I have written elsewhere in this blog about my love of Gladys Taber's Stillmeadow books.
They are helping me during a bad patch right now; I've had to fly up to my mother's house suddenly after she collapsed. She is terminally ill with cancer and up until now had been able to take care of herself.
I had to take a few St. Nicholas bound volumes with me; they are thick and "meaty" and would last me a while. But I needed some spiritual comfort and could either take a few of Madeleine L'Engle's nonfiction books or something else. I chose my three paperback copies (lightest) of Gladys Taber instead. There is something very comforting about her writing about her country house, her dogs (cocker spaniels and an Irish setter), cats, garden, and friends. Her prose is like poetry. It makes me feel as if I am wrapped in love.
28 May 2005
09 April 2005
A Literary Treat
"Mally...took down two sticks of dark gold paper.Enid Bagnold wrote this back in 1935, in National Velvet. I read it in the mid-1960s, in a brown-covered paperback with a drawing of blond Velvet and her piebald horse on the cover (a far cry from both Elizabeth Taylor in the movie and Lori Martin in the television series). The Brown girls' life next to the slaughterhouse was so different from mine that I was instantly fascinated, and I loved the differences in language and vocabulary. No effort was made to "Americanize" the descriptions or dialog, which I always appreciated. What then was "kedgeree" and "spawn" and what were "capers"? I was fascinated by their life by the sea and Mrs. Brown having swum the English Channel, by the racing information and the descriptions of the Grand National, and, especially since I had had budgies since I was a small child, Meredith and her canaries. (Those Grand National jumps have stuck in my head for years. When I go over speed bumps I think to myself, "Well, here's Becher's, and next is the Canal Turn...")
"Crunchie?" said Velvet, her face lighting...
In the gold paper was a chocolate stick. Beneath the chocolate was a sort of honeycomb, crisp and friable, something between biscuit and burnt sugar. Fry's chocolate crunchie...It was their year's choice."
This description of the candy bar stayed with me for years, too. It sounded delicious. So when James and I went into the little Norcross shop "A Taste of Britain" today—this is a lovely store that stocks china teacups and little cottages, some British CDs, little things like statuettes and bumper stickers, and British foods (even some frozen ones like bangers and meat pasties).—and looked over their stock of British candies, my eyes alighted with recognition on a gold papered stick labeled "Crunchie" (although it is now made by Cadbury). I had to try it, even if the import prices are a bit high.
James took a bit and pronounced it too sweet. It was a bit sweet; it would probably cure a sugar craving for about a week. But I enjoyed the heck out of it anyway. It tasted just as wonderful as it did back when I "sampled" it virtually 40 years ago reading National Velvet.
06 April 2005
War is Swell?
I finished reading Thomas Fleming’s very absorbing Illusions of Victory: Americans in World War I a week or so ago. This is a no-holds-barred look at the politics behind and during America’s entry into the war in April 1917, including censorship of any anti-war sentiments (if you’re one of the folks at odds with the Patriot Act, this book might provide an eye-opener of how extremely restrictive the American government really can be).
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a completely unbiased look at this entire situation, be forewarned: this ain’t it. Fleming expends a lot of vitriol on personages on either side, but reserves his harshest criticisms for Woodrow Wilson. This is the flip-side to writings where Wilson comes off almost able to be recommended for sainthood.
I thought the portions of the book concerning how Americans against our entry into “the Great War” (including fiery Senator Robert LaFollette and Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin) were treated even more interesting because of my reading the old children’s/young adults’ series books from the early 20th century. I speak in several paragraphs on my St. Nicholas web page about how this one magazine threw itself into promoting the war effort to children. However, St. Nicholas was not a lone anamoly; in almost all the series books written between 1917-1920 (the Bobbsey Twins were a notable exception), the series’ protagonists, from the hiking and motoring Outdoor Girls and the close-knit Camp Fire Girls of Hildegarde Frey to the various series of Boy Scout books and other boys’ series books, all became involved in the war effort. The girls, of course, were relegated to serving tea and cookies at the precursors to USO halls or knitting for victory, but the older boys quit the Scouts, or whatever their organization, to join the Army or Navy or even the neophyte Air Corps to "join General Pershing’s forces in France and fight for Uncle Sam."
Ninety years ago these books were unabashedly patriotic and thus considered good reading for children. Today they are often absurd propaganda with plotlines full of violence and racial and ethnic stereotypes that make even students of history, who know this existed and aren’t shocked, laugh or cringe.
The latest of these epics I recently finished was H. Irving Hancock’s Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops, or Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche. Hancock’s hero Dick Prescott goes back many years to "The High School Boys" series, with "Dick & Co." as they are called in the descriptions, including Dave Darrin, Dan Dalzell, Tom Reade, Harry Hazelton, and Greg Holmes. Hancock then did a series portraying the boys in grammar school while also portraying their post-school lives: Dick and Greg go to West Point, Dave and Dan to Annapolis, and Tom and Harry become young engineers in three different book series. All or most of the boys (not sure what happened to Harry) then serve during World War I: Dick and Greg of course in the Army, Dave and Dan in command of escort ships, and Tom in the Air Corps.
With Pershing’s Troops actually opens in "Camp Berry, Georgia" where Dick and Greg, now young, manly, outstanding—all our heroes being manly and outstanding, of course—officers train with other "doughboys" for embarcation to France. While there they run afoul of not one, but two, German spies and a member of the Army who they suspect also is a spy.
In one absolutely jaw-dropping scene, Dick has to speak to three conscientious objectors. He pretty much views them as and then calls them cowards, and in persuasive arguments, actually convinces two of them that they can kill if their loved ones are threatened by German imperialism. The third he determines really is against killing, even in self-defense and finds a non-combatent role for him. But before this latter man leaves, Dick asks him to take his hat off and notes that it "has a pointed shape" and that he will remember what the head of a conscientious objector looks like!
Finally Dick and Greg are off on troopships and are fired upon by “the Hun.” Of all the ships in the Navy, guess who are captaining two small escort ships of their transport—yep, you guessed it, Dave and Dan!
Once in France they go directly to the front, met by fawning Frenchmen who thank God for Pershing and Uncle Sam’s boys. Although the French have been in these trenches for months, it is Our Hero Dick, during his first tour, who is the first one to notice one of the French privates is signalling the German line with little electric bulbs whenever an officer puts his head up! (Of course we readers should have suspected the French private was a bit "off"—he has a German name, Berger!) Through the private they find out one of the respected French officers is really a German and also a spy; when caught the scornful man makes a rich melodramatic speech about how he is proud of his German heritage and how German superiority will wipe out the French and the British and even the Americans…yadda, yadda, yadda.
Dick isn’t at the front for 24 hours before he’s captured by "the Boche," marched to a cattle car and taken away to a prison—and of course being Our Hero he is the only one with brains to escape when the train stops. He makes his way to a road where he is saved by a French farmer, who takes him to hide in a barn with another American soldier— guess what, it’s Tom Reade!
I don’t think I have to tell you Our Heroes get back to the Allied side eventually; these stories all end the same. The combination of adulation, coincidence, and jingoism is simply breathtaking.
But as counterpoint to Illusions of Victory, like Dick Prescott it can’t be beat as an illustration of how even the youngest citizens of the U.S. were shown the "right" side of the war in Europe.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a completely unbiased look at this entire situation, be forewarned: this ain’t it. Fleming expends a lot of vitriol on personages on either side, but reserves his harshest criticisms for Woodrow Wilson. This is the flip-side to writings where Wilson comes off almost able to be recommended for sainthood.
I thought the portions of the book concerning how Americans against our entry into “the Great War” (including fiery Senator Robert LaFollette and Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin) were treated even more interesting because of my reading the old children’s/young adults’ series books from the early 20th century. I speak in several paragraphs on my St. Nicholas web page about how this one magazine threw itself into promoting the war effort to children. However, St. Nicholas was not a lone anamoly; in almost all the series books written between 1917-1920 (the Bobbsey Twins were a notable exception), the series’ protagonists, from the hiking and motoring Outdoor Girls and the close-knit Camp Fire Girls of Hildegarde Frey to the various series of Boy Scout books and other boys’ series books, all became involved in the war effort. The girls, of course, were relegated to serving tea and cookies at the precursors to USO halls or knitting for victory, but the older boys quit the Scouts, or whatever their organization, to join the Army or Navy or even the neophyte Air Corps to "join General Pershing’s forces in France and fight for Uncle Sam."
Ninety years ago these books were unabashedly patriotic and thus considered good reading for children. Today they are often absurd propaganda with plotlines full of violence and racial and ethnic stereotypes that make even students of history, who know this existed and aren’t shocked, laugh or cringe.
The latest of these epics I recently finished was H. Irving Hancock’s Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops, or Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche. Hancock’s hero Dick Prescott goes back many years to "The High School Boys" series, with "Dick & Co." as they are called in the descriptions, including Dave Darrin, Dan Dalzell, Tom Reade, Harry Hazelton, and Greg Holmes. Hancock then did a series portraying the boys in grammar school while also portraying their post-school lives: Dick and Greg go to West Point, Dave and Dan to Annapolis, and Tom and Harry become young engineers in three different book series. All or most of the boys (not sure what happened to Harry) then serve during World War I: Dick and Greg of course in the Army, Dave and Dan in command of escort ships, and Tom in the Air Corps.
With Pershing’s Troops actually opens in "Camp Berry, Georgia" where Dick and Greg, now young, manly, outstanding—all our heroes being manly and outstanding, of course—officers train with other "doughboys" for embarcation to France. While there they run afoul of not one, but two, German spies and a member of the Army who they suspect also is a spy.
In one absolutely jaw-dropping scene, Dick has to speak to three conscientious objectors. He pretty much views them as and then calls them cowards, and in persuasive arguments, actually convinces two of them that they can kill if their loved ones are threatened by German imperialism. The third he determines really is against killing, even in self-defense and finds a non-combatent role for him. But before this latter man leaves, Dick asks him to take his hat off and notes that it "has a pointed shape" and that he will remember what the head of a conscientious objector looks like!
Finally Dick and Greg are off on troopships and are fired upon by “the Hun.” Of all the ships in the Navy, guess who are captaining two small escort ships of their transport—yep, you guessed it, Dave and Dan!
Once in France they go directly to the front, met by fawning Frenchmen who thank God for Pershing and Uncle Sam’s boys. Although the French have been in these trenches for months, it is Our Hero Dick, during his first tour, who is the first one to notice one of the French privates is signalling the German line with little electric bulbs whenever an officer puts his head up! (Of course we readers should have suspected the French private was a bit "off"—he has a German name, Berger!) Through the private they find out one of the respected French officers is really a German and also a spy; when caught the scornful man makes a rich melodramatic speech about how he is proud of his German heritage and how German superiority will wipe out the French and the British and even the Americans…yadda, yadda, yadda.
Dick isn’t at the front for 24 hours before he’s captured by "the Boche," marched to a cattle car and taken away to a prison—and of course being Our Hero he is the only one with brains to escape when the train stops. He makes his way to a road where he is saved by a French farmer, who takes him to hide in a barn with another American soldier— guess what, it’s Tom Reade!
I don’t think I have to tell you Our Heroes get back to the Allied side eventually; these stories all end the same. The combination of adulation, coincidence, and jingoism is simply breathtaking.
But as counterpoint to Illusions of Victory, like Dick Prescott it can’t be beat as an illustration of how even the youngest citizens of the U.S. were shown the "right" side of the war in Europe.
15 February 2005
Ahhh, Linguistics!
I'm having a great time reading The Adventure of English, although I'd previously read a lot of the facts in my Mario Pei and other linguistics books. Melvin Bragg's writing style reminds me occasionally of James Burke: after a paragraph of talking about how pronounciations change, for instance from "coo" (still used in parts of Scotland) to "cow," and about the Great Vowel Shift, Bragg adds, "...but {linguists] can't say why the great shift happened; or whether it really was one large shift or two or more small ones; or why it happened less in the north (and, as we have seen, not at all to some Scottish cows)." A very Burke-ian quip indeed!
10 February 2005
Who is Edith Van Dyne?
Quiet Elizabeth "Beth" DeGraf is fifteen. She lives with her indifferent parents, a music teacher and an embroiderer, in a small town.
Glamorous Louise Merrick is seventeen. She and her mother, impoverished by her father's death, are living high in a nice apartment on the remainder of his life insurance payment rather than eking out a bare existence on the interest, in the hopes that Louise will make a good marriage to support them both.
Freckled redhead Patricia "Patsy" Doyle is sixteen. She and her Irish father, "the Major," live a poor but happy life with her as a ladies' hairdresser and him as a bookkeeper in a tenement house in the city.
At first glance the trio are a disparate lot, but what they have in common is Jane Merrick, a sickly, discontent, rude old lady who is their aunt. When Jane Merrick realizes she is dying, she sends invitations to each of the girls to come live with her for a month. She is planning to decide which of the three is the best heir for the sizeable fortune she inherited from her fiancé, who died on the eve of their wedding and left all his money to her. Dismissive Miss Merrick doesn't even consider it a possibility that the other heir to the estate might be Kenneth Forbes, her intended's nephew, whom she promised her fiancé she would care for if something happened to his mother. Ken is shy, rude, and mostly untutored, and he loathes his "almost aunt" as much as she loathes him.
These wildly divergent personalities come together in the 1906 book Aunt Jane's Nieces written by Edith Van Dyne, and appears typical in writing to the girls' series of the times, although Louise at first seems an atypical heroine for one of them as her character is closer to that of the inevitable opponents the "nice" girls have in other series stories. It will not be much of a spoiler to tell you that, despite the girls' wariness of each other at first meeting, they all are friends by the end of the book, since nine sequels were spawned, including the inevitable World War I era volume that had the three joining the Red Cross. (Almost all children's series fiction had a point where they halted between 1918-1920 and became obsessed with helping out the cause in the Great War, and many more series books were spawned by the adventures of boys who joined the Army and girls who became nurses or who deterred saboteurs.) Into the mix is also tossed the girls' Uncle John, who returns from "the West" rolling in dough from good investments he apparently makes accidentally, and who bankrolls the girls in all of their schemes in the later volumes.
Some of these volumes, however, didn't follow the traditional plots of most girls' novels of the times. Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work, for example, follows the girls as they help Kenneth–who has, under the influence of his now favorite "cousins," become a bit more agreeable–run for office. Politics was a strange bedfellow for three lively girls in that era when women still did not have suffrage, and indeed the pages were full of diatribes about evil grafting politicians and Democratic principals against Republican ones and vice versa. Indeed, several of the Nieces books not only seem to contain a small mystery, but rail against corruption in industry and politics, hardly the usual subjects in girls' books where clothing, society, and parties were the norm.
But then Edith Van Dyne's other books weren't on typical girlish subjects, either. The two volumes about "the Flying Girl," for instance, followed the adventure of a courageous young woman who learned to fly aircraft in the canvas-and-wire era. And the Mary Louise books follow the adventures of a girl who, in her first story, is pitted against detectives and the United States Secret Service (whose agents are portrayed as double-crossing and in competition with each other in an age where Government representatives were usually shown as solid, honest characters) looking for Mary Louise's beloved "Gran'pa Jim" to arrest him for treason! Strong stuff in those days for girls, but they sold well, showing that the young ladies of that day were eager for more than frills and furbelows in their literature. Indeed, Edith Van Dyne must have been a most progressive woman.
Not to fear, the mystery of Edith Van Dyne has long been solved: "she" was a he, in the person of Lyman Frank Baum–yes, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels. If you are interested in old girls' series books and would like something a little different from the norm, Aunt Jane's trio would probably suit you, not to mention the intrepid Mary Louise. Gutenberg.org has several of the titles, as does Blackmask.com.
A nice article/biography of Baum.
Glamorous Louise Merrick is seventeen. She and her mother, impoverished by her father's death, are living high in a nice apartment on the remainder of his life insurance payment rather than eking out a bare existence on the interest, in the hopes that Louise will make a good marriage to support them both.
Freckled redhead Patricia "Patsy" Doyle is sixteen. She and her Irish father, "the Major," live a poor but happy life with her as a ladies' hairdresser and him as a bookkeeper in a tenement house in the city.
At first glance the trio are a disparate lot, but what they have in common is Jane Merrick, a sickly, discontent, rude old lady who is their aunt. When Jane Merrick realizes she is dying, she sends invitations to each of the girls to come live with her for a month. She is planning to decide which of the three is the best heir for the sizeable fortune she inherited from her fiancé, who died on the eve of their wedding and left all his money to her. Dismissive Miss Merrick doesn't even consider it a possibility that the other heir to the estate might be Kenneth Forbes, her intended's nephew, whom she promised her fiancé she would care for if something happened to his mother. Ken is shy, rude, and mostly untutored, and he loathes his "almost aunt" as much as she loathes him.
These wildly divergent personalities come together in the 1906 book Aunt Jane's Nieces written by Edith Van Dyne, and appears typical in writing to the girls' series of the times, although Louise at first seems an atypical heroine for one of them as her character is closer to that of the inevitable opponents the "nice" girls have in other series stories. It will not be much of a spoiler to tell you that, despite the girls' wariness of each other at first meeting, they all are friends by the end of the book, since nine sequels were spawned, including the inevitable World War I era volume that had the three joining the Red Cross. (Almost all children's series fiction had a point where they halted between 1918-1920 and became obsessed with helping out the cause in the Great War, and many more series books were spawned by the adventures of boys who joined the Army and girls who became nurses or who deterred saboteurs.) Into the mix is also tossed the girls' Uncle John, who returns from "the West" rolling in dough from good investments he apparently makes accidentally, and who bankrolls the girls in all of their schemes in the later volumes.
Some of these volumes, however, didn't follow the traditional plots of most girls' novels of the times. Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work, for example, follows the girls as they help Kenneth–who has, under the influence of his now favorite "cousins," become a bit more agreeable–run for office. Politics was a strange bedfellow for three lively girls in that era when women still did not have suffrage, and indeed the pages were full of diatribes about evil grafting politicians and Democratic principals against Republican ones and vice versa. Indeed, several of the Nieces books not only seem to contain a small mystery, but rail against corruption in industry and politics, hardly the usual subjects in girls' books where clothing, society, and parties were the norm.
But then Edith Van Dyne's other books weren't on typical girlish subjects, either. The two volumes about "the Flying Girl," for instance, followed the adventure of a courageous young woman who learned to fly aircraft in the canvas-and-wire era. And the Mary Louise books follow the adventures of a girl who, in her first story, is pitted against detectives and the United States Secret Service (whose agents are portrayed as double-crossing and in competition with each other in an age where Government representatives were usually shown as solid, honest characters) looking for Mary Louise's beloved "Gran'pa Jim" to arrest him for treason! Strong stuff in those days for girls, but they sold well, showing that the young ladies of that day were eager for more than frills and furbelows in their literature. Indeed, Edith Van Dyne must have been a most progressive woman.
Not to fear, the mystery of Edith Van Dyne has long been solved: "she" was a he, in the person of Lyman Frank Baum–yes, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels. If you are interested in old girls' series books and would like something a little different from the norm, Aunt Jane's trio would probably suit you, not to mention the intrepid Mary Louise. Gutenberg.org has several of the titles, as does Blackmask.com.
A nice article/biography of Baum.
30 January 2005
Words That Sing
I can't remember not loving books, from the inexpensive little volumes my mom would buy at Woolworth's to the books of my own and books from the library. I love a good solid story in a smart narrative, but when I was small I didn't realize that good prose could have the voice of poetry as well. Then in a school reader we had an excerpt from Laurie Lee's memoir, Cider With Rosie (published here in the States as The Edge of Day). It was an astounding revelation. Lee's prose told a story, but wound in delightful metaphor that was poetry to read. I still cannot pick up the book without remembering that discovery of those joyful words.
Gladys Taber's Stillmeadow books are similar. Between the narratives of country living and recipes and the antics of the cocker spaniels and Irish setters that populate the landscape came turns of phrase that painted the countryside and its inhabitants in vivid language fit to be verse. (A travel book, Journey Through New England, has this turn of phrase in its descriptions as well and reminds me of Taber.)
I am reading yet another book with a similar blessing. Those of you who are fans of Mary O'Hara's Ken McLaughlin trilogy, My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead, and Green Grass of Wyoming already know of her well-crafted stories and of the description of countryside and characters that makes them special. You may not know about what I consider my favorite book of hers, Wyoming Summer. This is an adaptation of the journal O'Hara kept of one summer at the ranch that was the prototype for the Goose Bar Ranch in those books, and of some events that became inspiration for them, but as an additional joy it also contains that type of prose that sings like poetry. Her descriptions of ranch life, of music, of musings about God and life, are a delight to read not just for the story but for the language. It never fails to send me soaring. This is a worthwhile book to find and to keep forever.
Gladys Taber's Stillmeadow books are similar. Between the narratives of country living and recipes and the antics of the cocker spaniels and Irish setters that populate the landscape came turns of phrase that painted the countryside and its inhabitants in vivid language fit to be verse. (A travel book, Journey Through New England, has this turn of phrase in its descriptions as well and reminds me of Taber.)
I am reading yet another book with a similar blessing. Those of you who are fans of Mary O'Hara's Ken McLaughlin trilogy, My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead, and Green Grass of Wyoming already know of her well-crafted stories and of the description of countryside and characters that makes them special. You may not know about what I consider my favorite book of hers, Wyoming Summer. This is an adaptation of the journal O'Hara kept of one summer at the ranch that was the prototype for the Goose Bar Ranch in those books, and of some events that became inspiration for them, but as an additional joy it also contains that type of prose that sings like poetry. Her descriptions of ranch life, of music, of musings about God and life, are a delight to read not just for the story but for the language. It never fails to send me soaring. This is a worthwhile book to find and to keep forever.
26 January 2005
Annettevolution
One of the things I picked up last weekend was a bargain-priced "Disney Press" set of "Walt Disney's Annette Mysteries," containing four of the five books formerly published by Whitman in the early 1960s. (I have no idea why Annette: Mystery at Medicine Wheel isn't included in the set, but I could hazard a guess: it has a Western setting and possibly may no longer present an acceptable view of Native Americans or perhaps Hispanics—although the Hispanic characters in Mystery of Smuggler's Cove are presented respectfully.)
Annette McLeod, the orphan niece of brother and sister Archibald and Lila McLeod, was adopted by them when her father (Archie and Lila's brother) and mother died. The McLeods live in southern California and Annette owns every girl's motorized dream, a trim little white sports car she has nicknamed "the Monster." She and her friends attend high school, but we're never really certain what age they are (aside from the fact they can drive). The waters are further muddied by the fact that although on the book endpapers the Annette silhouette is that of the curly-haired girl as she appeared on The Mickey Mouse Club in the mid to late 1950s, the cover drawings are always of an older Annette with longer hair and a much more mature expression, the Annette of the "Beach Party" movies.
The Whitman book character, derived from a Mouse Club serial called...surprise!..."Annette," had a much longer and more curious bloodline than one might expect.
In 1950, Janette Sebring Lowrey wrote the novel Margaret, which opens in 1906 Texas and concerns teenage Maggie McLeod, who has lived all her life in the small town of Nichols Station with the family that raised her—Bonnie, a practical country woman, her footloose husband "Prince Albert" who spends most of his life away from home riding the rails, and Bonnie and "P.A.'s" cute but rather spoilt little girl, Lois—and her best friend, Michel.
Then Maggie receives a letter from her Aunt Lila McLeod in Ashford, Texas (the town is named after an ancestor of hers). Lila and her brother Archibald, a college professor, would like Maggie to live with them and become a part of the society that is her birthright. Bonnie thinks Maggie should get to know her father's family and insists the girl make the trip.
Ashford is a revelation for the small town girl. She is now called Margaret and welcomed by most of the boys and girls her age, including a country girl from outside town, Jet Maypen, and those in her social circle—but manages to make an enemy of the queen bee of the younger set, a snooty girl named Laura Rogan who sees Margaret as a hayseed. When Margaret becomes popular, Laura accuses her of stealing a diamond necklace that the wealthier girl removed at a party.
Disney reworked Margaret as a vehicle for Annette Funicello. Now entitled "Annette," the storyline is very simplified—entire subplots and characters vanish—but kept the same main plot for the television serial, although Ashford is now some middle American suburb and the time has been modernized to the 1950s. Annette meets the same characters (with their old-fashioned 1906 names intact), including Laura (played in delightfully bitchy style by Jymme Shore—Shore, as Roberta Shore, also played the girl in distress in Disney's The Shaggy Dog) and Jet (portrayed by TV's 1950s tomboy actress Judy Nugent), with Mouse Club regulars (and serial regulars) like Sharon Baird, Doreen Tracey, Tommy Cole, Cheryl Holdridge, Tim Considine, and David Stollery as the others. Richard Deacon, in his pre-buffoon Mel Cooley days, is Uncle Archie, and Sylvia Field, also Mrs. Wilson on Dennis the Menace, was Aunt Lila. The stigma of the stolen necklace hangs (pun intended) around Annette's head until the piece is found and everything ends happily ever after.
(Annette mentions Bonnie, but the character is never seen and she is only a shadowy influence in the girl's life as opposed to her major role in Lowrey's novel. Oddly, although the "Annette" timeframe had been advanced to the present day, Annette arrives in Ashford wearing a countrified outfit that Margaret would have felt more comfortable in. Even the updated Jet Maypen, also from "the country," didn't look that out of synch with time.)
The Whitman (now Disney Press) books dispose of everything except Annette, Aunt Lila, and Uncle Archie. Ashford is given lip service in the first paragraph of the first book of the series, Sierra Summer, in which it is revealed the McLeods have moved permanently to a house Uncle Archie owned in southern California to be closer to "his business." (????) Thus the books had the 1960s All-American sun-and-surf California setting and Ashford friends were forgotten. They are also set a few years later than the serial, since Annette suddenly drives and has a car. (Also, in the simple line illustrations of the day, although Annette looks like...well, Annette, her aunt and uncle no longer resemble the actors who portrayed them; Uncle Archie, in particular, is no longer bald and much younger.)
Today the stories are exercises in nostalgia. Annette's school life is cheery and fun except for tests: not a sign of violence, rapes, rebels, drugs, or drunkenness to be seen. A young character in one book has a father in prison, but of course it was all a mistake and one of the things Annette helps to do is clear the man's name. The mysteries themselves are about at the level of your typical Nancy Drew, or perhaps a little under—my main quibble is they build up and build up the suspense and then in the last chapter in about six paragraphs everything is wrapped up (the bad guy captured by the police, the misunderstanding resolved, etc.), and Annette is back in the Monster, tooling her way back to her aunt and uncle. Still, if you are of the era, they're a fun read and a great way to turn back the clock for a few hours to when everything seemed simpler.
Lowrey's Margaret is also recommended, especially if you've ever seen the "Annette" serial and want to see the derivation. The story stands on its own and the period feel is well done. BTW, if Janette Sebring Lowrey's name seems to stir some visceral memory, you're probably remembering her most famous work, the perennial Little Golden Book favorite, The Poky Little Puppy. Yes, Lowrey wrote this enduring kids' classic. Interestingly, both Poky Little Puppy participants had ties to Disney: Lowrey's Margaret turning into a Disney serial, and illustrator Gustaf Tenggren working for several years as a Disney animator.
Annette McLeod, the orphan niece of brother and sister Archibald and Lila McLeod, was adopted by them when her father (Archie and Lila's brother) and mother died. The McLeods live in southern California and Annette owns every girl's motorized dream, a trim little white sports car she has nicknamed "the Monster." She and her friends attend high school, but we're never really certain what age they are (aside from the fact they can drive). The waters are further muddied by the fact that although on the book endpapers the Annette silhouette is that of the curly-haired girl as she appeared on The Mickey Mouse Club in the mid to late 1950s, the cover drawings are always of an older Annette with longer hair and a much more mature expression, the Annette of the "Beach Party" movies.
The Whitman book character, derived from a Mouse Club serial called...surprise!..."Annette," had a much longer and more curious bloodline than one might expect.
In 1950, Janette Sebring Lowrey wrote the novel Margaret, which opens in 1906 Texas and concerns teenage Maggie McLeod, who has lived all her life in the small town of Nichols Station with the family that raised her—Bonnie, a practical country woman, her footloose husband "Prince Albert" who spends most of his life away from home riding the rails, and Bonnie and "P.A.'s" cute but rather spoilt little girl, Lois—and her best friend, Michel.
Then Maggie receives a letter from her Aunt Lila McLeod in Ashford, Texas (the town is named after an ancestor of hers). Lila and her brother Archibald, a college professor, would like Maggie to live with them and become a part of the society that is her birthright. Bonnie thinks Maggie should get to know her father's family and insists the girl make the trip.
Ashford is a revelation for the small town girl. She is now called Margaret and welcomed by most of the boys and girls her age, including a country girl from outside town, Jet Maypen, and those in her social circle—but manages to make an enemy of the queen bee of the younger set, a snooty girl named Laura Rogan who sees Margaret as a hayseed. When Margaret becomes popular, Laura accuses her of stealing a diamond necklace that the wealthier girl removed at a party.
Disney reworked Margaret as a vehicle for Annette Funicello. Now entitled "Annette," the storyline is very simplified—entire subplots and characters vanish—but kept the same main plot for the television serial, although Ashford is now some middle American suburb and the time has been modernized to the 1950s. Annette meets the same characters (with their old-fashioned 1906 names intact), including Laura (played in delightfully bitchy style by Jymme Shore—Shore, as Roberta Shore, also played the girl in distress in Disney's The Shaggy Dog) and Jet (portrayed by TV's 1950s tomboy actress Judy Nugent), with Mouse Club regulars (and serial regulars) like Sharon Baird, Doreen Tracey, Tommy Cole, Cheryl Holdridge, Tim Considine, and David Stollery as the others. Richard Deacon, in his pre-buffoon Mel Cooley days, is Uncle Archie, and Sylvia Field, also Mrs. Wilson on Dennis the Menace, was Aunt Lila. The stigma of the stolen necklace hangs (pun intended) around Annette's head until the piece is found and everything ends happily ever after.
(Annette mentions Bonnie, but the character is never seen and she is only a shadowy influence in the girl's life as opposed to her major role in Lowrey's novel. Oddly, although the "Annette" timeframe had been advanced to the present day, Annette arrives in Ashford wearing a countrified outfit that Margaret would have felt more comfortable in. Even the updated Jet Maypen, also from "the country," didn't look that out of synch with time.)
The Whitman (now Disney Press) books dispose of everything except Annette, Aunt Lila, and Uncle Archie. Ashford is given lip service in the first paragraph of the first book of the series, Sierra Summer, in which it is revealed the McLeods have moved permanently to a house Uncle Archie owned in southern California to be closer to "his business." (????) Thus the books had the 1960s All-American sun-and-surf California setting and Ashford friends were forgotten. They are also set a few years later than the serial, since Annette suddenly drives and has a car. (Also, in the simple line illustrations of the day, although Annette looks like...well, Annette, her aunt and uncle no longer resemble the actors who portrayed them; Uncle Archie, in particular, is no longer bald and much younger.)
Today the stories are exercises in nostalgia. Annette's school life is cheery and fun except for tests: not a sign of violence, rapes, rebels, drugs, or drunkenness to be seen. A young character in one book has a father in prison, but of course it was all a mistake and one of the things Annette helps to do is clear the man's name. The mysteries themselves are about at the level of your typical Nancy Drew, or perhaps a little under—my main quibble is they build up and build up the suspense and then in the last chapter in about six paragraphs everything is wrapped up (the bad guy captured by the police, the misunderstanding resolved, etc.), and Annette is back in the Monster, tooling her way back to her aunt and uncle. Still, if you are of the era, they're a fun read and a great way to turn back the clock for a few hours to when everything seemed simpler.
Lowrey's Margaret is also recommended, especially if you've ever seen the "Annette" serial and want to see the derivation. The story stands on its own and the period feel is well done. BTW, if Janette Sebring Lowrey's name seems to stir some visceral memory, you're probably remembering her most famous work, the perennial Little Golden Book favorite, The Poky Little Puppy. Yes, Lowrey wrote this enduring kids' classic. Interestingly, both Poky Little Puppy participants had ties to Disney: Lowrey's Margaret turning into a Disney serial, and illustrator Gustaf Tenggren working for several years as a Disney animator.
23 December 2004
Everyone's Christmas
Your little girl asks for just one thing for Christmas, a small, insignificant treasure. You procrastinate and then find out the one thing, the only thing, the sole thing she has requested of Santa Claus, is out of production. What do you do?
That's the dilemma of the young father in "Lipstick Like Lindsay's," just one of the stories in Gerald Toner's collection Lipstick Like Lindsay's and Other Stories. I found Lipstick misfiled and shoved among the tattered children's volumes in a used book store. Toner doesn't write Christmas stories in which apprentice angels turn up to solve miracles or holiday tales where little magical characters appear. One or two of his stories have a slight religious slant, but even that is low key, concentrating not on the religion itself, but the warm feeling of well-being that belief brings.
What his stories are are about real people. Some may be rich, some may be poor, but they all have the usual problems: perhaps a job or lack of same, perhaps parential or spousal problems, or enigmatic children. They may not want to face Christmas, or go into the holiday with different perceptions, and Christmas doesn't solve all their problems, but in some way they make peace with the spirit of the season, and in a way that isn't lachrymose or overly cute.
One of my particular favorite stories this year was the final story in Lipstick, "My Dad's Idea of Christmas." Every year, the father of the story's seventeen-year-old protagonist takes his family into the big city to visit a venerable department story and explore a nearby shopping arcade. The descriptions of the department store brought back all those wonderful memories of Christmas shopping at the Outlet Company and Shepard's and Grant's. Even though you've never met the people or visited the places Toner has created, you know them all, if not still there physically, forever in your heart.
If you want to read Christmas stories that will leave you with a smile and a good feeling, please pick up any or all of Toner's books, which also include Holly Day's Cafe and Other Stories and the novel Whittlesworth Comes to Christmas. I've always been thankful that I rummaged through the untidy shelves of that bookstore one year; the effort is well worth your while.
That's the dilemma of the young father in "Lipstick Like Lindsay's," just one of the stories in Gerald Toner's collection Lipstick Like Lindsay's and Other Stories. I found Lipstick misfiled and shoved among the tattered children's volumes in a used book store. Toner doesn't write Christmas stories in which apprentice angels turn up to solve miracles or holiday tales where little magical characters appear. One or two of his stories have a slight religious slant, but even that is low key, concentrating not on the religion itself, but the warm feeling of well-being that belief brings.
What his stories are are about real people. Some may be rich, some may be poor, but they all have the usual problems: perhaps a job or lack of same, perhaps parential or spousal problems, or enigmatic children. They may not want to face Christmas, or go into the holiday with different perceptions, and Christmas doesn't solve all their problems, but in some way they make peace with the spirit of the season, and in a way that isn't lachrymose or overly cute.
One of my particular favorite stories this year was the final story in Lipstick, "My Dad's Idea of Christmas." Every year, the father of the story's seventeen-year-old protagonist takes his family into the big city to visit a venerable department story and explore a nearby shopping arcade. The descriptions of the department store brought back all those wonderful memories of Christmas shopping at the Outlet Company and Shepard's and Grant's. Even though you've never met the people or visited the places Toner has created, you know them all, if not still there physically, forever in your heart.
If you want to read Christmas stories that will leave you with a smile and a good feeling, please pick up any or all of Toner's books, which also include Holly Day's Cafe and Other Stories and the novel Whittlesworth Comes to Christmas. I've always been thankful that I rummaged through the untidy shelves of that bookstore one year; the effort is well worth your while.
13 December 2004
06 December 2004
04 November 2004
A Member of the Family
This morning's Thursday Threesome asked a question about which children's book series was your favorite. My answer brought me back...
The first series books I ever read were the Bobbsey Twins. The twins (two sets of them), their names now taken in vain as symbols of white-bread goody-goody kids, go back a long way. The first Bobbsey Twins novel was published in 1904 by the Edward Stratemeyer syndicate (who also did Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, etc.) by Mershon. (This first Mershon edition is so rare that if you have one, you can count yourself in for a good deal of money right now.) More sequels were published by Grosset & Dunlap right through the 1930s and 1940s, and then in the 1960s the books were completely revised to bring them up to then-modern sensiblilities. (Some of these revisions were rewritten completely, as in the first book, and some remained with only part of the plot intact--in The Bobbsey Twins and Baby May, for instance, a baby is abandoned; in the revision, it's an elephant that's abandoned.)
I had only about eight or nine of the revised books as a kid, since their $1.25 price was prohibitive on our budget, and I liked those, but I really enjoyed the first three original stories, reprinted by Whitman books, The Bobbsey Twins: Merry Days Indoors and Out, The Bobbsey Twins in the Country, and The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore. The new novels had the Bobbseys solving mysteries, but the early ones were much more fascinating (if sedate): the Bobbseys rode around in a horse and carriage (horse and sleigh in the winter), and there were fantastic things in the books, like the kids watching the "town well" get cleaned out, or having an Independence Day parade or a boat pageant, and, most astonishing of all, the rescue of men from a sailing ship wreck with something called a "breeches buoy." I was wide-eyed in all the differences in this 1904 world from my own 1960s world. Some things I expected--the children were much more disciplined, especially in school, where boys had to wear ties, and they all stood up when the teacher asked them a question--and in other ways the kids seemed so much more adult and independent. Bert, for instance, at the tender age of nine, is allowed to use adult tools including saws, to build his own iceboat--which he and his pal Charley later sail on the lake without supervision! (In the early books, Bert and Nan, the dark haired older twins are eight to begin with and Freddie and Flossie, the blond younger twins are four; later, they become twelve and six respectively. Even in the early books, Nan, although she typically likes pretty clothes and baking, is described as a sturdy, athletic girl who participates in sports, not following the prissy girl predecessors in the serial book world.)
When I got older I sought out the older, original versions for my own. As the publication dates changed, so did the Bobbseys--Mr. Bobbsey, for instance, in the original books was called "Papa" by the children and "Mr. Bobbsey" in talking about him, but in the 1920s books became "Daddy Bobbsey" in the narration, which always struck me as silly. (Many books of that time also have mothers being addressed as "Momsy," which is really freaky.) Oddly, one of the things that changed, and not for the better, was Dinah.
If you've read any Bobbsey Twins books, you know that Dinah Johnson is the Bobbsey's faithful, nurturing "jolly colored housekeeper." Her husband Sam, who in the original books is the Bobbseys' handyman and gardener, is late the foreman at Mr. Bobbsey's lumberyard on Lake Metoka. As is common in all books written around this era, Dinah and Sam are the usual stereotypical African-American characters--they speak in "black dialect" and, God in heaven, in the country story Dinah even makes a joke about stealing watermelons. This is probably enough to get the early Bobbseys kicked off a modern reading list. However bad Dinah looks in the early books, however, her character actually degenerated during the 1930s stories, which is where I quit collecting.
If you look beyond the obvious racial props Dinah is burdened with in the early stories, she is actually a generous, admirable character. Mrs. Bobbsey, in her role of busy society wife, is a loving mother, but she's out a lot of the time doing charity work. Dinah isn't just a servant, she's a surrogate mother to the kids: she bakes them cakes and cookies, resolves their squabbles occasionally, cleans up after them and doesn't tell on them, and helps them with projects. She has even been heroic: in Merry Days Indoors and Out, when Freddie is buried in the snow while the twins are building a snow fort, she is the one who keeps her head, runs outside and digs him out of the pile of snow. The children in turn adore her; they can't imagine a home without Dinah and she even accompanies them on vacation.
You would have thought that over time Dinah's lot in life would have improved, but in the 1930s they started using her as comic relief. She became the mistress of malaprops, misunderstanding some word the children were using and having to be corrected by her younger educated white charges. It was depressing and embarrassing to read. Other obvious racial stereotypes started appearing more in the stories at that time as well.
Dinah and Sam survived the 1960s revisions--I think they were now referred to as "Negro" in the new editions--and thankfully had quit speaking in that "nebba had dis so good" manner of speech that was so degrading. The later "New" books removed Dinah from the action all together and the stories felt incomplete. Dinah, after all, really was part of the family.
Recently those 1960s revisions have made a comeback in new covers. They look, inside, very much like the editions I had, but I understand they have been changed in subtle ways. Freddie and Flossie, for instance, who were always described as being plump, have lost their nicknames of "fat fireman" and "fat fairy" (I'm not sure if it's because of the program to fight childhood obesity or because "fat" is now considered insulting). Also, Dinah's heritage is not referred to in the text at all. I can't decide whether I like this or not. Certainly it's a positive step forward--it no longer matters what color her skin is...and at the same time it's rather sad. Everyone one of us has an ethnic or racial heritage that should be celebrated. Dinah's race was so often denegrated, especially in the "comic relief" 1930s, that it seems sad that we cannot now turn around and show it in a positive manner. It is as if part of Dinah's identity has taken away. I would be a different person without my Italian roots; it seems crass and wrong to rob Dinah of her African-American heritage.
For more about the Bobbseys, visit Dr. Mike's site.
A description of the series from St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture.
The first series books I ever read were the Bobbsey Twins. The twins (two sets of them), their names now taken in vain as symbols of white-bread goody-goody kids, go back a long way. The first Bobbsey Twins novel was published in 1904 by the Edward Stratemeyer syndicate (who also did Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, etc.) by Mershon. (This first Mershon edition is so rare that if you have one, you can count yourself in for a good deal of money right now.) More sequels were published by Grosset & Dunlap right through the 1930s and 1940s, and then in the 1960s the books were completely revised to bring them up to then-modern sensiblilities. (Some of these revisions were rewritten completely, as in the first book, and some remained with only part of the plot intact--in The Bobbsey Twins and Baby May, for instance, a baby is abandoned; in the revision, it's an elephant that's abandoned.)
I had only about eight or nine of the revised books as a kid, since their $1.25 price was prohibitive on our budget, and I liked those, but I really enjoyed the first three original stories, reprinted by Whitman books, The Bobbsey Twins: Merry Days Indoors and Out, The Bobbsey Twins in the Country, and The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore. The new novels had the Bobbseys solving mysteries, but the early ones were much more fascinating (if sedate): the Bobbseys rode around in a horse and carriage (horse and sleigh in the winter), and there were fantastic things in the books, like the kids watching the "town well" get cleaned out, or having an Independence Day parade or a boat pageant, and, most astonishing of all, the rescue of men from a sailing ship wreck with something called a "breeches buoy." I was wide-eyed in all the differences in this 1904 world from my own 1960s world. Some things I expected--the children were much more disciplined, especially in school, where boys had to wear ties, and they all stood up when the teacher asked them a question--and in other ways the kids seemed so much more adult and independent. Bert, for instance, at the tender age of nine, is allowed to use adult tools including saws, to build his own iceboat--which he and his pal Charley later sail on the lake without supervision! (In the early books, Bert and Nan, the dark haired older twins are eight to begin with and Freddie and Flossie, the blond younger twins are four; later, they become twelve and six respectively. Even in the early books, Nan, although she typically likes pretty clothes and baking, is described as a sturdy, athletic girl who participates in sports, not following the prissy girl predecessors in the serial book world.)
When I got older I sought out the older, original versions for my own. As the publication dates changed, so did the Bobbseys--Mr. Bobbsey, for instance, in the original books was called "Papa" by the children and "Mr. Bobbsey" in talking about him, but in the 1920s books became "Daddy Bobbsey" in the narration, which always struck me as silly. (Many books of that time also have mothers being addressed as "Momsy," which is really freaky.) Oddly, one of the things that changed, and not for the better, was Dinah.
If you've read any Bobbsey Twins books, you know that Dinah Johnson is the Bobbsey's faithful, nurturing "jolly colored housekeeper." Her husband Sam, who in the original books is the Bobbseys' handyman and gardener, is late the foreman at Mr. Bobbsey's lumberyard on Lake Metoka. As is common in all books written around this era, Dinah and Sam are the usual stereotypical African-American characters--they speak in "black dialect" and, God in heaven, in the country story Dinah even makes a joke about stealing watermelons. This is probably enough to get the early Bobbseys kicked off a modern reading list. However bad Dinah looks in the early books, however, her character actually degenerated during the 1930s stories, which is where I quit collecting.
If you look beyond the obvious racial props Dinah is burdened with in the early stories, she is actually a generous, admirable character. Mrs. Bobbsey, in her role of busy society wife, is a loving mother, but she's out a lot of the time doing charity work. Dinah isn't just a servant, she's a surrogate mother to the kids: she bakes them cakes and cookies, resolves their squabbles occasionally, cleans up after them and doesn't tell on them, and helps them with projects. She has even been heroic: in Merry Days Indoors and Out, when Freddie is buried in the snow while the twins are building a snow fort, she is the one who keeps her head, runs outside and digs him out of the pile of snow. The children in turn adore her; they can't imagine a home without Dinah and she even accompanies them on vacation.
You would have thought that over time Dinah's lot in life would have improved, but in the 1930s they started using her as comic relief. She became the mistress of malaprops, misunderstanding some word the children were using and having to be corrected by her younger educated white charges. It was depressing and embarrassing to read. Other obvious racial stereotypes started appearing more in the stories at that time as well.
Dinah and Sam survived the 1960s revisions--I think they were now referred to as "Negro" in the new editions--and thankfully had quit speaking in that "nebba had dis so good" manner of speech that was so degrading. The later "New" books removed Dinah from the action all together and the stories felt incomplete. Dinah, after all, really was part of the family.
Recently those 1960s revisions have made a comeback in new covers. They look, inside, very much like the editions I had, but I understand they have been changed in subtle ways. Freddie and Flossie, for instance, who were always described as being plump, have lost their nicknames of "fat fireman" and "fat fairy" (I'm not sure if it's because of the program to fight childhood obesity or because "fat" is now considered insulting). Also, Dinah's heritage is not referred to in the text at all. I can't decide whether I like this or not. Certainly it's a positive step forward--it no longer matters what color her skin is...and at the same time it's rather sad. Everyone one of us has an ethnic or racial heritage that should be celebrated. Dinah's race was so often denegrated, especially in the "comic relief" 1930s, that it seems sad that we cannot now turn around and show it in a positive manner. It is as if part of Dinah's identity has taken away. I would be a different person without my Italian roots; it seems crass and wrong to rob Dinah of her African-American heritage.
For more about the Bobbseys, visit Dr. Mike's site.
A description of the series from St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture.
27 October 2004
100 Years Past
Back in the early part of the century, one of the most prolific writers was a woman named Carolyn Wells. While she wrote articles and mysteries, she was most well-known for her children’s stories, chiefly those for girls.
Wells did several series, including the Patty Fairfield stories, which I believe I’ve spoken of briefly before. The series starts with Patty at fourteen visiting relatives, then follows her to school and college, abroad and then to courtship. Patty’s dad is not rich, but well-to-do enough that Patty isn’t forced to work and always has lots of nice party dresses and things. It’s a much more innocent world, where middle-class girls of seventeen weren’t too old to sit in Dad’s lap while the family gathered around the fire and while descriptions of clothing abounded were full of activities rather than lovesick teenagers mooning over the opposite sex. Patty always had something doing, whether it was a picnic or a charity bazaar or sightseeing.
Wells’ other series was for younger girls and concerned Marjorie Maynard, a lively twelve-year old, again in an upper middle-class family. Unlike Patty, she has siblings: older Kingdon, the only boy, and younger Kitty and the obligatory cute small child with a lisp, Rosy.
The differences are almost shockingly startling, and it has nothing to do with the family having horses instead of a car, traveling by steam train instead of airplane, and using crank telephones. Marjorie at twelve—and her friends of the same age—are still little girls. They play with doll houses and dolls, play tag and climb trees, and the thought of boys as future romantic mates never crosses their minds. It’s so pleasant and relaxing watching them get into mischief no worse than marking up the front stairs with their heavy shoes or splashing water at Grandma’s hired man. They get to be real kids and not premature women, with no sturm und drang about premarital sex, makeup, sexy clothing, and violence in school.
Interestingly enough, they are also smaller in stature as well; one can see how today’s children physically mature so much faster. Marjorie’s Uncle Steve and Grandmother build a tree house for her and her friends and furnish it for her with wicker chairs that are "not of a size for grown people, but were just right for twelve-year-old girls." And these are well-fed well-cared-for children, not underfed waifs from the slums--I don’t think I know a twelve-year-old today who is not adult size and who would fit in those quaint little wicker chairs!
Wells did several series, including the Patty Fairfield stories, which I believe I’ve spoken of briefly before. The series starts with Patty at fourteen visiting relatives, then follows her to school and college, abroad and then to courtship. Patty’s dad is not rich, but well-to-do enough that Patty isn’t forced to work and always has lots of nice party dresses and things. It’s a much more innocent world, where middle-class girls of seventeen weren’t too old to sit in Dad’s lap while the family gathered around the fire and while descriptions of clothing abounded were full of activities rather than lovesick teenagers mooning over the opposite sex. Patty always had something doing, whether it was a picnic or a charity bazaar or sightseeing.
Wells’ other series was for younger girls and concerned Marjorie Maynard, a lively twelve-year old, again in an upper middle-class family. Unlike Patty, she has siblings: older Kingdon, the only boy, and younger Kitty and the obligatory cute small child with a lisp, Rosy.
The differences are almost shockingly startling, and it has nothing to do with the family having horses instead of a car, traveling by steam train instead of airplane, and using crank telephones. Marjorie at twelve—and her friends of the same age—are still little girls. They play with doll houses and dolls, play tag and climb trees, and the thought of boys as future romantic mates never crosses their minds. It’s so pleasant and relaxing watching them get into mischief no worse than marking up the front stairs with their heavy shoes or splashing water at Grandma’s hired man. They get to be real kids and not premature women, with no sturm und drang about premarital sex, makeup, sexy clothing, and violence in school.
Interestingly enough, they are also smaller in stature as well; one can see how today’s children physically mature so much faster. Marjorie’s Uncle Steve and Grandmother build a tree house for her and her friends and furnish it for her with wicker chairs that are "not of a size for grown people, but were just right for twelve-year-old girls." And these are well-fed well-cared-for children, not underfed waifs from the slums--I don’t think I know a twelve-year-old today who is not adult size and who would fit in those quaint little wicker chairs!
07 October 2004
Stormy Weather
Back when I was looking at the reviews for Scotti’s Sudden Sea, about the Hurricane of 1938 (see “There Are Bricks Flying By”), I noted another hurricane book, Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, and remarked that the excerpt on Amazon.com was quite good. Well, Tuesday at Kudzu, the remaindered book store, along with Enright’s classic The Saturdays and a book about American regional language differences, I found a copy.
If you watch documentaries about hurricanes, as we usually end up doing, you find several ubiquitous notables along with the 1938 disaster. There is of course the killer 1900 storm that hit Galveston, Texas, vividly reproduced in Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm. There’s the 1926 hurricane on the East Coast of Florida that destroyed the finances of several businessmen building tourist accommodations in Miami and Ft. Lauderdale as well as property. (Ironically, one of these men recovered enough capital to sink all his cash into building oceanfront homes again. On the southern coast of New England in 1938.) More modern storms, such as Hurricanes Camille and Andrew, are also included.
And then there’s the 1935 storm, which struck the Florida Keys with howling force and basically destroyed the old way of life among the “Conches,” as the residents were known.
The facet that makes the 1935 event different from the others is the presence in the Keys of the workers building the highway that now connects Key West to mainland Florida. These men were United States military veterans, and they were there basically because there were no jobs for them anywhere else (and, some say, to get rid of them).
Many of these men had been in the Bonus March of 1932. There are many different “takes” on the Bonus March--President Hoover and many other Government officials apparently truly did believe that what were left of the Bonus Marchers were simply troublemakers, thieves and Communists--but all the histories will tell you that General MacArthur’s high-handed and cruel treatment of them was unfair, whether they were mad radicals or not. The day MacArthur burned out the Bonus Marchers and drove them away from town with tanks and mounted troups, Franklin Roosevelt knew he had won the upcoming election.
The Roosevelt folks will tell you he was trying to do the best for these desperate men when he sent large numbers of them down to Florida to work on the road project. They would have food, shelter, and a job. Detractors say Roosevelt shipped them there so they wouldn’t be near Washington. Either way, the men got a raw deal: the camps they were placed in were dirty, they were inadequately housed and not protected from the hordes of mosquitoes that plague that part of the country, and most of the men overseeing the project had no knowledge of hurricanes or how fast they could move and ignored the locals’ warnings of the possible force of the storm.
From all accounts the men at these camps weren’t the best folks in the world. Many of them had come back from the war with what we would call today “post-traumatic stress syndrome” but back then was known more vividly as “shell shock.” They were belligerent, nasty, and tended to get roaring drunk on payday, partially because the camps were so bleak there was nothing else for them to do. But however badly they behaved, they didn’t deserve the offhand treatment they received—and the fate in store from them as the hurricane struck.
Author Willie Drye doesn’t have quite the narrative strengths of Larson, Scotti, or Everett Allen (A Wind to Shake the World), but the story is still quite compelling and is an excellent portrait of the old way of life in Florida and the hardships of the time.
Synopsis of Storm of the Century on Amazon.com.
1926 Hurricane
American Experience: MacArthur and the Bonus March
Bonus March information
The Bonus March as written by an honors student
Herbert Hoover's take on the Bonus Marchers
If you watch documentaries about hurricanes, as we usually end up doing, you find several ubiquitous notables along with the 1938 disaster. There is of course the killer 1900 storm that hit Galveston, Texas, vividly reproduced in Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm. There’s the 1926 hurricane on the East Coast of Florida that destroyed the finances of several businessmen building tourist accommodations in Miami and Ft. Lauderdale as well as property. (Ironically, one of these men recovered enough capital to sink all his cash into building oceanfront homes again. On the southern coast of New England in 1938.) More modern storms, such as Hurricanes Camille and Andrew, are also included.
And then there’s the 1935 storm, which struck the Florida Keys with howling force and basically destroyed the old way of life among the “Conches,” as the residents were known.
The facet that makes the 1935 event different from the others is the presence in the Keys of the workers building the highway that now connects Key West to mainland Florida. These men were United States military veterans, and they were there basically because there were no jobs for them anywhere else (and, some say, to get rid of them).
Many of these men had been in the Bonus March of 1932. There are many different “takes” on the Bonus March--President Hoover and many other Government officials apparently truly did believe that what were left of the Bonus Marchers were simply troublemakers, thieves and Communists--but all the histories will tell you that General MacArthur’s high-handed and cruel treatment of them was unfair, whether they were mad radicals or not. The day MacArthur burned out the Bonus Marchers and drove them away from town with tanks and mounted troups, Franklin Roosevelt knew he had won the upcoming election.
The Roosevelt folks will tell you he was trying to do the best for these desperate men when he sent large numbers of them down to Florida to work on the road project. They would have food, shelter, and a job. Detractors say Roosevelt shipped them there so they wouldn’t be near Washington. Either way, the men got a raw deal: the camps they were placed in were dirty, they were inadequately housed and not protected from the hordes of mosquitoes that plague that part of the country, and most of the men overseeing the project had no knowledge of hurricanes or how fast they could move and ignored the locals’ warnings of the possible force of the storm.
From all accounts the men at these camps weren’t the best folks in the world. Many of them had come back from the war with what we would call today “post-traumatic stress syndrome” but back then was known more vividly as “shell shock.” They were belligerent, nasty, and tended to get roaring drunk on payday, partially because the camps were so bleak there was nothing else for them to do. But however badly they behaved, they didn’t deserve the offhand treatment they received—and the fate in store from them as the hurricane struck.
Author Willie Drye doesn’t have quite the narrative strengths of Larson, Scotti, or Everett Allen (A Wind to Shake the World), but the story is still quite compelling and is an excellent portrait of the old way of life in Florida and the hardships of the time.
Synopsis of Storm of the Century on Amazon.com.
1926 Hurricane
American Experience: MacArthur and the Bonus March
Bonus March information
The Bonus March as written by an honors student
Herbert Hoover's take on the Bonus Marchers
28 September 2004
Skipping Grisham
I stopped at the library last night. (Good God, here I go again.) I was looking for Elizabeth Peters’ Guardian of the Horizon and ended up with four books. The other three were Christmas books. One of them was one I’d wanted to read for a while: John Grisham’s Skipping Christmas.
Brief boring notes of exposition:
I’ve never read John Grisham. Even though I watched Perry Mason religiously as a kid, a book involving law has all the appeal of curdled milk. I have no interest in reading about it.
If you hadn’t gathered from my “Holiday Harbour” blog and my Christmas web page, I love Christmas. I like the decorations, the music, the entire idea. Despite all that, I don’t relish the overspending and maniac fanaticism that cames at the Christmas season. Fun and exciting is one thing, desperation and bankruptcy is another.
Which is why the idea of Grisham’s book sounded so appealling.
[Warning! Major spoilers ahoy!]
Luther and Nora Krank (I should have guessed what the ending would be when I saw that surname) have just seen off their 23-year-old daughter Blair, leaving for two years in Peru with the Peace Corps, her first Christmas away from home. It’s Thanksgiving weekend and a grumpy Luther notices the already burgeoning Christmas madness--and decides he’s sick of it. He retreats to his calculator and realizes he spent $6,100 on Christmas the previous year and neither he nor his wife were satisfied. It was hectic, no fun, they got and gave useless presents, etc.
Time for another personal interjection: I collect Christmas books. Not Christmas books with crafts or recipes, but books about Christmas itself. Several of them, like Unplug the Christmas Machine, are about simplifying Christmas, since I dislike the furor that goes on during the holiday season. So although Luther isn’t the world’s most likeable character, I was completely in sympathy with him and what he decides to do next: he convinces his wife, also weary of Yuletide shenanigans, to go on a cruise for the holidays, leaving Christmas Day.
It’s not like it’s a new idea; many folks do it. But the Kranks go one step further than some might: they’re not going to decorate, or throw their usual party, or buy a tree, etc. They will forgo all the trimmings of the holiday except their charitable contributions, which they plan to make at other times of the year. Great. Not what I would do, but I understood perfectly.
Unhappily, most of the Kranks’ friends don’t. Oh, a few of them are envious of the pair not having social obligations or unwanted relatives coming over, but most of them are downright indignant. Their bafflingly selfish attitude is “how dare you not have Christmas with all the trimmings?”
The worst are the Kranks’ "neighbors." The couple live on a street that always takes place in a neighborhood decorating contest. This includes every house having a big plastic Frosty the Snowman on the roof. When the neighbors find out the Kranks won’t be decorating, they are nearly apoplectic with rage. Even the neighborhood police, firefighters, and Boy Scouts collecting for charity treat the Kranks like they’re...well, some sort of cranks, even though Luther assures them he will give to their spring and summer charities. The printer who usually does Nora Krank’s Christmas cards and party invitations is downright indignant when the Kranks won’t even tell him why they’re not ordering cards and invitations (as if it were any of his business).
The neighbors, however, go over the top. They harass the Kranks with whispers and gossip, and serenade them with loud Christmas carols under their windows every night. Even the newspapers get into the act, publishing a picture of the Kranks’ undecorated house as if it’s some type of hideous unknown crime.
Well, Linda, you say, that’s the point of the book, isn’t it? Non-Christians, athiests, and others who don’t celebrate Christmas are bombarded with this stuff from before Halloween onward. This is just that syndrome taken to absurdity.
And had the book left it at that, it might have been fine.
But remember, our name is “Krank” here, and we must see the error of our ways. So while I was hoping desperately that Luther and Nora would eventually get away from this boorish herd of obnoxious revelers, it doesn’t happen. In fact, since the entire book has a television sitcom air about it, the predictable thing happens on December 23: daughter Blair calls. She’s not only coming home for Christmas, but she’s engaged for God’s sake to a Peruvian doctor named Enrique who’s always wanted to see a real American Christmas with the tree, the feast, the decorations on the roof.
Were these real adults with backbone Luther and Nora would have told Blair the truth. But no, in true TV sitcom fashion Nora, who was a little reserved about the “skipping Christmas” gig at the beginning but then warmed to it, does a “complete 180” to her husband, decides they will not go on the cruise and sends Luther into a frantic search for food, party guests and decorations before Blair and Enrique arrive on Christmas Eve. A requisite amount of slapstick occurs, including Luther’s foray on the roof to mount the plastic Frosty, to which the obnoxious neighbors look on with glee.
And then they find out why Luther and Nora are doing all this, immediately become sweet and kind again, and help the Kranks get Christmas together.
At the end, Luther gives the cruise tickets to a neighbor and his terminally ill wife.
Oh, please. I’ve gone through 45 years of loving Christmas stories with sappy endings, but this one just made me want to throw the book against the wall. As annoying as Luther Krank is, the idea of him having to be grateful to all these insensitive, malcontented morons makes me positively ill. If I were the Kranks, I’d put that house on the market posthaste--they seem to have the cash to do so--and go live somewhere else. But I’m sure that wouldn’t suit Nora Krank, who just up and repudiates her husband after agreeing with him for most of the book. She probably now thinks all these people are wonderful. Me, I think they deserve to have their cars keyed and eggs tossed at their windows.
The only thing I did like about the sappy ending was Luther giving away the tickets. Yeah, it was a cliché, but it was the only really nice thing anyone does for anyone in this book. And as someone who has known people who were terminally ill with cancer, it’s just a Good Thing all around.
As for Skipping Christmas, you can skip it across a pond for all I care.
Brief boring notes of exposition:
I’ve never read John Grisham. Even though I watched Perry Mason religiously as a kid, a book involving law has all the appeal of curdled milk. I have no interest in reading about it.
If you hadn’t gathered from my “Holiday Harbour” blog and my Christmas web page, I love Christmas. I like the decorations, the music, the entire idea. Despite all that, I don’t relish the overspending and maniac fanaticism that cames at the Christmas season. Fun and exciting is one thing, desperation and bankruptcy is another.
Which is why the idea of Grisham’s book sounded so appealling.
[Warning! Major spoilers ahoy!]
Luther and Nora Krank (I should have guessed what the ending would be when I saw that surname) have just seen off their 23-year-old daughter Blair, leaving for two years in Peru with the Peace Corps, her first Christmas away from home. It’s Thanksgiving weekend and a grumpy Luther notices the already burgeoning Christmas madness--and decides he’s sick of it. He retreats to his calculator and realizes he spent $6,100 on Christmas the previous year and neither he nor his wife were satisfied. It was hectic, no fun, they got and gave useless presents, etc.
Time for another personal interjection: I collect Christmas books. Not Christmas books with crafts or recipes, but books about Christmas itself. Several of them, like Unplug the Christmas Machine, are about simplifying Christmas, since I dislike the furor that goes on during the holiday season. So although Luther isn’t the world’s most likeable character, I was completely in sympathy with him and what he decides to do next: he convinces his wife, also weary of Yuletide shenanigans, to go on a cruise for the holidays, leaving Christmas Day.
It’s not like it’s a new idea; many folks do it. But the Kranks go one step further than some might: they’re not going to decorate, or throw their usual party, or buy a tree, etc. They will forgo all the trimmings of the holiday except their charitable contributions, which they plan to make at other times of the year. Great. Not what I would do, but I understood perfectly.
Unhappily, most of the Kranks’ friends don’t. Oh, a few of them are envious of the pair not having social obligations or unwanted relatives coming over, but most of them are downright indignant. Their bafflingly selfish attitude is “how dare you not have Christmas with all the trimmings?”
The worst are the Kranks’ "neighbors." The couple live on a street that always takes place in a neighborhood decorating contest. This includes every house having a big plastic Frosty the Snowman on the roof. When the neighbors find out the Kranks won’t be decorating, they are nearly apoplectic with rage. Even the neighborhood police, firefighters, and Boy Scouts collecting for charity treat the Kranks like they’re...well, some sort of cranks, even though Luther assures them he will give to their spring and summer charities. The printer who usually does Nora Krank’s Christmas cards and party invitations is downright indignant when the Kranks won’t even tell him why they’re not ordering cards and invitations (as if it were any of his business).
The neighbors, however, go over the top. They harass the Kranks with whispers and gossip, and serenade them with loud Christmas carols under their windows every night. Even the newspapers get into the act, publishing a picture of the Kranks’ undecorated house as if it’s some type of hideous unknown crime.
Well, Linda, you say, that’s the point of the book, isn’t it? Non-Christians, athiests, and others who don’t celebrate Christmas are bombarded with this stuff from before Halloween onward. This is just that syndrome taken to absurdity.
And had the book left it at that, it might have been fine.
But remember, our name is “Krank” here, and we must see the error of our ways. So while I was hoping desperately that Luther and Nora would eventually get away from this boorish herd of obnoxious revelers, it doesn’t happen. In fact, since the entire book has a television sitcom air about it, the predictable thing happens on December 23: daughter Blair calls. She’s not only coming home for Christmas, but she’s engaged for God’s sake to a Peruvian doctor named Enrique who’s always wanted to see a real American Christmas with the tree, the feast, the decorations on the roof.
Were these real adults with backbone Luther and Nora would have told Blair the truth. But no, in true TV sitcom fashion Nora, who was a little reserved about the “skipping Christmas” gig at the beginning but then warmed to it, does a “complete 180” to her husband, decides they will not go on the cruise and sends Luther into a frantic search for food, party guests and decorations before Blair and Enrique arrive on Christmas Eve. A requisite amount of slapstick occurs, including Luther’s foray on the roof to mount the plastic Frosty, to which the obnoxious neighbors look on with glee.
And then they find out why Luther and Nora are doing all this, immediately become sweet and kind again, and help the Kranks get Christmas together.
At the end, Luther gives the cruise tickets to a neighbor and his terminally ill wife.
Oh, please. I’ve gone through 45 years of loving Christmas stories with sappy endings, but this one just made me want to throw the book against the wall. As annoying as Luther Krank is, the idea of him having to be grateful to all these insensitive, malcontented morons makes me positively ill. If I were the Kranks, I’d put that house on the market posthaste--they seem to have the cash to do so--and go live somewhere else. But I’m sure that wouldn’t suit Nora Krank, who just up and repudiates her husband after agreeing with him for most of the book. She probably now thinks all these people are wonderful. Me, I think they deserve to have their cars keyed and eggs tossed at their windows.
The only thing I did like about the sappy ending was Luther giving away the tickets. Yeah, it was a cliché, but it was the only really nice thing anyone does for anyone in this book. And as someone who has known people who were terminally ill with cancer, it’s just a Good Thing all around.
As for Skipping Christmas, you can skip it across a pond for all I care.
27 September 2004
24 September 2004
Trim Up the Tree
Do old photos intrigue you, especially those of old Christmas trees and decorations? Are those old-fashioned cornucopias and candle holders on the branches an invitation to more investigation? Wouldn't you like to step into those old parlors and meet the little girls with corkscrew curls and little boys in Buster Brown outfits and look at their tabletop trees and floor-to-ceiling beauties, covered with kugel, Dresdens, bead ornaments and wax babies?
Impossible, of course. The next best thing is Robert Brenner's Christmas Past.
Having seen most collectors' books, I can attest that, unless you are looking for prices, they're pretty dull. Oh, if you have a volume that has old colored photos of something you're interested in, the attraction factor increases, but it's still a glorified price book.
Brenner's book isn't. Instead, it's a history of the Christmas tree and its decorations and lights (candles and electric). After a chapter on the origin of the tree tradition and some reminisces from people who remembered seeing their first trees, or decorating their first trees with popcorn and cranberries and tatted doilies, each chapter is a detailed (in small print, no less) examination of each type of ornament from the glass-blown kugels (a history of Thuringia, where the glassblowers plied their trade, is included) to cotton confections to wire and bead creations to wax babies made in the form or angels or Jesus, and even more. The chapters on lighting the Christmas tree are particularly fascinating--and finally, an explanation of why early electric strings were called "Mazda lights" (named after the Babylonian god of light)!
This detailed examination of all things ornamental and lucent is accompanied by pages and pages of color and black and white photos of the different objects, old-time rooms decorated for the holidays, and old advertisements going back to the 1800s for the various ornaments and lights. It is the definitive book about old Christmas trimmings.
Impossible, of course. The next best thing is Robert Brenner's Christmas Past.
Having seen most collectors' books, I can attest that, unless you are looking for prices, they're pretty dull. Oh, if you have a volume that has old colored photos of something you're interested in, the attraction factor increases, but it's still a glorified price book.
Brenner's book isn't. Instead, it's a history of the Christmas tree and its decorations and lights (candles and electric). After a chapter on the origin of the tree tradition and some reminisces from people who remembered seeing their first trees, or decorating their first trees with popcorn and cranberries and tatted doilies, each chapter is a detailed (in small print, no less) examination of each type of ornament from the glass-blown kugels (a history of Thuringia, where the glassblowers plied their trade, is included) to cotton confections to wire and bead creations to wax babies made in the form or angels or Jesus, and even more. The chapters on lighting the Christmas tree are particularly fascinating--and finally, an explanation of why early electric strings were called "Mazda lights" (named after the Babylonian god of light)!
This detailed examination of all things ornamental and lucent is accompanied by pages and pages of color and black and white photos of the different objects, old-time rooms decorated for the holidays, and old advertisements going back to the 1800s for the various ornaments and lights. It is the definitive book about old Christmas trimmings.
15 September 2004
"There Are Bricks Flying By"
It was one of those rainy summers through July, then August raised sweltering temps, exhausting for people without air conditioning in three-story homes. In September it began to rain again, until the ground was saturated.
Mary worked through it all in a factory in Providence, RI, on Pine Street. She was 21 and had had to quit school to take care of her mother in 11th grade. When September 21 turned out to be sunny and pleasant, she was almost reluctant to go in that day.
Later that morning the wind picked up, however--it grew cloudy, then dark. Her workplace had big windows on one side of the room so that the lights were augmented by natural sunlight on nice days. Today she had to peer at her work.
Then, in the early afternoon, she looked outside and saw bricks flying, one by one, past the windows. It was raining steadily and then hard, lashing the glass.
She mentioned it to her supervisor, who only told her to get back to work. She was doing piece work at the time and every minute she dawdled meant a penny or two less in her paycheck. When she mentioned the bricks to other people, they only pooh-poohed her. Once she said she was going home early, but was told to sit down and do her work.
A scant half-hour before quitting time they announced, "It's pretty stormy out. Everyone can leave early."
Mary was lucky--she didn't have to take the bus home or walk as always; a girlfriend's brother had called: "I'm coming to pick you up." They had to walk six blocks in driving rain and were drenched by the time they got to the car.
When she got home her mother was frantic. Her father had chosen that day to go up to their vegetable garden allotment and was not back yet. The power was out and Mary's younger brother trudged to the hardware store in drenching rain to buy kerosene for the storm lanterns. At nine o'clock, finally, a voice from the darkness outside asked, "Hey! Where are all the lights?"
It was her father, who had had to take a different bus to get home in the storm and then got trapped downtown as a storm surge flooded Providence. Mary's niece Anna and her godmother had been in Providence, shopping for a dress for the former. They also made it home unharmed.
The place where Mary worked, Coro's, hadn't been touched because it was on high ground; the flying bricks weren't even from that building. Most weren't so lucky, especially if they had a home at the shore.
What Mary--my mom--had struggled home through was the great Hurricane of 1938. The Weather Bureau didn't believe a hurricane would hit New England and did not send out timely warnings. They were sure it would go out to sea. Instead it hit Long Island--to this day the fast-moving storm is referred to as "the Long Island Express"--and New England like a battering ram. It not only tore up the coastline, it roared inland, destroying pine in New Hampshire, a quarter of Vermont's maple trees, and countless little New England tree-shrouded greens. Downtown Providence was submerged under 17 feet of water that had roared up Narragansett Bay, flooded the basements of the department stores and killed shoppers, submerged cars and drowned their drivers, short circuited trolley cars so their horns blew endless ghostly symphonies under the water.
The hurricane of '38 tale was one of the stories I always begged from my mother as a little girl. It was like the tornado in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or some other fairy tale cataclysm to me, but this one came with photos--we had a "hurricane book" from Hurricane Carol up in the attic that compared the damage done in 1938 and again in 1954--and an "up close and personal" extra. I vaguely remember Hurricane Donna in 1960, lashing the house and tearing shingles from the roof, leaving us under the light of the kerosene "hurricane lamp" for three days.
R.A. Scotti's Sudden Sea, which I recently re-read after purchasing the book in paperback, transports you to 1938--to the salt-air homes on Napatree Point, RI, the hardscrabble farms on Conanicut (Jamestown), the coastal communities of Long Island, and even "Fenwick," the Connecticut home where Katharine Hepburn was spending the summer with her parents and brother. I re-read the book in a sultry setting that was as warm and oppressive as the approaching storm, and blinked and felt lost and disoriented when I finally finished and returned to my own world.
This is a fabulous book, with all the intensity and realism of Larson's Isaac's Storm and Junger's The Perfect Storm, a time machine back to "the last of the old New England summers," and is much recommended, along with Everett Allen's A Wind to Shake the World, which was written in the 1970s. Not only did Scotti used Wind as part of her research, but his narrative equally absorbing and evocative, and Allen knows of what he speaks: he was there. A neophyte newspaper reporter, Allen began his first journalism job in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on September 21, 1938.
(BTW, I have only read the excerpt on Amazon.com, but Willie Drye's Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, sounds super as well.)
(YOW! I'm glad I found my copy of the Everett Allen book last spring...it's now going for a minimum of $20. Someone at Alibris wants $619.00 for it!)
Mary worked through it all in a factory in Providence, RI, on Pine Street. She was 21 and had had to quit school to take care of her mother in 11th grade. When September 21 turned out to be sunny and pleasant, she was almost reluctant to go in that day.
Later that morning the wind picked up, however--it grew cloudy, then dark. Her workplace had big windows on one side of the room so that the lights were augmented by natural sunlight on nice days. Today she had to peer at her work.
Then, in the early afternoon, she looked outside and saw bricks flying, one by one, past the windows. It was raining steadily and then hard, lashing the glass.
She mentioned it to her supervisor, who only told her to get back to work. She was doing piece work at the time and every minute she dawdled meant a penny or two less in her paycheck. When she mentioned the bricks to other people, they only pooh-poohed her. Once she said she was going home early, but was told to sit down and do her work.
A scant half-hour before quitting time they announced, "It's pretty stormy out. Everyone can leave early."
Mary was lucky--she didn't have to take the bus home or walk as always; a girlfriend's brother had called: "I'm coming to pick you up." They had to walk six blocks in driving rain and were drenched by the time they got to the car.
When she got home her mother was frantic. Her father had chosen that day to go up to their vegetable garden allotment and was not back yet. The power was out and Mary's younger brother trudged to the hardware store in drenching rain to buy kerosene for the storm lanterns. At nine o'clock, finally, a voice from the darkness outside asked, "Hey! Where are all the lights?"
It was her father, who had had to take a different bus to get home in the storm and then got trapped downtown as a storm surge flooded Providence. Mary's niece Anna and her godmother had been in Providence, shopping for a dress for the former. They also made it home unharmed.
The place where Mary worked, Coro's, hadn't been touched because it was on high ground; the flying bricks weren't even from that building. Most weren't so lucky, especially if they had a home at the shore.
What Mary--my mom--had struggled home through was the great Hurricane of 1938. The Weather Bureau didn't believe a hurricane would hit New England and did not send out timely warnings. They were sure it would go out to sea. Instead it hit Long Island--to this day the fast-moving storm is referred to as "the Long Island Express"--and New England like a battering ram. It not only tore up the coastline, it roared inland, destroying pine in New Hampshire, a quarter of Vermont's maple trees, and countless little New England tree-shrouded greens. Downtown Providence was submerged under 17 feet of water that had roared up Narragansett Bay, flooded the basements of the department stores and killed shoppers, submerged cars and drowned their drivers, short circuited trolley cars so their horns blew endless ghostly symphonies under the water.
The hurricane of '38 tale was one of the stories I always begged from my mother as a little girl. It was like the tornado in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or some other fairy tale cataclysm to me, but this one came with photos--we had a "hurricane book" from Hurricane Carol up in the attic that compared the damage done in 1938 and again in 1954--and an "up close and personal" extra. I vaguely remember Hurricane Donna in 1960, lashing the house and tearing shingles from the roof, leaving us under the light of the kerosene "hurricane lamp" for three days.
R.A. Scotti's Sudden Sea, which I recently re-read after purchasing the book in paperback, transports you to 1938--to the salt-air homes on Napatree Point, RI, the hardscrabble farms on Conanicut (Jamestown), the coastal communities of Long Island, and even "Fenwick," the Connecticut home where Katharine Hepburn was spending the summer with her parents and brother. I re-read the book in a sultry setting that was as warm and oppressive as the approaching storm, and blinked and felt lost and disoriented when I finally finished and returned to my own world.
This is a fabulous book, with all the intensity and realism of Larson's Isaac's Storm and Junger's The Perfect Storm, a time machine back to "the last of the old New England summers," and is much recommended, along with Everett Allen's A Wind to Shake the World, which was written in the 1970s. Not only did Scotti used Wind as part of her research, but his narrative equally absorbing and evocative, and Allen knows of what he speaks: he was there. A neophyte newspaper reporter, Allen began his first journalism job in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on September 21, 1938.
(BTW, I have only read the excerpt on Amazon.com, but Willie Drye's Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, sounds super as well.)
(YOW! I'm glad I found my copy of the Everett Allen book last spring...it's now going for a minimum of $20. Someone at Alibris wants $619.00 for it!)
02 September 2004
Library Books du Jour
Finished:
Unsinkable, purportedly the "entire story" of the Titanic disaster, starting with the conception of the ship and ending with Bob Ballard's discovery of her resting place and the subsequent graverobbers who visited her. I learned quite a few things, including that there was an American inquest into the accident. I found some of the reviews on Amazon.com, however, very amusing: several people accuse the author of quoting from Walter Lord's A Night to Remember nearly word for word. They might want to look at the recommendations on the book jacket: the first "attaboy" is from Walter Lord himself. I think if someone were copying his book "word for word" he'd have something different to say.
1876. This was a volume drawn from newspaper and magazine articles of the era and published in 1976, the year of the Bicentennial. Despite all the nice accompanying photos and engravings, I didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped when I first saw it.
In Progress:
Sunday Nights at Seven, Joan Benny's biography of her dad interspersed with Jack Benny's own unpublished autobiography, found after his death.
Endurance. Story of Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated Antarctic expedition, with photos taken during the journey.
1900 by Rebecca West, someone who lived the year.
Unsinkable, purportedly the "entire story" of the Titanic disaster, starting with the conception of the ship and ending with Bob Ballard's discovery of her resting place and the subsequent graverobbers who visited her. I learned quite a few things, including that there was an American inquest into the accident. I found some of the reviews on Amazon.com, however, very amusing: several people accuse the author of quoting from Walter Lord's A Night to Remember nearly word for word. They might want to look at the recommendations on the book jacket: the first "attaboy" is from Walter Lord himself. I think if someone were copying his book "word for word" he'd have something different to say.
1876. This was a volume drawn from newspaper and magazine articles of the era and published in 1976, the year of the Bicentennial. Despite all the nice accompanying photos and engravings, I didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped when I first saw it.
In Progress:
Sunday Nights at Seven, Joan Benny's biography of her dad interspersed with Jack Benny's own unpublished autobiography, found after his death.
Endurance. Story of Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated Antarctic expedition, with photos taken during the journey.
1900 by Rebecca West, someone who lived the year.
Flanders' Follies
In 1996, I took the two classes CDC then offered on that newfangled frontier, the Internet. In "Internet II" class, we learned how to make a basic web page using Notepad, writing the HTML code by hand.
I was like an adult duck getting to swim for the first time. I went back to the office next day and found "The Beginner's Guide to HTML," which is still wandering around at NCSA's site. Having devoured that, I went to Paul McFedries' Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating an HTML Web Page, which is still around as well.
So I got myself addicted to HTML and web books as well and still have a fair collection of them. Two of my favorites are the Vincent Flanders' Web Pages That Suck books, based on his web site. These are "for God's sake, don't do this!" volumes with amusing text and highly illustrative--if not ysterically funny--screen caps of so-called "professional" web sites that are so mind-bogglingly bad that you can't believe someone paid to have them done. I especially enjoy Flanders' diatribes at "mystery meat navigation," which refers to those websites with obscure looking graphics or photos that are not labeled and you have to mouse-over them to see what they stand for. The poor man practically gets apopleptic about them.
My one complaint with computer books is they are so darned expensive. I understand that even with the popularity of computers today, they are still a niche market, so they are priced higher to recoup publishing costs. But they come at college textbook prices most of the time, an unreal cost that has you paying $40-$50, even $60+ for one book.
Luckily for my habit, I've gotten most of my HTML books at Sam's (back when they had the occasional title), on remainder counters, and lately off Amazon Marketplace. Flanders' Son of Web Pages That Suck was a heart-stopping $45, but I got it for a tenth that price on AM. And I'm enjoying it, too, perhaps even more than the original. There are some great links to web usage sites in this edition.
I was like an adult duck getting to swim for the first time. I went back to the office next day and found "The Beginner's Guide to HTML," which is still wandering around at NCSA's site. Having devoured that, I went to Paul McFedries' Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating an HTML Web Page, which is still around as well.
So I got myself addicted to HTML and web books as well and still have a fair collection of them. Two of my favorites are the Vincent Flanders' Web Pages That Suck books, based on his web site. These are "for God's sake, don't do this!" volumes with amusing text and highly illustrative--if not ysterically funny--screen caps of so-called "professional" web sites that are so mind-bogglingly bad that you can't believe someone paid to have them done. I especially enjoy Flanders' diatribes at "mystery meat navigation," which refers to those websites with obscure looking graphics or photos that are not labeled and you have to mouse-over them to see what they stand for. The poor man practically gets apopleptic about them.
My one complaint with computer books is they are so darned expensive. I understand that even with the popularity of computers today, they are still a niche market, so they are priced higher to recoup publishing costs. But they come at college textbook prices most of the time, an unreal cost that has you paying $40-$50, even $60+ for one book.
Luckily for my habit, I've gotten most of my HTML books at Sam's (back when they had the occasional title), on remainder counters, and lately off Amazon Marketplace. Flanders' Son of Web Pages That Suck was a heart-stopping $45, but I got it for a tenth that price on AM. And I'm enjoying it, too, perhaps even more than the original. There are some great links to web usage sites in this edition.
31 August 2004
Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Part 2
I'm enjoying this Dana Girls story a lot. The author has the language of those older series books down pat. It may surprise folks who know what a devotee I am of these old kids' series books, but I've never read a Dana Girls book, whether the originals or any updating they did in the 1960s. I've never actually read a Nancy Drew, either. The books cost $1.25 when I was of the age to read them and my mom couldn't afford them (and it would have taken five weeks to save up for one with my allowance). I owned mostly Whitman books, which were 29 cents, and later paperbacks. Occasionally on Christmas or my birthday, I would get a Bobbsey Twins book--the rewritten ones of the 1960s, not the original books I collected as an adult. I only had about eight of them, though.
It is so funny reading these, with their proper grammar and condemnation of slang, and remember that they were banned from most libraries of my day! The librarians scorned them as cheaply written and manufactured sensationalist twaddle. They wanted us to read the classics, like Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island and Jane Eyre and the Maud Montgomery books. (To be honest, I always loathed Treasure Island; I never have figured out what is so romantic about dirty, smelly killer pirates. Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and yes, even the Dana Girls, were well-educated, clean and respectful. What was the problem?)
It is so funny reading these, with their proper grammar and condemnation of slang, and remember that they were banned from most libraries of my day! The librarians scorned them as cheaply written and manufactured sensationalist twaddle. They wanted us to read the classics, like Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island and Jane Eyre and the Maud Montgomery books. (To be honest, I always loathed Treasure Island; I never have figured out what is so romantic about dirty, smelly killer pirates. Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and yes, even the Dana Girls, were well-educated, clean and respectful. What was the problem?)
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