Betty Birney’s Blog

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.

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

This is a book I actually owned, which means it must have been a gift. Most book gifts came from my paternal grandmother, from whom I inherited my love of books and playing piano. I loved the idea of this book more than the book. I liked the title, liked the illustrations but I don’t think I was crazy about the story.

Like the books in my last post, it has a lot of text. The only reason I’m including it in the post is that again, as with the previous books, there are triplets in it! Three identical girls. I’m only guessing that the Flicka, Dicka, Ricka and Snip, Snapp, Snurr books were so popular, triplets were “in.” Funny, because multiple births were less common than today. And they were always identical triplets, which I’m sure are very rare.

 I liked the triplets, I liked the puppy story in this book, but I wanted to like it more!

When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, like most middle class families, we didn’t own a lot of books. I’m sure there were bookstores in downtown St. Louis, but in the suburbs, which were relatively new, they weren’t around yet. You could buy books at a department store, though. I remember being taken to Famous-Barr to get my Girl Scout Handbook. Department stores had everything back then – even bakeries and household goods such as soap. The bookstore there was somewhat limited but they sold Nancy Drew and popular series. Let’s face it, there weren’t as many people back then and there weren’t as many books. So … we went to the library.

Even before the bookmobile came to our suburban town of Affton, my parents took us to libraries in the city – mostly near where both sets of grandparents lived. While my older sister, Janet, was already checking out chapter books, I was still too young to read, so I browsed the picture books. There were two popular series of books that I checked out time and time again. They were by a Swedish author/illustrator named Maj Lindman and involved two sets of triplets. The boy triplets were Snipp, Snapp, Snurr. What three or four-year old wouldn’t enjoy saying those names? The girls were Flicka, Ricka and Dicka. The series were completely separate but they were very similar. The identical triplets in both series were very blonde and dressed identically. Although I didn’t realize it then, the stories were somewhat similar in theme, but the settings varied.

Even back then, they were old-fashioned. Originally published in the 1930s, the books featured peasants and farm life – women in long skirts and bandanas, plenty of cows!

Many of the stories revolved around the triplets (either set) wanting to earn some money to share something but often ending up sharing their bounty with others. They got into mischief but never did anything bad – merely careless. In the book pictured, they pick strawberries for money, get lost, go to a cottage (of strangers!) and ask for help. The family who helps them is poor (but clean – that’s stressed) and when the girls get their money they buy a dress for the little girl in the cottage and a teddy bear for her baby brother. Mother brings a basket of goodies.

The books are all in print again (available on Amazon.com) and give you a glimpse back to a time that was much more innocent.

The book at left is a little different – the sun is an actual character, as you can see, and there’s not a lot of story. However, it would be a great way to introduce the cycle of nature and food to a young child. Even though I was so young, I do know that it was the art that drew me to these books – not the story. I have vague recollection of joy at finding a Snipp, Snapp, Snurr or Flicka, Ricka, Dicka book on the shelf.

By the way, these books have a lot more text than contemporary picture books, which I think was quite typical. Maybe parents had more time to read to their children back then – what do you think?

The arrival of summer brings back so many wonderful childhood memories: long days of playing in the yard with friends,  playing games inside the house with friends, swimming, roller skating, jump rope, hopscotch,  jacks,walking to the movies, and reading! I read all year, but there was even more time for books in the summer. My whole family read in our respective beds every night – I remember calling out to my parents’ bedroom and spelling a word so they would tell me what it was.

When I was very young, there was no library in Affton, then a relatively young suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. My parents took my sister Janet and me into the city to libraries to check out as many books as we could. My sister recalls that there was a limit and since she was an ardent reader, my parents had to take her to more than one branch to get enough books to last the week. I really wasn’t reading then, but I do remember the books I checked out, many of them time and time again.

But by the time I was in full reading mode, a miracle occurred. Every two weeks, the Bookmobile chugged down Gravois Road in Affton, where I lived, parked next to Affton Drugs and opened its doors! The photos above are exactly the bookmobile I remember. I can still hear the thump of my feet on the wooden steps. In the summer, Janet and I would walk to the bookmobile, arms filled with books both coming and going. It was a long walk by today’s standards but well worthwhile. (We walked everywhere back then by ourselves.)

Oh, what delicious books there were! And the librarians did a good job of stocking the books. So if I read and loved a Little House or Betsy-Tacy or Dr. Doolittle book, another one would appear in a few weeks and a librarian would nudge me in its direction. I took it for granted back then but I now I am so grateful to those angels of the library, looking out for two book-loving girls.

I’m mentioning this for two reasons. One, I believe about 100 librarians were laid off in the Los Angeles Public Library system today (despite a last minute effort at a reprieve), which is a tragedy. The hours are being cut as well. When I go to my local Studio City branch at opening time, there’s always a line of people waiting for the doors to open. Unfortunately, I don’t believe the City Council or Mayor ever go to the library as ordinary citizens to see what really goes on there.

Secondly, I’m going to attempt to go back to my childhood (the 1950s-1960s) and blog about my favorite books from those days, especially those which had a great influence on me as a person and a writer. I’ve not been blogging for a while for several reasons, but I’m going to give it a go … so if you are reading the blog, please take a moment to post a comment!