I don’t recall having any picture books when I was growing up - my grandma told me many stories. My daughters loved when we read together “If you give a mouse a cookie”. I still use it as an analogy when someone wants more and more.
I read a lot of comics when I was a kid. Do they count as picture books? Not all were funny. Dick Tracy, Blackhawk, etc. were action comics. Mickey, Donald, Goofy, Tweety, Mutt and Jeff, etc. were, though.
Reading was never introduced in my childhood home. My mother had educational problems, so we never saw books in our home. It wasn't until I was a pre-teen that I ever saw my father with a book in his hand, and in 1958, he was reading a book about the holocaust, complete with photographs, that I picked up one day. It was then that I realized that I could learn a lot about the world that was never explained to me as a child.
My first picture book was the "Dick and Jane" books I saw in first grade in a Catholic school. For some reason, be it familial indifference or just my immaturity at six years old, I didn't pick up on reading in First grade, and was aty danger of being held back unless I joined the Library's Summer Reading Club, for which I was required to read ten books, and then to give a vocal report to an attending librarian.
Picture books never entered into the lists of books to read, so by my third year, I was reading all of the books in the children's section of my local library. By fifth grade, I was reading Jules Verne and Mark Twain.
Never were "picture books" a part of my upbringing and education. Yes, many children's books were enhanced with attendant pictures, but it was the WORDS that I concentrated on. I learned to read because I was given the tools to do so, and I had a desire to learn about the world around me.
Sometime in my pre-teen years, I lost the desire to read, and it wasn't until I graduated from High School that I regained my desire to read. Part of that was that my girl friend was an AP student, and was reading stuff that I had never heard of, such as e. e. cummings.
After High School, I began reading everything I could find in an old used bookstore. I found a copy of Les Misérables, printed in the 1800s, and devoured it in a two-week span. 1000 pages! This began my journey into reading, and picture books played no part in it.
when my youngest was going through a tough time in his life, he came back home and, like you devoured all the classics and particularly all of Steinbeck. It restored him. Now he was telling me he just read Dante's Inferno - for fun
There was a bookstore not far from my workplace in Cleveland that I loved browsing through. It had a basement where they stored all of their used and vintage books, and what a joy THAT was to wander through the musty-smelling volumes. I found a copy of Les Misérables with a publication date in the late 1800s, so I bought it. The pages were yellowed, and some were damaged on the edges, probably due to readers' whetting their fingers as they turned the pages. The binding was still solid, but the glue had started to deteriorate. 1000+ pages of escapism! I had not previously heard of this title. I bought it out of pure love of the physical properties, the smell, the feel, the taste (Yes, I am one of those!) I was only 18 years old at the time.
the fourteen bears in summer and winter by evelyn f. scott. i still have mine from childhood though it's falling apart, now. the book has mostly been out of print for decades but every so often it gets reissued due to popular demand and then goes out of print again and you have to buy a used copy ($$$) if you can find it on ebay or where ever. i was fortunately able to get two more copies so each of my children could have their own copy since they fell in love with my my book when young. they still have a deep fondness for it, even though they are now a teen and older teen! the book follows the sweet story of a bear family in the forest and their adventures in the summer and then many of the same haunts in the wintertime. the art is amazing and it's like a richard scarry book in that there is so much visually to take in, you always see something different you missed before. as a child (and still!) i loved seeing all the different "tree" houses each of the bears lived in and how they were decorated differently. this book is my version of a lovey in that i always feel immense comfort and happiness each time i see the illustrations and read the story! if you can find a copy, i highly recommend it, it's worth the price to have in your collection whether you are young or old. :)
My English aunties sent me hardcover comic-book compilations, which I still have in a sterilite container: Wham! and Beano, The Daleks, Dan Dare, Black Bob (a plucky Border Collie), etc. Bloody fantastic, the lot of them.
We lived in England for two years when I was a kid; I have a very battered copy of a Beano annual from probably 1976 that I caught my son reading a couple of times a few years back ...
Speaking of England, I loved watching the cartoon version of "Mr. Bean" with my grandson. He is older now, but we still refer to a Mr. Bean situation every now and then, and laugh out loud.
That's terrific. Physical comedy, slapstick, etc., is the best. Another thing to love about Rowan Atkinson: for years he's bravely spoken out against cancel culture and censorship, and in favor of freedom of speech.
I don’t recall any picture books from my childhood. But I’m sure I had some. I read a lot as a child. Books took me away from my life into something different. I never saw my father read a book but he read the newspaper every day. My mother was the reader and she was why we had books in the house and taught us to love libraries.
Same here. I don’t remember picture books when I was a kid, but my mother is always reading, and I remember routine trips to the library and several non-picture books that I loved as a kid.
Growing up, my dad was a big reader (almost a book a day), and he took me to the library nearly every weekend.
The item I remember most was not a book, but rather a record - Peter and the Wolf by Prokofiev. The music absolutely terrified me. He would ask me if I felt brave enough to listen, and usually I said yes, and we would check it out. But I could not stand the mounting terror as the wolf stalked the unassuming farm animals and would ask him to stop playing it.
I still get a visceral response when I listen to it.
I grew up listening to Peter and the Wolf, but I don’t remember being scared of it; on the contrary, I remember really liking it. But my absolute favorite record as a child was Danny Kaye reading fairytales.
No greater pleasure than cuddling up with your little one and reading her or him a bedtime story. I can still recite some passages that I had read over and over - "The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play, so we sat in the house all that cold, cold wet day...." Or, '"In the great green room, there was a telephone...." My sibs and I were fortunate to have a mother who loved reading. I remember her telling me that, if I had a good book, I would never be bored or lonely. We used to have a roving library on a converted bus, called "the Bookmobile," to which we all looked forward to visiting with our Mom. I think I owned or traded with my pals every one of the Hardy Boys books. Even today I cannot be without a book. Reading Rick Atkinson's second book on our Revolution, a subject of which I thought I had mastery but am learning how much I do not.
That sounds fabulous! My parents thought the cure for boredom was additional chores! I was actually berated by my parents when I would read... they thought it was a waste of time and lazy.....
Both my parents liked books, but my dad was the really voracious reader in our house. His favorite topics though always surrounded war, the Civil War in particular.
I love Rick Atkinson’s writing. His Liberation Trilogy, about WWII in the North African and European theaters, is fantastic. His first volume in the Revolution Trilogy was amazing. Just waiting for the price to drop before I order volume 2.
Dad had a copy of "Up Front," Bill Mauldin's collection of cartoons drawn during World War II. As a toddler I loved looking at poor bedraggled dogfaces Willie and Joe, and eventually learned to read the captions.
Besides that, there were any number of Little Golden books, to be bought for 25 cents at Bohacks after a big Saturday shopping. "Dumbo" and "Bambi" were my favorites.
TV had good cartoons. Don't ask me why I was drawn to "Horton Hatches the Egg." Was it the tree, or that almost whenever my father promised me something, he'd say, "I meant what I said and I said what I meant -- an elephant faithful one-hundred percent."
+1 for Horton, also the reminder of Little Golden Books! I loved one called "Make Way for the Roadway", which I still own, though it is in terrible shape (parts of pages missing, I think I blame that on my younger brothers!)
I have, on my bookshelf in front of me now, "Bill Mauldin's Army"! My Dad had it in his bookshelf and I claimed it when he passed away. Phenomenal stuff. Lots of civilians in it, too - really nifty, as my Dad would say.
We had pretty much every Dr. Seuss book, in our house. I really do think that I became an architect because I loved the places that all of his characters lived in (okay - maybe I became an architect because I was scared of taking organic chemistry in college...).
Fun tidbit - Dr. Seuss grew up on Mulberry St. in Springfield and my mother's father was on the Springfield Parks Commission with Dr. Seuss' father (I think Mr. Geisel was the Superintendent of the Springfield Public Schools). After Mulberry, he moved his family over to a house on Sumner Ave., across the street from Forest Park.
One summer, when he was home from Dartmouth, the younger Geisel was bored and drew a mural of his characters on his bedroom wall. Many years later, a school principal and his family moved in and he and his wife were removing wallpaper from the bedroom wall and uncovered the drawing! I dated the girl who grew up in that bedroom, many years later - she had a great imagination and hilarious sense of humor!
Organic Chemistry (in college) was a roadblock for many. I am laughing at the thought of it. Many girls changed their major from Nursing to another field of study because of that class. It was brutal. I asked a friend's daughter, who recently graduated from nursing school, how she liked that class. She gave me a quizzical look, and said, "Oh... You don't have to take THAT anymore." I am assuming she received an AA degree rather than a Bachelors in Nursing. Perhaps she received her degree online? Who knows nowadays? The standards are not what they used to be. I know that much.
I've kept a few picture books from my childhood -- and a couple, I tracked down on Ebay and restored to my collection.
My mother was an avid reader. Books played a vital role in my childhood. My younger brothers, not so much. Dad didn't read more than industry literature (he was, as I put it in a short story many years ago "a computer man before the computer age."
The eldest in my family, I'm the only true reader. However, we were all read to, and encouraged to read, with weekly visits to the local library. I've actually just reinstated the habit of borrowing books from the library, as opposed to buying them, in part because I'm broke, but also because borrowing imposes a deadline to finish the book.
The first beloved picture book that comes to mind is "The LIttlest Angel." My childhood copy contained the most fantastic illustrations done in blues and whites to affect the heaven to which this little blond boy in a blue unitard goes too soon. To this day, I can't even summarize the story without getting choked up. The boy feels unmoored in heaven, out of place. He's so young and most of the people there are old. Then he makes an appeal to God, if he could just get one thing he left behind on earth, he'll be content. It's a battered wooden box filled with "treasures" -- a chewed-up dog collar, a blue robin's egg, a pressed butterfly --
When I got married at 28, someone gave us a battered wooden box as a wedding gift. Of all the gifts, that's the one I remember. It sat on my (ex) husband's desk. He filled the box with similar objects. His fountain pens. His wobbly badges. A faded photo of himself at 12, half-buried in a pile of hay in a barn in Denmark (after his father abandoned him there.)
Another picture book that I kept is "The Red Balloon," which tells the story with stills from Lamorisse's 1956 film. Red was my favorite color as a child. That story still moves me to this day. I can actually still vividly remember the day I saw it on TV when I was five. I was utterly enchanted by it.
And recently tracked down Arthur Miller's "Jane's Blanket," which I still remember borrowing from our local library, about a girl who can't let go of her security blanket. Then some bird removes it strand by strand to build a nest.
This isn't a picture book, but another childhood favorite I kept was "My Side of the Mountain," and I still have my set of OZ books, with their gorgeous steampunk illustrations.
I use the library constantly. It’s the only return I get on my property taxes. Sure the cops and the fire department are there if I need them but pffft, on a day to day basis I get nuthin from them. The cops don’t stop speeders and loud drivers. The fire department uses their $500,000 vehicle to go grocery shopping during their work day. And I don’t use the parks anymore. Sewer and trash are paid extra and they increase the fee every year. So the library is the only return I get. And don’t start me on the school or county property taxes.
Libraries are amazing. We have such a good system where I live where you can pick a book off the shelf from any branch and have it delivered and held at the branch of your choice. And if none of the libraries have a book, you can request it to be found, and they’ll have it delivered from libraries all over the country.
Geez, I never thought to remember those, a favorite part of my early childhood. Yes, I was at them all the time, "Bambi," "Br'er Rabbit," "Little Black Sambo," "Hansel and Gretel," even the "Three Little Pigs." It seems I had a lot of picture books. Thanks for the reminder.
In my very young days, there was a claymation version of "Hansel and Gretel" on TV, with music from Humperdinck's opera. It was great and aired a few times. When my parents took me to the Met to see the opera, maybe when I was 14-15 years old, it was like an old friend.
In coming years I saw it several times again, one memorable performance with Fredericka von Stade and Judith Blegen.
After that, the Met updated it, ruined it, and finally dropped it.
It's a musician's opera -- the orchestration's terrific.
I remember that "Hansel and Gretel" version on TV. It was great! I would have never remembered that unless you had brought it up. Now that you mention it...
Yours was what we called "a high class family," compared to mine. I didn't get into opera until into my 40s. I can only imagine how, at your mention, "...the Met updated it, ruined it."
Isn't that where Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis lived, Caroline too? It certainly couldn't have meant Greta Garbo -- maybe Tallulah Bankhead. No, not Tallulah. My favorite story about Tallulah is the time she got a J-walking ticket, and had to appear in court, early in the morning. Coming out of the Waldorf she saw the crowds, and uttered, "My God, all these people going to court?!"
"Isn't that where Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis lived, Caroline too? It certainly couldn't have meant Greta Garbo."
Yes to the first, but Garbo was closer to Sutton Place. The City Opera turned "Hansel and Gretel" into a commentary on inequity. It was foul.
My family were just middle class but with those cultural ambitions so prevalent among first-generation Americans who grew up poor during the Depression. It was a good thing: books, opera highlights and Dvorak, Carmen Dragon's recording of Christmas carols, and cocktails before dinner. We were all of us in those days, aunts and uncles too, WASPs in Greeks' clothing, and I'm grateful.
During a brief stint in East Cleveland, Ohio, during the season the school ran buses (for $0.25, IIRC) to Severance Hall for Saturday morning Children's concerts by the Cleveland Symphony. (May explain why in early college I was discovering Beethoven whilst my peers were Beatling.)
I was being a smart ass, about the women. Oh yes, Sutton Place, a great place to walk around and to sit and look at the river. I lived for a month at the Y, on 56th and Third, thereabouts. Below at Casey J, I also lived in East Cleveland, for a month, on Taylor, across from the Severance estate, and hung out with the gang around the Cleveland Playhouse, the Miami Deli. What a time I was having, I really got around before 1963
I have no memory of childhood books. Despite my mom being an avid reader. She always had a novel. I must have read all the classic fairy tales as I know them all. My first books I remember were Nancy Drew.
I was a voracious reader by the time I was in first grade, but like Barry, I don't remember any of the picture books. I do remember many picture books that I read to my two children, now adults--one with his own two children. No one favorite, but Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are," Dr. Seuss of course, anything by Shel Silverstein, Brown's "Goodbye Moon," and Carle's "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."
As a niche item for anyone who has a small child who is not very verbally expressive, check out the delightful "The Boy Who Said 'Wow"," based on a real story. A granddad took his small grandson, who barely talked at all, to a performance by the Handel and Haydn Society at Boston Symphony Hall of Mozart's "Funeral Music" and other works. At the end of the "Funeral Music," at that liminal moment when the orchestra has gone silent and the conductor is lowering his baton--but before the applause erupts--the grandson cried out loudly, "Wow!"
The story is wonderful for anyone but those with quiet children--and the children themselves--will likely love the book.
“Good NIGHT, Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown….and, arrrgh…I was gonna post a pic but can’t find my copy! For Sooth! That means I haven’t been giving my grands the exposure to it they deserve!
My teenaged sister took me to a Saturday matinee of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ when I was two. I wouldn’t leave. After three showings, she threatened my life. For the next year, I WAS Sleeping Beauty.
Maybe three months later, my poor, overworked mother missed a page on her five-hundredth oral reading of the ‘Little Golden Book’ of same. I pointed out her mistake. I don’t know how I can remember this, but I can distinctly hear her saying, “You don’t need me to read this to you. You can do it yourself.” And she meant it. I learned to read, just like that.
So, I guess my favorite picture book was Disney’s Little Golden Book of ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ I was well beyond ‘Dick and Jane’ by the time I made it to kindergarten.
I encountered Dick and Jane in first grade, not because we were using the books to learn to read, but because my elderly teacher, Mrs. Swanner, had the whole set on her classroom shelves. On rainy days, I would stay in at recess and read them.
I don’t recall having any picture books when I was growing up - my grandma told me many stories. My daughters loved when we read together “If you give a mouse a cookie”. I still use it as an analogy when someone wants more and more.
Oh, yes. "He's going to want a glass of milk. And if you give him the milk...." You aren't the only one to use that analogy. Thanks for the memory.
Sounds a bit like how things work in DC
Haha! (followed by a wince..)
Oh gosh! I forgot about those books. My daughter too loved them, and quite frankly I thought they were pretty fun too.
We have some of the mouse books we read with our kids (6 and 9). It’s also now an animated show that they like to watch. Some concepts endure.
I read a lot of comics when I was a kid. Do they count as picture books? Not all were funny. Dick Tracy, Blackhawk, etc. were action comics. Mickey, Donald, Goofy, Tweety, Mutt and Jeff, etc. were, though.
And yeah, I still do.
Reading was never introduced in my childhood home. My mother had educational problems, so we never saw books in our home. It wasn't until I was a pre-teen that I ever saw my father with a book in his hand, and in 1958, he was reading a book about the holocaust, complete with photographs, that I picked up one day. It was then that I realized that I could learn a lot about the world that was never explained to me as a child.
My first picture book was the "Dick and Jane" books I saw in first grade in a Catholic school. For some reason, be it familial indifference or just my immaturity at six years old, I didn't pick up on reading in First grade, and was aty danger of being held back unless I joined the Library's Summer Reading Club, for which I was required to read ten books, and then to give a vocal report to an attending librarian.
Picture books never entered into the lists of books to read, so by my third year, I was reading all of the books in the children's section of my local library. By fifth grade, I was reading Jules Verne and Mark Twain.
Never were "picture books" a part of my upbringing and education. Yes, many children's books were enhanced with attendant pictures, but it was the WORDS that I concentrated on. I learned to read because I was given the tools to do so, and I had a desire to learn about the world around me.
Sometime in my pre-teen years, I lost the desire to read, and it wasn't until I graduated from High School that I regained my desire to read. Part of that was that my girl friend was an AP student, and was reading stuff that I had never heard of, such as e. e. cummings.
After High School, I began reading everything I could find in an old used bookstore. I found a copy of Les Misérables, printed in the 1800s, and devoured it in a two-week span. 1000 pages! This began my journey into reading, and picture books played no part in it.
when my youngest was going through a tough time in his life, he came back home and, like you devoured all the classics and particularly all of Steinbeck. It restored him. Now he was telling me he just read Dante's Inferno - for fun
"Hey - what the Hell?" :-D
I hope that it wasn't the graphic novel version...
What a fascinating story about your reading journey!
There was a bookstore not far from my workplace in Cleveland that I loved browsing through. It had a basement where they stored all of their used and vintage books, and what a joy THAT was to wander through the musty-smelling volumes. I found a copy of Les Misérables with a publication date in the late 1800s, so I bought it. The pages were yellowed, and some were damaged on the edges, probably due to readers' whetting their fingers as they turned the pages. The binding was still solid, but the glue had started to deteriorate. 1000+ pages of escapism! I had not previously heard of this title. I bought it out of pure love of the physical properties, the smell, the feel, the taste (Yes, I am one of those!) I was only 18 years old at the time.
the fourteen bears in summer and winter by evelyn f. scott. i still have mine from childhood though it's falling apart, now. the book has mostly been out of print for decades but every so often it gets reissued due to popular demand and then goes out of print again and you have to buy a used copy ($$$) if you can find it on ebay or where ever. i was fortunately able to get two more copies so each of my children could have their own copy since they fell in love with my my book when young. they still have a deep fondness for it, even though they are now a teen and older teen! the book follows the sweet story of a bear family in the forest and their adventures in the summer and then many of the same haunts in the wintertime. the art is amazing and it's like a richard scarry book in that there is so much visually to take in, you always see something different you missed before. as a child (and still!) i loved seeing all the different "tree" houses each of the bears lived in and how they were decorated differently. this book is my version of a lovey in that i always feel immense comfort and happiness each time i see the illustrations and read the story! if you can find a copy, i highly recommend it, it's worth the price to have in your collection whether you are young or old. :)
Only $160 on Amazon. 😳
My English aunties sent me hardcover comic-book compilations, which I still have in a sterilite container: Wham! and Beano, The Daleks, Dan Dare, Black Bob (a plucky Border Collie), etc. Bloody fantastic, the lot of them.
We lived in England for two years when I was a kid; I have a very battered copy of a Beano annual from probably 1976 that I caught my son reading a couple of times a few years back ...
Lots of references to 'bangers and mash' in the Beano comics.
Speaking of England, I loved watching the cartoon version of "Mr. Bean" with my grandson. He is older now, but we still refer to a Mr. Bean situation every now and then, and laugh out loud.
That's terrific. Physical comedy, slapstick, etc., is the best. Another thing to love about Rowan Atkinson: for years he's bravely spoken out against cancel culture and censorship, and in favor of freedom of speech.
Good to know!
I don’t recall any picture books from my childhood. But I’m sure I had some. I read a lot as a child. Books took me away from my life into something different. I never saw my father read a book but he read the newspaper every day. My mother was the reader and she was why we had books in the house and taught us to love libraries.
Same here. I don’t remember picture books when I was a kid, but my mother is always reading, and I remember routine trips to the library and several non-picture books that I loved as a kid.
Growing up, my dad was a big reader (almost a book a day), and he took me to the library nearly every weekend.
The item I remember most was not a book, but rather a record - Peter and the Wolf by Prokofiev. The music absolutely terrified me. He would ask me if I felt brave enough to listen, and usually I said yes, and we would check it out. But I could not stand the mounting terror as the wolf stalked the unassuming farm animals and would ask him to stop playing it.
I still get a visceral response when I listen to it.
I grew up listening to Peter and the Wolf, but I don’t remember being scared of it; on the contrary, I remember really liking it. But my absolute favorite record as a child was Danny Kaye reading fairytales.
I can hear the violins in my mind.
I remember in elementary school wanting to read every book in the library but I don’t remember any picture books
My favorite book from I don’t know when was the scarlet pimpernel by the Baroness Orczy
No greater pleasure than cuddling up with your little one and reading her or him a bedtime story. I can still recite some passages that I had read over and over - "The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play, so we sat in the house all that cold, cold wet day...." Or, '"In the great green room, there was a telephone...." My sibs and I were fortunate to have a mother who loved reading. I remember her telling me that, if I had a good book, I would never be bored or lonely. We used to have a roving library on a converted bus, called "the Bookmobile," to which we all looked forward to visiting with our Mom. I think I owned or traded with my pals every one of the Hardy Boys books. Even today I cannot be without a book. Reading Rick Atkinson's second book on our Revolution, a subject of which I thought I had mastery but am learning how much I do not.
That sounds fabulous! My parents thought the cure for boredom was additional chores! I was actually berated by my parents when I would read... they thought it was a waste of time and lazy.....
Oh, that’s sad.
Both my parents liked books, but my dad was the really voracious reader in our house. His favorite topics though always surrounded war, the Civil War in particular.
That is truly sad.
I love Rick Atkinson’s writing. His Liberation Trilogy, about WWII in the North African and European theaters, is fantastic. His first volume in the Revolution Trilogy was amazing. Just waiting for the price to drop before I order volume 2.
Dad had a copy of "Up Front," Bill Mauldin's collection of cartoons drawn during World War II. As a toddler I loved looking at poor bedraggled dogfaces Willie and Joe, and eventually learned to read the captions.
Besides that, there were any number of Little Golden books, to be bought for 25 cents at Bohacks after a big Saturday shopping. "Dumbo" and "Bambi" were my favorites.
TV had good cartoons. Don't ask me why I was drawn to "Horton Hatches the Egg." Was it the tree, or that almost whenever my father promised me something, he'd say, "I meant what I said and I said what I meant -- an elephant faithful one-hundred percent."
Nice childhood. Nice memories.
+1 for Horton, also the reminder of Little Golden Books! I loved one called "Make Way for the Roadway", which I still own, though it is in terrible shape (parts of pages missing, I think I blame that on my younger brothers!)
Or Make Way for Ducklings......
That sounds vaguely familiar. I may have fallen into a generational gap between those with whom it was originally popular, and their children?
I have, on my bookshelf in front of me now, "Bill Mauldin's Army"! My Dad had it in his bookshelf and I claimed it when he passed away. Phenomenal stuff. Lots of civilians in it, too - really nifty, as my Dad would say.
We had pretty much every Dr. Seuss book, in our house. I really do think that I became an architect because I loved the places that all of his characters lived in (okay - maybe I became an architect because I was scared of taking organic chemistry in college...).
Fun tidbit - Dr. Seuss grew up on Mulberry St. in Springfield and my mother's father was on the Springfield Parks Commission with Dr. Seuss' father (I think Mr. Geisel was the Superintendent of the Springfield Public Schools). After Mulberry, he moved his family over to a house on Sumner Ave., across the street from Forest Park.
One summer, when he was home from Dartmouth, the younger Geisel was bored and drew a mural of his characters on his bedroom wall. Many years later, a school principal and his family moved in and he and his wife were removing wallpaper from the bedroom wall and uncovered the drawing! I dated the girl who grew up in that bedroom, many years later - she had a great imagination and hilarious sense of humor!
Organic Chemistry (in college) was a roadblock for many. I am laughing at the thought of it. Many girls changed their major from Nursing to another field of study because of that class. It was brutal. I asked a friend's daughter, who recently graduated from nursing school, how she liked that class. She gave me a quizzical look, and said, "Oh... You don't have to take THAT anymore." I am assuming she received an AA degree rather than a Bachelors in Nursing. Perhaps she received her degree online? Who knows nowadays? The standards are not what they used to be. I know that much.
I enjoyed the Dr. Seuss fun tidbit.
A joke I read recently:
A dog walks into an employment agency and says "I really need a job."
The receptionist exclaims "That's amazing. You're a talking dog. Why, you could get a job very quickly at a circus!"
The dog replies "A circus, why would they need an architect?"
Hahahaha!!!
What a find behind the wallpaper!
Elizabth Nickson has a really good substack today about Iran and the influence of Muslims across the globe. Very informative.
https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/world-to-muslims-conform-or-get-off?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=30495&post_id=166409680&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=15nx69&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Thanks JBell. I'm going to save that for later. Right now, I am in too good of a mood from Celia's prompt and JiP comments.
Thank you.
Agree JBell. Good essay. She is always tough to read—her anger leaps off the page. But I always at least skim. Today: anger but lots of hope.
I've kept a few picture books from my childhood -- and a couple, I tracked down on Ebay and restored to my collection.
My mother was an avid reader. Books played a vital role in my childhood. My younger brothers, not so much. Dad didn't read more than industry literature (he was, as I put it in a short story many years ago "a computer man before the computer age."
The eldest in my family, I'm the only true reader. However, we were all read to, and encouraged to read, with weekly visits to the local library. I've actually just reinstated the habit of borrowing books from the library, as opposed to buying them, in part because I'm broke, but also because borrowing imposes a deadline to finish the book.
The first beloved picture book that comes to mind is "The LIttlest Angel." My childhood copy contained the most fantastic illustrations done in blues and whites to affect the heaven to which this little blond boy in a blue unitard goes too soon. To this day, I can't even summarize the story without getting choked up. The boy feels unmoored in heaven, out of place. He's so young and most of the people there are old. Then he makes an appeal to God, if he could just get one thing he left behind on earth, he'll be content. It's a battered wooden box filled with "treasures" -- a chewed-up dog collar, a blue robin's egg, a pressed butterfly --
When I got married at 28, someone gave us a battered wooden box as a wedding gift. Of all the gifts, that's the one I remember. It sat on my (ex) husband's desk. He filled the box with similar objects. His fountain pens. His wobbly badges. A faded photo of himself at 12, half-buried in a pile of hay in a barn in Denmark (after his father abandoned him there.)
Another picture book that I kept is "The Red Balloon," which tells the story with stills from Lamorisse's 1956 film. Red was my favorite color as a child. That story still moves me to this day. I can actually still vividly remember the day I saw it on TV when I was five. I was utterly enchanted by it.
I also kept a book called "Old Black Witch," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVKf6SN69oI
And recently tracked down Arthur Miller's "Jane's Blanket," which I still remember borrowing from our local library, about a girl who can't let go of her security blanket. Then some bird removes it strand by strand to build a nest.
This isn't a picture book, but another childhood favorite I kept was "My Side of the Mountain," and I still have my set of OZ books, with their gorgeous steampunk illustrations.
I use the library constantly. It’s the only return I get on my property taxes. Sure the cops and the fire department are there if I need them but pffft, on a day to day basis I get nuthin from them. The cops don’t stop speeders and loud drivers. The fire department uses their $500,000 vehicle to go grocery shopping during their work day. And I don’t use the parks anymore. Sewer and trash are paid extra and they increase the fee every year. So the library is the only return I get. And don’t start me on the school or county property taxes.
Libraries are amazing. We have such a good system where I live where you can pick a book off the shelf from any branch and have it delivered and held at the branch of your choice. And if none of the libraries have a book, you can request it to be found, and they’ll have it delivered from libraries all over the country.
Geez, I never thought to remember those, a favorite part of my early childhood. Yes, I was at them all the time, "Bambi," "Br'er Rabbit," "Little Black Sambo," "Hansel and Gretel," even the "Three Little Pigs." It seems I had a lot of picture books. Thanks for the reminder.
In my very young days, there was a claymation version of "Hansel and Gretel" on TV, with music from Humperdinck's opera. It was great and aired a few times. When my parents took me to the Met to see the opera, maybe when I was 14-15 years old, it was like an old friend.
In coming years I saw it several times again, one memorable performance with Fredericka von Stade and Judith Blegen.
After that, the Met updated it, ruined it, and finally dropped it.
It's a musician's opera -- the orchestration's terrific.
I remember that "Hansel and Gretel" version on TV. It was great! I would have never remembered that unless you had brought it up. Now that you mention it...
It's on DVD. A real trip back watching it. And still lovely.
You're killing me with the reference to Bohack's.
Yes. The orange stamps pasted into little books.
Yes! ... and the green stamps were for the A&P.
Yours was what we called "a high class family," compared to mine. I didn't get into opera until into my 40s. I can only imagine how, at your mention, "...the Met updated it, ruined it."
Another version, at the City Opera, now kaput, had the witch as a predatory widow living on Fifth Avenue. (If I remember correctly.)
Isn't that where Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis lived, Caroline too? It certainly couldn't have meant Greta Garbo -- maybe Tallulah Bankhead. No, not Tallulah. My favorite story about Tallulah is the time she got a J-walking ticket, and had to appear in court, early in the morning. Coming out of the Waldorf she saw the crowds, and uttered, "My God, all these people going to court?!"
"Isn't that where Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis lived, Caroline too? It certainly couldn't have meant Greta Garbo."
Yes to the first, but Garbo was closer to Sutton Place. The City Opera turned "Hansel and Gretel" into a commentary on inequity. It was foul.
My family were just middle class but with those cultural ambitions so prevalent among first-generation Americans who grew up poor during the Depression. It was a good thing: books, opera highlights and Dvorak, Carmen Dragon's recording of Christmas carols, and cocktails before dinner. We were all of us in those days, aunts and uncles too, WASPs in Greeks' clothing, and I'm grateful.
During a brief stint in East Cleveland, Ohio, during the season the school ran buses (for $0.25, IIRC) to Severance Hall for Saturday morning Children's concerts by the Cleveland Symphony. (May explain why in early college I was discovering Beethoven whilst my peers were Beatling.)
I was being a smart ass, about the women. Oh yes, Sutton Place, a great place to walk around and to sit and look at the river. I lived for a month at the Y, on 56th and Third, thereabouts. Below at Casey J, I also lived in East Cleveland, for a month, on Taylor, across from the Severance estate, and hung out with the gang around the Cleveland Playhouse, the Miami Deli. What a time I was having, I really got around before 1963
I have no memory of childhood books. Despite my mom being an avid reader. She always had a novel. I must have read all the classic fairy tales as I know them all. My first books I remember were Nancy Drew.
I read all of those and The Hardy Boys, as fast I could get them from the school library!
Claymation = "Gumby"!
Eddie Murphy hilariously ruined Gumby for me...
I loved my Gumby doll!
I was a voracious reader by the time I was in first grade, but like Barry, I don't remember any of the picture books. I do remember many picture books that I read to my two children, now adults--one with his own two children. No one favorite, but Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are," Dr. Seuss of course, anything by Shel Silverstein, Brown's "Goodbye Moon," and Carle's "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."
As a niche item for anyone who has a small child who is not very verbally expressive, check out the delightful "The Boy Who Said 'Wow"," based on a real story. A granddad took his small grandson, who barely talked at all, to a performance by the Handel and Haydn Society at Boston Symphony Hall of Mozart's "Funeral Music" and other works. At the end of the "Funeral Music," at that liminal moment when the orchestra has gone silent and the conductor is lowering his baton--but before the applause erupts--the grandson cried out loudly, "Wow!"
The story is wonderful for anyone but those with quiet children--and the children themselves--will likely love the book.
Thank you for the rec! Sounds lovely.
“Good NIGHT, Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown….and, arrrgh…I was gonna post a pic but can’t find my copy! For Sooth! That means I haven’t been giving my grands the exposure to it they deserve!
Four thumbs up (yeah! at least four!) on The Boy Who Said Wow. On several levels. It's personal.
My favorites are "You Are Racist", "I Shouldn't Have a Penis" and "Isn't Everbody Gay?"
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Funny. Not. Sorry.
LOL
Jen- thanks for cracking me up this morning!
Coming from you, Jen…I laughed out loud!🤣
I couldn't help myself.
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Too high brow for me. LOL.
My teenaged sister took me to a Saturday matinee of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ when I was two. I wouldn’t leave. After three showings, she threatened my life. For the next year, I WAS Sleeping Beauty.
Maybe three months later, my poor, overworked mother missed a page on her five-hundredth oral reading of the ‘Little Golden Book’ of same. I pointed out her mistake. I don’t know how I can remember this, but I can distinctly hear her saying, “You don’t need me to read this to you. You can do it yourself.” And she meant it. I learned to read, just like that.
So, I guess my favorite picture book was Disney’s Little Golden Book of ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ I was well beyond ‘Dick and Jane’ by the time I made it to kindergarten.
I encountered Dick and Jane in first grade, not because we were using the books to learn to read, but because my elderly teacher, Mrs. Swanner, had the whole set on her classroom shelves. On rainy days, I would stay in at recess and read them.