Over 1,000 colleges and universities have joined the America Reads initiative and have placed Federal Work-Study students in high-needs schools, the majority in urban settings. Few outside the reading field recognize the complexities associated with instruction for emergent readers, particularly for students who arrive at school with few literacy skills. Among other things, tutors must understand the importance of alphabet knowledge, letter-sound correspondences, and the development of a concept of word. Indeed, the training and continual supervision of tutors is one factor that must be considered in a successful intervention effort. Book Buddies is a community volunteer one-on-one tutoring program that uses a triad of individuals to work toward a child's reading success. The triad consists of the child, the volunteer tutor, and the reading coordinator. Tutors follow a structured sequence of activities using the Book Buddies 4-part lesson plan that consists of the following basic elements: (1) rereading familiar story books; (2) word study; (3) writing; and (4) reading a new book. This paper describes a Book Buddies program in an elementary school in the South Bronx, NY (the poorest Congressional District in the nation), in which members from the Retired Senior Volunteer Project were recruited and trained to tutor first-grade children. The paper concludes that Book Buddies in the Bronx was an intervention project in which the children who received 40 Book Buddies lessons statistically significantly surpassed the students in the control group on measures of accurate word reading in context, letter identification, and word reading in isolation. (Contains 12 references.) (NKA)