Newbie Question on Digital Read about pyfirmata HOT 1 CLOSED

I have a solution which will be shown below. What I don't understand is, if the switch is closed when I start the program, a True is returned, which is what I would expect. However, if it is open, a None is returned until the button is closed. This is not what I would expect, and is extremely confusing. I would suggest that this be documented somewhere. In addition, it was not clear that the value returned needed to be cast to a string so that an exception is not thrown as a result of receiving a non-numeric value. Finally, is there any way to initialize the return value to 0 or False and never see the None?

import pyfirmata, pyfirmata.util
import time

board = pyfirmata.Arduino('/dev/ttyACM0', baudrate=57600)

iterator = pyfirmata.util.Iterator(board)
iterator.start()

time.sleep(1)

button = board.get_pin('d:13:i')

time.sleep(1)
button.enable_reporting()

time.sleep(1)

for i in range(100):
print "Button state: %s" % button.read()
# The return values are: True False, and None
if str(button.read()) == 'True':
print "Button pressed"
elif str(button.read()) == 'False':
print "Button not pressed"
else:
print "Button was never pressed"
board.pass_time(0.5)

board.exit()

from pyfirmata.