Betty Birney’s Blog

Actually, a thousand words isn’t all that much to a writer. So a picture can be worth far more than the proverbial thousand words.

I had to spend some time gathering together fan mail and art for an upcoming sales meeting. What a delight to rummage through the hundreds of letters and even more artwork from Humphrey’s fabulous fans. I thought I’d share a couple of them that made me smile.

No words needed.

Thanks to Victoria and Jason of Houston, TX.

How could anyone who grew up in the 50s (or earlier) fail to list Ferdinand the Bull as a favorite book? Everyone loved Ferdinand. The tale of a peace-loving bull who loves smelling the flowers more than fighting in the bullring, The Story of Ferdinand was a popular book for many years and was made into an animated short by Disney. You can see it here.  (Warning – it doesn’t capture the look of the book.)

The story was by Munro Leaf and the illustrations by Robert Lawson. Lawson will definitely be coming up again in my list of favorites. I remember Leaf for something besides Ferdinand. (By the way, as a young reader, I thought Munro Leaf was a thrilling name!) He wrote a children’s feature in the Ladies’ Home Journal about the watchbird. It became part of our family lexicon – I can still hear my mother saying “This is a watchbird watching you.” The watchbird phrase stayed in our family so long, it still comes to mind when I see a child misbehaving. Reading Mother’s McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal was a big  part of my childhood. I especially loved the paper doll, Betsy McCall, from McCall’s – I thought Betsy and I were so much alike. Or maybe I just wanted to be like her. After all, our names were similar and we both had dark hair. Another book Betsy figured prominently in my reading life – I will get to her in a bit.

Back to Ferdinand – aren’t Lawson’s pen and ink drawings gorgeous? And how he skewers the bullfighters and bandoleros! Still, for today’s generation, I’m thinking Ferdinand may not sit so well. Parents wouldn’t want to have to explain bullfighting to children, whereas we were raised knowing it was a part of Spanish and Mexican culture.  During my childhood, books about different cultures were very popular (see the previous post). And pre-globalization, the changes between cultures were much greater.

Still, the story of a peace-loving bull who bucks the system and frustrates the status quo of bullfighting delighted me. Hey, I’m a Taurus! Last weekend, my husband casually mentioned loving Ferdinand when he was a child. It’s a common bond I didn’t know about.

I have such mixed feelings about this beloved book, The Five Chinese Brothers.  By today’s standards and perhaps by any standards, it promotes a racial stereotype (one that was acceptable in the 1950s). I didn’t know anything about that. I found the story and illustrations fascinating and absorbing. I always ran to find this book on the library shelf. I had to see those illustrations of the brother who could swallow the sea, the brother who could stretch his legs and the brother who could not be burned. The book is still in print, but on Amazon, I found an angry mother complaining that the book was violent (as well as stereotypical).

Earlier this year, when I was doing an event at the iconic Children’s Book World in L.A., store owner Sharon Hearn and I ended up talking about how much we loved The Five Chinese Brothers when we were young.  Back then, young as I was, I didn’t think this was a true story, or that Chinese people were like this. The violence (a child dies, for goodness sakes, in a picture book, and authorities try to kill the brothers five times) didn’t bother me a whit. I thought it was a thumping good story and a very satisfying one. I don’t think it made me a bigot and it didn’t give me nightmares or make me a violent person. (I’m about as non-violent as they get.) It doesn’t translate today but it stimulated my imagination in a big way.

There was another popular Chinese-themed book of the day, again with what would be probably characterized as stereotypes today. The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack, has another problem that might turn off parents and caregivers: Ping, the little duck, runs away because he’s afraid of getting a spanking. “Mommy, what’s a spanking?” kids today might ask. Spanking was an accepted punishment when I was growing up. That said, I was rarely spanked and maybe the few times I was were pretty half-hearted and painless. I’ve talked to people who grew up when I did who have said they were spanked in school. That was not in my experience at all. I  never saw any physical punishment between adult and child at school. And my take on the “spanking” Ping was avoiding was that it was a gentle swat on the rear to say, “hurry up, now.”

One thing I love about this book is the part where the little boy who lives on a boat in the Yangtze falls into the river and meets Ping. Young children living on boats had barrels tied around their waists so if they fell into the water, they’d float. The first water wings! On the other hand, I cringe at the yellow coloring and the fact that poor Ping almost ended up as dinner. Again, this book was fascinating to me as a young child. I always gobbled up anything new I could learn about the world. The fact that the world view was a little skewed didn’t do permanent damage, thank goodness. But I don’t think these books would -or should – fly today. Times change – thank goodness – but what mattered to me was the story and the imaginative flow of these tales.

Educator and author Esme Raji Codell has a nice plug for Summer According to Humphrey on her blog. If you love children’s books, you probably already read her. (You’ll have to scroll down a bit on the blog to get to Humphrey.)

I was jarred when it dawned on me a little while back that many children aren’t being taught nursery rhymes and fairy tales any more. Stories and rhymes that have been passed on for hundreds of years and that have cultural significance may, indeed, die. Things change, of course. But why?

In this case, I think there are two reasons. One is that fairy tales and nursery rhymes were part of a verbal tradition that is definitely waning. Parents traditionally told these stories and taught them to their children, often without having a book to guide them. We all just knew them. Now, with both parents working and busy schedules, there’s less time for one-on-one entertainment. Videos can do the job. But that’s not the whole explanation for why fairy tales and nursery rhymes are endangered.

I think parents today find them too scary and creepy for their children. I certainly can’t argue with the creep factor. A girl is taking food to her grandmother and finds that she’s been eaten by a wolf. Two children are taken to the woods and deliberately abandoned – near a witch’s house. There are some very scary stepmothers out there and it’s possible to stay too long at the ball or the fair.

I enjoyed these stories and poems and never lost a moment’s sleep over them. Of course, it’s unsafe in the woods alone. Yes, there are bad people – some of them pretty witchy – out there. Don’t take candy from strangers – or eat their candy houses! These are cautionary tales.

Mother Goose has a different problem. The rhymes are just plain odd. Many nursery rhymes are thought to have been thinly veiled political satire. They have their own scary factor: humanoid eggs get smashed beyond repair, the ladybug’s home is on fire and her children are alone, and somebody killed Cock Robin. They also have a delicious sense of wonder: the cow jumps over the moon and the dish runs away with the spoon.

There’s a growing protectiveness among parents that wasn’t around when I was growing up. We didn’t slather on sunscreen except at the pool, we roamed the neighborhood for hours unchaperoned, we probably weren’t hydrated at all times. But we were protected in other ways: foul language and sexual content on TV were censored, people didn’t wear T-shirts with obscenities on them, certain “feminine” products weren’t advertised on T.V. There’s no possible way to protect children from growing up too fast today in a 24-hour news cycle.

(By the way, there were child molesters and kidnappers when I was growing up. Young as I was, I was aware of the Greenlease kidnapping everyone was talking about – particularly since I lived in St. Louis. I even recall a sick joke about it. My mother gave us the appropriate training about not going with strangers and she was very definite about it.)

Our old Mother Goose book is the most worn of all my children’s book – evidence of how much we loved it with its vivid illustrations. You can see the pencil numberings my sister put in. She was frustrated by the book’s lack of an index and so she numbered the rhymes and then matched them up with the alphabetical list of rhymes, so she could easily find her favorites. 

I chose the seesaw because that’s another thing that’s disappeared. I can’t argue that seesaws weren’t dangerous. I can argue that they were really fun. But part of the fun was slamming them down or trying to bounce the other person off. I never got hurt on one but I know there were occasionally smashed fingers. So they’ve disappeared from playgrounds along with merry-go-rounds (the kind you get spinning fast and then jump on), which were also great fun.

For more reading on children’s books, I recommend The Annotated Mother Goose, and the works of Iona and Peter Opie

Please feel free to discuss what I’ve said by adding comments. You can sign up to receive email notifications of new posts at http://groups.google.com/group/betty-birney-blog-readers