons.

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait! Whoa. You are the great grandson of “Give me liberty or give me death” Patrick Henry?

CALLER: Yes, that’s correct.

RUSH: No kidding?

CALLER: That’s correct. Rush, my wife and I, we don’t have any kids, so your children’s books… We listened to the first one on a road trip. We really enjoyed it. The Rush Revere and The First Patriots was in my Kindle queue for quite awhile, for several weeks. I finally got around to reading it a couple days ago. Rush, I know this is a children’s book, but this book had a profound impact on me.

RUSH: Really? That’s cool.

CALLER: Your conversations with Patrick Henry? You brought him to life. If there’s one person that I could go back and talk to in history it would be him, and the way you brought him to life in this book? Rush, it made me feel like I was sitting there listening to your conversation, and you made him exactly how I thought he would be.

RUSH: Oh, wow. You do not know… I’ve got chills and tingles going up my spine here. This is just… You can’t possibly know how you’ve made my day here.

CALLER: Well, Rush, it made my day when I read that. So I just wanted to tell you that. I’m glad I got through to tell you that. Seriously, Rush, you do not know. It was just the profound impact.

RUSH: It’s just mind-boggling.

CALLER: I had to go back and read through it again, and I was disappointed when you had him in Virginia. When that conversation, that meeting was done, I was like, “No, this can’t be all,” and then when you were back with him in Philadelphia, I was thrilled.

RUSH: That’s right. Look, hang on. I want to send you the new book when it comes out. Mr. Snerdley needs to get your address. Do not hang up, Tom.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to go back for just a moment here and talk about our last caller, Tom, from Columbia, Missouri, the great, great grandson of Patrick Henry. I don’t have the words to tell you what his call meant to me and to all of us that work on the Rush Revere Adventure Series. We’re a tight little team with our heads down and doing a whole lot of work to get these books right, make sure the mission survives in each one of them and so forth.

His call was exactly what we are trying to do. We want to bring these great figures from American history to life for people so that they can actually experience who these people were. Not just read about them in a dry, abstract way, in a recounting of history kind of way, but actually go back to these seminal events in American history and take children, our primary target audience, back to these events and let them live them in ways that they can understand and enjoy and be inspired by.

Here is the great, great grandson of Patrick Henry, an adult, who was moved by the books in exactly the way that we are trying to achieve. I hope you’ll forgive me for talking about this. You might think it’s somewhat of a private matter, but how good that makes me feel, all of us who work on these books feel, because that’s exactly what we’re trying to do here. His reaction to it, personal for him, being that Patrick Henry is his great great-grandfather, but brought him back to life.

These are great people. These were crucially important people. And we want everybody to know them, who they were, what they sacrificed, what they believed in, what they gave up, what they contributed and so forth. I mentioned the other day, we’ve got a Rush Revere Facebook page. It’s been out there for a while, but we’re really pumping it now. It’s Facebook.com/RushRevere. We want this page to have something for everyone. We’re going to have personal interviews, behind the scenes lesson plans and so forth. If you go there today, for example, you’ll see a green post for Destination Education.

Our goal is to create free downloadable lesson plans for parents and teachers and families to use to continue education in American history. To go beyond the books. You know, use the books as a starting point or as a reference, source material, and to have them essentially be a launching pad for people that want to know more and to make that more available. Right there at the Facebook page.

The Rush Revere website is up and running, and that has got its own content as well which is related to the characters in the book, in the series. Young readers and fans can send e-mails to the characters and get replies from Liberty the Talking Horse, many people’s favorite character and so forth.

So it’s a really rewarding thing when I get phone calls like that. A, I’m thankful they got through, that Tom got through. The second thing I’m thankful for is that Snerdley allowed the call through. You never know, some people don’t bring it off when they call and they get rejected. It’s just one of those things that happens. But this all worked out and the guy made it through. He was just fantastic. We ran out of time with him, up against the well-known hard break. I could not be flexible by even a second. So, again, thanks to Tom in Columbia.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the third book has just been announced and it’s out there for pre-order now. Rush Revere and the American Revolution, and we can’t wait for this one to hit. We are so excited because this is a two-fer. It’s the usual Rush Revere Adventure Series, which goes back in time to seminal events in the American Revolution. But we combine a modern-day story with it in dedication to the US military.

So many children of military families have a tough time dealing with Mom or Dad being deployed for long periods of time. And despite knowing that Mom and Dad are in the military, it’s still tough, the separation is tough. Sometimes these kids feel personally abandoned, even though their instincts tell them that’s not what’s happening. They have a tough time dealing with it. When I found out this was a real event, a real thing that happens to a lot of military families, we incorporated a story with one of the characters whose father is deployed to Afghanistan.

He’s one of the time travelers, one of the students in Rush Revere’s history course who time travels with the crew. He learns via American history what his dad today is doing and how important it is. I don’t want to give the whole story away, obviously, the character is Cam, but we’re so excited about this. We love the military so much. We’re just in literal awe of what they do. So the next book is a tribute and a dedication to them as well as the standard mission of teaching the truth of American history to young people.