Children’s author Louise Borden has been reading aloud in elementary schools for years, but on March 1, the experience was a little different.

For the first time, she read her 2006 book “Across the Blue Pacific,” which is about her uncle, an officer lost on the USS Albacore. The event, in Ripley, Ohio, near her Cincinnati home, came just two weeks after news that the wreck of Albacore had been identified.

“I didn’t cry, but I was … a little choked up,” said Borden, whose uncle was Lt. Theodore Taylor Walker, Albacore’s executive officer.

Borden, who has written on many historical topics, portrayed her uncle, who died before she was born, from the perspective of Molly, a young girl. Molly meets Walker when he is home on leave, and he helps her and her brother build a snowman. Later they write him letters.

Then, two days before Christmas, they learn that their neighbor, Walker’s mother, has gotten a telegram with bad news. Slowly they realize Walker is never coming home.

Borden read “Across the Blue Pacific” as part of “Read Across America,” an annual celebration of reading sponsored by the National Education Association.

She said she made a set of cards for students in the fourth-grade class she visited, each with a photo of an Albacore crew member. The photos were from OnEternalPatrol.com, a website dedicated to lost submariners.

“When I handed these cards out … you would have thought … that they had a celebrity in their hand. They were so reverential holding this man’s picture and showing each other,” Borden said.

Walker entered the U.S. Naval Academy at 16 and was just 23 when he served as Albacore’s executive officer. He was awarded a Bronze Star posthumously.

While attending submarine school in Groton, he became engaged to a Connecticut College student. Borden said she was in touch with the woman while writing the book.

In Borden’s childhood, her uncle “was this mysterious person who was missing, and I was just convinced that he was going to come back.”

j.ruddy@theday.com