Posted on by TracyC

The Case of the Wandering Weathervanes

McGurk Mysteries

WanderingWeathervanes

The Case of the Wandering Weathervanes by E.W. Hildick, 1988.

WanderingWeathervanesReporter

Brains Bellingham brings a new case to the other members of the McGurk Organization: a weathervane that he was using for his latest science experiment has been stolen!  Although Brains says that the weathervane was extremely valuable because it was a critical part of his experiment, the others don’t think much of it.  However, Brains’ weathervane turns out to be just one of many weathervanes that have disappeared all over town.

At first, everyone is sure that it’s just a prank, probably by some local kids, and it gets reported as an odd tidbit on the local news.  However, the more weather vanes that disappear and the more time that goes by without them being returned, the more disgruntled the local citizens become.  People (like Brains) start claiming that their weathervanes were worth more than they probably were, although there were a couple of legitimate collectors’ items among the stolen weathervanes.  The police fail to see the humor behind the incident and start talking about serious consequences for the one responsible for the weathervanes’ disappearances.  Unfortunately, as often happens in these cases, people begin looking at Wanda’s brother, Ed, as the culprit.

WanderingWeathervanesEd

Ed has a long-standing reputation as a prankster, and so is the first person most people suspect when strange things start happening.  Wanda is sure that he isn’t guilty this time, though.  Her brother wouldn’t be above taking something for a short period of time just as a joke, but he wouldn’t just steal things from people and keep them.  When some of the weathervanes start reappearing, at the wrong houses, it looks like it might have been a prank after all, but Ed still maintains that that he’s innocent.

The members of the McGurk Organization believe that the real culprit might be a friend of Ed’s who admires some of his pranks and might be trying to imitate him with a wild scheme of his own.  However, if Ed’s friend is really guilty, where are the missing weathervanes and why haven’t they been returned?  A professional private investigator has been pressing the kids for what they know about the thefts, and Ed suddenly disappears!  There may be much more to the mysterious disappearing weathervanes than meets the eye.  What started as an odd prank may have uncovered something more serious!

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

WanderingWeathervanesSecret
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The Case of the Muttering Mummy

MutteringMummy

The Case of the Muttering Mummy by E.W. Hildick, 1986.

Joey Rockaway needs to buy a special present for his mother’s birthday. Having broken his mother’s china cat ornament recently, he has decided that he will buy one of the replicas of a golden cat statue from Egypt at the Egyptian exhibit at the local museum. The other members of the McGurk Organization come to the museum with him, and McGurk uses this as an opportunity to give them a kind of memory test about objects in the exhibit.

Actually, everything in the exhibit is a replica, not just the items sold in the museum gift shop. Justin Matravers, a wealthy man who has recently died, collected Egyptian artifacts, but part of his will specified that the collection should never be put on public display. However, his widow, who wanted to show off the collection, had replicas made of everything in the collection so that she could have those put on display.

MutteringMummyCase

McGurk sneers about how everything in the exhibit is fake, although he is actually surprisingly superstitious. The museum always did have a real mummy case on display. They always said that the mummy case was empty, but some of the more superstitious kids, like McGurk, believe that there is a mummy inside the case and that there is a curse on it. McGurk has nicknamed the mummy Melvin. The other kids aren’t afraid of Melvin or Egyptian curses, and while they are looking around the Egyptian exhibit, Mari plays a joke by using her ventriloquist skills to make the mummy case “talk.” This trick sets off a bizarre mystery for the McGurk Organization.

A scholar and author, Harrison Keech, is sketching the replicas at the exhibit and witnesses Mari’s trick and Joey picking out the replica cat for his mother. After he asks Joey if he can take a look at the cat, Keech suddenly becomes very upset, saying that the cat statue is cursed! He says that Mari’s joke has angered the spirit of the mummy and awakened the spirit of Bastet. The mummy was a follower of Bastet, the Egyptian cat goddess, and it will now be drawn to the statue if they remove it from the museum. Mari tells Joey that she can tell from Keech’s voice that he’s making up the whole story and that he shouldn’t let that stop him from buying the cat.

MutteringMummyNight

However, strange things start happening after Joey buys the cat. It seems like someone is following him home, a dark, shadowy figure. Joey thinks it might even be the mummy, come back to life! The others are skeptical, and McGurk arranges a kind of test where Joey brings the statue with him to a meeting of the organization. Sure enough, a strange figure lurks outside their meeting, and they hear strange whispers in a foreign language!

The spookiness doesn’t last for long. It turns out that Mari, as well as being a ventriloquist, has some skill with different languages and recognizes what the “mummy” says as being Greek, not Egyptian, and the phrases as being typical things that someone might say in a restaurant. When the kids find a scrap of bandage outside, they are quick to notice that it’s a modern, elasticized bandage, like the kind you can get at any pharmacy.

So, the question becomes who is playing at being a mummy and why? Is it Keech, wanting to make the kids think that the mummy story he told them is real, and if so, what would he have to gain from it? The only other two people who know about the story are Joanne, who works at the museum, and Donny, her fiancé, who is jealous of the attention she’s been paying to Keech when he comes to the exhibit.

MutteringMummyLies

I have some complaints about this book that hadn’t occurred to me when I read it as a kid. At one point, Donny, who is described as being a social worker, comes to visit the kids because he wants to hire the organization to check up on Keech and his relationship with Joanne. Donny is very jealous, and when he explains how Joanne seems to be falling for all of Keech’s crazy mummy stories, he suddenly turns to Wanda and Mari and says, “You women, you’ll believe anything when a smarmy two-bit jackass like that starts shooting his mouth off!” That’s just really inappropriate for an adult to say to kids, and the whole situation is weird on several levels. First of all, Donny is an adult, and if he’s having issues with his love life, especially with the woman he thinks he wants to spend the rest of his life with, the last thing he should do is hire kids (even really smart ones) to handle the issues for him. Second, Wanda and Mari are young girls, not “women,” and what little girls believe is no business of Donny’s. Trying to imply that Wanda and Mari might someday fall for a “jackass” is not only insulting but implies that Donny is thinking about Wanda and Mari in terms that no grown man should be thinking about girls their ages. I find it disturbing that Donny is apparently a social worker, a person in a position of trust who is supposed to help people in difficult situations to manage their lives, and he’s acting like this. Also, toward the end of the book when the bad guy (I won’t say who it is here, although I thought that the answer was pretty obvious even early in the story) is making his escape, he shoves Joanne aside and calls her a “slut.” That’s pretty strong language for a kid’s book of this level. None of this occurred to me when I was a kid, so maybe other kids reading this wouldn’t notice, but I thought that I’d mention it because these things bother me now.

At one point, Brains gives a demonstration of using water displacement to determine the volume of irregularly-shaped objects, explaining how Archimedes discovered the principal (although I’m not sure that Archimedes’ Principal was quite as he explains it), as the kids investigate what makes Joey’s cat statue so special. You might be able to guess what it is. It seemed pretty obvious to me. The one thing that seemed the most puzzling was how it was done. Mari also offers an interesting explanation of the different kinds of lies that people tell and their motives for doing so.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

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The Case of the Vanishing Ventriloquist

VanishingVentriloquist

The Case of the Vanishing Ventriloquist by E.W. Hildick, 1985.

Mari Yoshimura, Wanda’s pen pal from Osaka, Japan has just arrived in the United States, and she’s eager to meet Wanda’s friends. Mari’s father is the head of Yoshimura Electronics, and he is visiting different cities in the United States on business. While her father travels, Mari gets to enjoy an extended visit with Wanda. Wanda has told her all about the McGurk Organization, and Mari is eager to join up with them during her stay in America. Unfortunately, when she first arrives, McGurk isn’t in a very receptive mood.

McGurk tells Mari that she can’t join the organization, which hurts Mari and offends Wanda, because he has organized a series of challenges in order to decide which of the current members to give a promotion. McGurk thinks that Mari’s presence would upset the challenges, and he can’t promote her because she hasn’t actually done anything with the organization yet. However, Wanda negotiates with McGurk. Since Mari is her guest, and she can’t neglect her guest, she arranges for Mari to just follow along on the challenges, working through them herself just for fun. McGurk allows it on the condition that Mari not help Wanda because that would give Wanda an unfair advantage. Wanda and Mari agree to the arrangement, and Mari writes all of her notes for the challenges in Japanese, just to make sure that Wanda doesn’t accidentally see any of her answers.

VanishingVentriloquistMariIntro

Mari turns out to be really good at the challenges that McGurk sets. When he tells the members of the organization to spend a day observing people and notice how many times people do things that would be a temptation to criminals (like leaving packages in a car, tempting someone to break in and get them), Mari ends up with more observations than anyone else. Mari also proves to be good at noticing suspicious behavior when she sees a man that no one else notices, who seems to be hanging around a bus stop for no reason, not showing any interest in getting on any of the buses.

Then, Brains accidentally discovers a real mystery that the McGurk Organization can investigate where Mari plays a special role. While Brains is working on one of his latest inventions, a new kind of portable phone for kids (this is before cell phones became popular), he accidentally gets his signals crossed and ends up overhearing part of someone else’s conversation. It sounds like the two men Brains overhears are going to target someone at the Senior Citizens’ Annual Picnic. However, because Brains didn’t hear the whole conversation, they can’t be sure what these men are going to do. They report the incident to Patrolman Cassidy at the police station, but he doesn’t think too much of it. He says that he’ll look in on the picnic but that what Brains overheard might not really have to do with a crime. He heard too little of the conversation to be sure what the men were actually talking about.

VanishingVentriloquistMariRescue

Fortunately, because Wanda’s mother is part of the committee organizing the picnic, the kids have a good opportunity to investigate the matter themselves. Wanda will be helping her mother to serve food, and Mari is going to be part of the entertainment, putting on her ventriloquist act. Mari says that the other members of the organization can be part of her act, so they can be on hand to keep an eye on things. McGurk is pleased about this and finally offers Mari a position as a trainee of the McGurk Organization.

However, it turns out that everyone has completely misjudged the situation. A very serious crime is being planned, and the McGurk Organization doesn’t realize it until Mari is kidnapped from the picnic! Mari was the target all along, and the suspicious man at the bus stop was actually there to watch her. Can the others get her back before it’s too late?

VanishingVentriloquistMariWelcome

From this book on, Mari becomes a regular character in the series and a full member of the McGurk Organization. Mari’s father decides that he wants to open one of his electronics factories in the United States, so Mari and her family will be living there for awhile to oversee it, giving Mari the chance to stay with the McGurk Organization for an extended period of time.  McGurk starts dreaming that when Mari eventually goes back to Japan, she will open a branch of the McGurk Organization there, but that would be years in the future, if it happens.  McGurk dreams big.

One of the funniest parts of this book is when the kids are supposed to be looking around for examples of suspicious behavior. Before the challenge begins, McGurk admits that what is “suspicious” is difficult to quantify and that most of what they’ll notice will have perfectly reasonable, non-criminal explanations behind it. Joey Rockaway notes that, for most of that particular challenge, the members of the McGurk Organization themselves are the ones who are acting most suspiciously, running around and spying on random people. At one point, Joey almost gets thrown out of a supermarket because the manager noticed the creepy way he kept spying on a woman who kept picking up packages of cookies and then putting them back. It turns out that the manager of the store knows that the woman is on a diet and has had trouble wrestling with temptation. She routinely gets tempted to buy cookies, picks some up, and then puts them back on the shelf when she realizes that she shouldn’t have them. Her behavior may look odd to people who don’t understand what she’s going through or what she’s doing, but perfectly understandable to those who do, like so many things.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

McGurk Gets Good and Mad

McGurkMad

McGurk Gets Good and Mad by E.W. Hildick, 1982.

The members of the McGurk Organization have been planning a kind of open house in order to show the other kids from the neighborhood the kind of mystery-solving work they do. However, someone seems to be doing their best to ruin it.

It starts with the mice that the members of the Organization find in their headquarters, which have already gnawed some of the exhibits for the open house. It quickly becomes obvious that the mice didn’t find their way in by accident when someone posts a sign warning people away from the open house because of the mice. There’s no way anyone could have found out that there were mice, especially not that quickly, unless they had planted them there deliberately. The mysterious sign is signed “Agent 93,” but who is that?

While Brains works on a way to get rid of the mice, the others begin thinking about who could have it in for the McGurk Organization. They consider past cases they’ve solved and villains that they’ve unmasked as well as some of the kids they know generally from school who don’t like them or were offended when they weren’t allowed to join the Organization.

By the time of the open house, they still don’t know who the saboteur is, and when it’s time to unveil the real police handcuffs that Patrolman Cassidy gave them as an award (the highlight of the open house for the McGurk Organization), they are suddenly and inexplicably replaced by a pair of fake mice and another note from “Agent 93.”

Whatever it takes, McGurk is determined to find the guilty person and get those handcuffs back!

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

I Hate English

HateEnglish

I Hate English! by Ellen Levine, 1989.

When Mei Mei’s family moves from Hong Kong to New York, she finds herself forced to go to a school where no one else speaks Chinese.  She is expected to learn English and to read, write, and speak in English, and she hates it!  To her, English is a very strange language, and the writing system is nothing like Chinese.  For a time, Mei Mei refuses to speak in English, even when she understands what is being said around her, because she hates it so much.

HateEnglishArrival

The only part of New York that Mei Mei really likes is Chinatown and the Chinatown Learning Center.  Mei Mei likes it because she is surrounded by people speaking Chinese. There, she can relax and be herself because people there understand her.

HateEnglishLearningCenter

However, Mei Mei’s refusal to speak English isn’t helping her at school or anywhere else.  It’s keeping her from speaking to anyone outside of Chinatown, and it can’t continue.  When an English teacher, Nancy, comes to the Learning Center to help Mei Mei with her English, she resists learning at first.  She feels like she’ll lose her Chinese and part of her identity if she uses English.

HateEnglishNancy

At first, Mei Mei’s worries about speaking English intensify with Nancy’s lessons.  It disturbs her how English has words that would be difficult or impossible to translate into Chinese and English words seem to be coming more easily to her, even when she doesn’t really want to speak the language.  Nancy explains to Mei Mei that English is necessary for her because she will need it to talk to many people in America, and there are many people who also want to talk to Mei Mei and be her friend, including Nancy.  It’s only when Nancy overwhelms her by constantly talking in English and Mei Mei becomes desperate to talk about herself and be understood in English that Mei Mei realizes that speaking a new language doesn’t mean losing her identity.  It’s just another way of expressing herself, and she can go back and forth between the two any time she wants.

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HateEnglishMeiMei

Mei Mei’s feelings of strangeness in her new home and the difficulties of learning a new language are relatable.  The hardest part of the experience for Mei Mei is feeling like she might be giving up a part of her past, her culture, and herself by switching from Chinese to English.  But, refusing to speak English puts Mei Mei in the position of being someone who can only listen, never talk, limiting her ability to be understood and to make friends.  In the end, she comes to realize that speaking a new language is not a matter of giving up anything, just adding to what she knows and making herself understood in a new way.  It’s the beginning of expanding her horizons and building relationships with new people.

HateEnglishFriends

My favorite part as a kid was the part where Mei Mei and her friends went to the beach and cooked shellfish that they found.  It was interesting to me because I never lived near a beach when I was young.  The lifeguard at the beach tells Mei Mei and her friends that they can’t eat the shellfish, and they realize that he thinks that because he doesn’t know how to cook them.  I never did either and still don’t, but I liked hearing about it.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island

NameChangedEllisIsland

If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island by Ellen Levine, 1993.

Like other books in this series, this book explains about a part of American history using a series of questions and answers.  Each section of the book starts with a different question about what it was like to come to America as an immigrant in the past and what happened when they reached Ellis Island, one of the main ports of entry into the United States around the turn of the 20th century, just off the coast of New York City, such as, “Would everyone in your family come together?”, “What did people bring with them?”, and “What did the legal inspectors do?”  Then, the book answers each of the questions.

The questions and answers start by describing what the journey to America was like from the late 1800s through the early 1900s.  Typically, families would come to the United States in stages: the father of a family (or perhaps one of the older children) would make the trip first, find a job in the United States and start saving money to prepare for rest of the family to come.  Depending on the family’s individual circumstances, it might be years before all the members completed the immigration process and reunited in America.

People traveled by ship in those days, and an often-forgotten part of their journey was even reaching the port the ship to America would be leaving from.  Depending on the starting point of the journey and the travel arrangements each family was able to make, getting to the port might involve crossing borders between other countries, adding another layer of legal difficulties to the journey.

There was also the knowledge that they might be turned away once they arrived at Ellis Island.  One of the chief concerns at the time was illness.  The inspectors at Ellis Island checked immigrants for signs of infectious diseases, and the ship companies knew that if their passengers were turned away because of the fear of disease, they would be required to pay for the return voyage themselves.  To help ensure that their passengers would not arrive with a disease, they would conduct their own health checks before the ship ever left port, looking for signs of illness, giving the passengers vaccines, and disinfecting things.  They were particularly afraid of passengers with lice because lice can spread typhus, which is deadly.  They would often cut the passengers’ hair or comb it very carefully.

The treatment passengers on ships received depended largely on their class of passage.  First and second-class passengers received the best rooms and the best food, and when they arrived in New York (assuming that was their destination), they didn’t even have to go to Ellis Island at all; the immigration inspectors would inspect first and second-class passengers on board the ship.  Only steerage passengers (“third class”, the cheapest possible method of travel, used by the poorest people, the largest group) would have to get off the ship for processing at Ellis Island.

EllisIslandComplex

The processing center at Ellis Island wasn’t just a building; it was an entire complex.  The Great Hall alone was large enough to contain hundreds of people at a time, and when it was full of immigrants there were so many languages being spoken at once (sometimes as many as 30 different languages) that some people described it as sounding like the Tower of Babel.  There were also dormitories that could house more than a thousand people, a hospital for the sick, a post office, banks where people could change their cash for American money, a restaurant to feed everyone (with two kitchens, one kosher and one regular), a railroad ticket office where immigrants who would be moving on from New York could make their travel arrangements, and much more.  Some people called Ellis Island the “Island of Tears” because the arrival there after a long journey was an emotional experience and many immigrants were worried that they might be sent back if they couldn’t answer the inspectors’ questions to their satisfaction.  At the end of the Great Hall, there was a large staircase that came to be known as the Staircase of Separation.  Everyone had to go down this staircase after their examination by the inspectors.  At the bottom, they would go their separate ways, depending on their travel plans or whether they had passed inspection.  People who turned to the right were heading to the railroad ticket office.  People turning to the left were heading to the Manhattan ferry.  People who went straight were heading to the detention rooms because they hadn’t passed the inspection.

EllisIslandStaircase

As I mentioned before, the inspectors were very concerned about people who showed signs of serious diseases.  One of the first things that would happen during inspection was a brief examination by the Ellis Island doctors.  Because of the massive amount of people who had to be processed, this examination lasted only a few minutes, during which the doctor would quickly check for very specific symptoms and signs of possible illness.  If they didn’t see anything obviously wrong, such as red eyes (possible sign of eye infection, although for some, it was just because they’d been crying), difficulty in breathing, or lice, they would let the people pass.  If the doctors thought that they saw something that might be sign of illness, they would write a letter in chalk on the person’s clothes and send them on to be examined more thoroughly by another doctor.  Getting one of these letters didn’t always mean rejection.  If the other doctor decided that the first doctor was mistaken or that the person’s symptoms weren’t serious, they would still be allowed into the country.  Sometimes, if a person was ill but had a curable disease, they would be kept in the hospital on Ellis Island until they were better.  If the doctors weren’t quite sure if a person was ill or not, they might keep the person in the dormitories for a few days and then check them again after they had a chance to rest.  The people who were sent back on the ship were ones who had diseases that were incurable or seriously contagious.  (It sounds heartless, but they were trying to head off deadly epidemics.  During the 1800s, large cities like New York sometimes suffered serious epidemics of deadly diseases because of the sudden influx of new people who were living in overly-crowded conditions with relatively poor sanitation.  By preventing people with signs of serious diseases from joining the rest of the population, they were hoping to head off new epidemics and save lives.)

One of the more controversial parts of the examination was when they tested people for possible mental problems.  They wanted to make sure that they were mentally fit enough to find work, but the problem was that the tests designed by people who didn’t take cultural differences into account when they designed them.  The parts where they asked people to do simple arithmetic problems or to demonstrate that they could read, count backwards, or match up sets of similar drawings were pretty straight-forward.  However, sometimes they were shown a picture and asked to describe what was happening in the picture, and the immigrants gave the inspectors some surprising interpretations because it turns out that some experiences aren’t quite as universal as some people think.  For example, one picture was of some children digging a hole with a dead rabbit lying nearby.  It was supposed to depict children burying a dead pet.  But, some people view rabbits more as food than pets, and some immigrants said that the children were doing their chores because why shouldn’t the children work in the garden (the digging) after hunting a rabbit for dinner?  Fiorello La Guardia, himself from an immigrant family, an interpreter on Ellis Island and later, mayor of New York, particularly despised tests like these because the people who designed them and administered them were trying to test the minds of others without any real idea about what their lives had been like or how their minds actually worked.

EllisIslandGreatHall

The inspectors’ examinations in general weren’t always reliable because they were often hurried (dealing with so many people in a limited amount of time) and because the interpreters weren’t always accurate, which brings us to the question of why people’s names were sometimes changed at Ellis Island.  Sometimes, it was intentional.  Some immigrants thought that they would be more likely to be accepted by the inspectors if they had short, easy-to-pronounce names, so they would purposely give them shorter versions of their names.  There was some basis for this belief because, if an inspector didn’t understand a long, unfamiliar name, they wouldn’t have much time to figure it out and so would either take their best guess at the what the name should be, shorten it when they wrote it down, or give up altogether and write a much shorter name instead.  For example, when they processed Jewish people from Russia, the inspectors often ran into difficulties in understanding their last names and would sometimes just write down “Cohen” or “Levine”, no matter what the original name really was.  Sometimes, name changes were just an honest mistake because the inspector didn’t know how a name was really spelled (I can speak from personal experience because my family’s last name wasn’t always spelled like it is now, and when they found out that it had been changed, it was just too much trouble to fix it) or because they had misinterpreted something that the immigrant said.  One of my favorite examples of this was a young man who tried to explain to the inspector that he was an orphan (“yosem” in Yiddish). The inspector dutifully wrote his last name as Josem.

EllisIslandPlayground

The pictures in the book are paintings based on original photographs of immigrants and Ellis Island.  (See Immigrant Kids to compare some of the pictures.)

The book also contains some further information about the lives of immigrants once they arrived in America (Immigrant Kids goes into a lot more detail), the attitudes of Americans toward immigrants at the time (varied but with strong strains of anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, and general anti-immigrant attitudes during the 1800s), and the contributions of immigrants to American society.  I actually bought this book as a souvenir on a visit to Ellis Island years ago.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Immigrant Kids

ImmigrantKids

Immigrant Kids by Russell Freedman, 1980.

ImmigrantKidsEllisIsland

One of the best parts about this book is the pictures.  The preface of the book specifically talks about photography at the turn of the 20th century, how cameras were still fairly new technology but growing in popularity.  Cameras that were small enough to be held in a person’s hands were an 1880s innovation, and the book mentions that small cameras like that were known as “detective cameras” because they were small enough that they could be used to take pictures without the subjects noticing.  Over time, it became easier for amateurs to learn to use cameras, and it became more common for people to take pictures of their ordinary, everyday lives.  Pictures like these open up a window on the past.  The pictures in this book are of children whose families had only recently arrived in America from countries around the world.  The photographer for many of these pictures was Jacob A. Riis, a journalist in New York City who wanted to document the living conditions of poor immigrants.  He published a book called How the Other Half Lives in 1890, in which you can see more of his work.  Other pictures in this book are by Lewis Hine, who is known for his photographs of child laborers.  They are not the only photographers whose work appears in this book, but they are the most famous.

The book is divided into sections, covering different aspects of the lives of immigrant children.  In the chapter called Coming Over, the author describes what the journey to America was like.  One of the primary motivations for people to come to America around the turn of the century was money and employment opportunities.  If a family had little money and little or no chance of getting better jobs in their home country, they would decide to try their luck somewhere else.  Because most of the immigrant families were poor, it was common for families to immigrate gradually.  Often, the father of the family would come first, find a job, start establishing a life and home for his family, and eventually send for his wife and children when he’d saved enough money.  The actual journey was by ship, often in “steerage,” the cheapest form of passage available, in cramped rooms in the ship’s hold.

ImmigrantKidsFamilyQuestions

Although the journey could be harrowing, one of the most nerve-wracking parts was the immigrant processing that took place at immigrant ports like Ellis Island.  There were routine questions that immigrants were expected to answer and exams for them to take, and if the questioners weren’t satisfied, the immigrants could be sent back to the country they came from.  Doctors would examine the immigrants to evaluate their health and look for signs of possible mental defects.  They were particularly concerned about signs of infectious diseases.  Sometimes, it was difficult for immigrants to answer all the questions because of language barriers and the immigrants’ own nerves at being interrogated.  If an immigrant seemed too agitated, the examiners would typically let them rest for a while before trying again.

ImmigrantKidsTenement

The other chapters in the book are At Home, At School, At Work, and At Play, which give more details about the lives of immigrant children as their families settled in America.  They often settled in large cities because those were where the most employment opportunities were to be found.  Because they didn’t speak much English and needed help learning how things worked in America, such as how to find jobs and places to live and how laws worked, they tended to settle in neighborhoods with others from similar backgrounds who could help them.  That is why, even to this day, there are certain areas of large cities, such as New York, Boston, or Chicago, which are known for people of a particular nationality (like the Irish neighborhood, the Jewish neighborhood, Chinatowns, etc.).  New arrivals often joined friends or relatives who had already been living in the US for a while, seeking help in getting themselves established.  These ethnic neighborhoods were located in poor parts of town because the people there didn’t have much money.  People lived in small, crowded apartments called tenements, sharing water and toilet facilities with other families because the apartments were not provided with individual facilities.  However, once these groups of immigrant families became established, they remained established for a long time, and they gave these neighborhoods their own distinctive style.

ImmigrantKidsSchool

School was often difficult for new arrivals because the children had to learn English before they could study other subjects.  There were some special English language learning classes for them at larger schools with enough demand for them.  At smaller schools which didn’t have these classes, they often had help from other children who had arrived in America earlier and could act as translators.  They were also frequently put into classes for children who were younger than they were, studying easy subjects, until they had learned enough English to move up to classes with children their own age.

Typically, immigrant children aimed to stay in school until they were fourteen years old because that was the age when they could officially get full-time work.  However, because their families were poor, the children might have to leave school early to find jobs and help their families make ends meet.  The book describes how rules were frequently bent or broken because the laws were not well-enforced, and children often worked at younger ages, even under harsh conditions.  For immigrant children, the most important education was that which taught practical, vocational skills that would help them find jobs quickly.  Some agencies, like the Children’s Aid Society (known for the Orphan Trains), would help them with vocational training.

ImmigrantKidsBaseball

However, immigrant children still like to play.  Boys and girls usually played separately.  Boys frequently played games like baseball in the street, or stickball, which was a variant that could be played in smaller spaces.  In stickball, the “bat” was a stick or the handle of an old broom, and the ball was rubber and allowed to bounce before it was hit.  Girls would play other games, like “potsy,” which was a version of hopscotch.

Because of the lessons they were taught in schools and because the immigrant children mixed with children outside of their immigrant groups in school, the children absorbed the local culture and became Americanized faster than their parents.  Many of them experienced the feelings of being torn between their parents’ traditions and wanting to fit in with society around them.

In each of the chapters in the book, there are anecdotes from people who had arrived in the US as children around the turn of the century, telling stories about different aspects of their lives.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Under Copp’s Hill

UnderCoppsHill

Under Copp’s Hill by Katherine Ayres, 2000.

This book is part of the American Girl History Mysteries series.

The year is 1908, and eleven-year-old Innocenza Moretti lives with her relatives in Boston.  They are immigrants from Italy.  Innie, as her family calls her, is an orphan.  According to the story that her grandmother told her, she was the only one of her parents’ children to survive infancy, her siblings being born prematurely and dying shortly after birth.  Innie’s mother was so grateful that Innie survived that she promised her to the Holy Mother at her baptism.  Then, Innie’s parents died in a fire in their tenement building when she was about two years old.  Innie and her grandmother, Nonna, survived the fire only because little Innie had started crying in the night, and she took her outside to walk her around so that she wouldn’t wake her parents.  Because of that experience, Nonna is deathly afraid of fire and also has become convinced that the Holy Mother must have spared Innie (as well as herself).  She thinks that Innie is destined to become a nun and has continued to promise her to the Holy Mother in prayer, repeating the promise regularly.  Although Nonna thinks that the miracles surrounding Innie’s life are signs of a future life in the Church for Innie, her grandmother’s promises in prayer terrify Innie.

Innie feels trapped by her grandmother’s expectations for her, expectations that the rest of her family don’t even know about.  She doesn’t want to be a nun, but her grandmother is sure that she will be.  Because of her fears that her grandmother may force her to become a nun when she grows up, Innie is never on her best behavior.  She thinks that if she gets a reputation as a trouble-maker, the Church will decide that she is unsuited for a religious life.  Unfortunately, Innie’s long-practiced habit of ignoring rules and her problem child reputation lead her to be suspected of something worse than just minor misbehaving.

Innie’s family owns a boardinghouse where they provide food and lodging for young immigrant men.  Innie and Nonna live on the ground floor, and Innie’s aunt, uncle, and cousins live above them.  Innie spends a lot of time with her cousins, especially Teresa, who is about her age.  Her older cousin, Carmela, persuades both Teresa and Innie to join a library club at a new settlement house with her.  The settlement house helps girls and young women from immigrant families by teaching them work skills and aspects of American culture that they can use as they become American citizens in exchange for some of the work that the girls do on behalf of the settlement house.  Carmela has taken a new job as a pottery painter there and tells her parents that it will be good for Teresa and Innie to go there as well because they will receive help with their schoolwork and they will also have classes to teach them skills like sewing, knitting, and pottery, that they can use to make money later.  However, the real attraction of the club for the girls is that they get to listen to music, have dancing lessons, read books, and socialize with other girls about their age.  The prospect of sewing classes isn’t appealing for Innie, but she loves books and looks forward to borrowing some from the settlement house library.

At the settlement house, Innie meets a variety of girls from other immigrant families, not just Italian ones.  In particular, Innie makes friends with a girl named Matela, who is a Jewish girl from Russia.  As the girls talk about a recent, large fire in town, Matela talks about the czar’s soldiers burning things back in Russia and how she misses her grandfather, who is still there.  Innie understands Matela’s feelings because she knows what it’s like to miss someone.  She doesn’t really remember her parents, but she feels the lack of them in her life.  Teresa also becomes friends with Matela, but the three girls agree to keep their friendship secret because each of their families prefers them to associate with girls from backgrounds similar to their own.  Innie’s uncle wants the girls to spend time with other Italians, and Matela admits that her father prefers her to spend time with other Jewish girls.  The adults don’t really understand the cultural mix at the settlement house.

However, from the very first day that the girls begin going to events at the house, strange things start happening.  Things disappear or are oddly moved about.  Food disappears.  A silver teapot belonging to the ladies who run the settlement house is stolen.  Then, someone steals some pottery and a shawl.

To Innie’s horror, she ends up becoming the prime suspect for the thefts because she was caught snooping in an area of the house where she didn’t belong and because she accidentally broke one of the pieces of pottery that the others girls made and tried to sweep it up without telling anyone.  When she and her friends snoop around and try to find the missing objects, Innie discovers one of the missing pottery pieces.  However, instead of being happy for the clue, the ladies who run the house just think that Innie must have broken more of the pottery and tried to cover it up, like she did before, by hiding the rest of the set.  After all, if she was doing some things she shouldn’t have been doing, it’s plausible that she could be a thief, too.

If Innie is going to remain a member of the library club (and continue to have access to books that she can read), she’s going to have to prove her innocence.  In fact, proving her innocence may also be important for Carmela, who is supposed to have a citizenship hearing soon.  If Innie’s bad reputation causes problems for her at work, she may lose her job and be denied American citizenship!

Matela thinks that the thief could be a ghost from the nearby Copp’s Hill graveyard, but Innie is sure that it must be a human being.  There are secrets at the settlement house that even the ladies who run it are unaware of and someone who desperately needs help and can’t ask for it.

Teresa and Matela continue to help Innie, and in the process, Innie confesses to Matela her fears about becoming a nun.  It is Matela who helps Innie to find the solution to her problem, urging her to step outside of the small community of Italian immigrants that her family clings to and to seek advice from a priest in the Irish area of the city.  As a priest, he has the knowledge that Innie needs to understand her faith, and because he doesn’t know Innie’s family personally, he has the objectivity to help Innie to see her grandmother’s promise in a new light and to understand that her future destiny is still in her own hands.  No one can speak for another person or make important promises on their behalf.  A religious vocation is a serious decision that only a mature adult can make for herself, or not make, as the case may be.  The priest tells her that, as young as she is, Innie should focus on learning to be a good person, and then she will see what direction life leads her.  With that knowledge, of course, Innie realizes that she will have to put more effort into behaving herself, but it’s a relief to her to realize that she doesn’t need to purposely misbehave in order to control her life.

Eventually, Innie’s aunt also learns about the grandmother’s promise and Innie’s worries and reassures her that, although her grandmother can be an intimidating woman with what she wants, Innie’s family loves her and that she shouldn’t be afraid to come to them with her questions and concerns. Innie has thought of herself as parentless, at the mercy of her grandmother’s wishes and expectations, but her aunt says that she loves Innie like she does her own daughters and that Innie is as much a part of their family as they are.  If Innie has problems, her aunt will be there for her, helping her find whatever answers she needs.

There is also a subplot about how girls in immigrant families (at least, in ones like Innie’s family) aren’t as highly-regarded as boys.  When the family is discussing important matters, Innie often tries to comment on what she thinks, but her grandmother keeps telling her to be quiet because it isn’t a girl’s place to comment on business that men should handle and her male cousins sneer at her because they don’t think she knows anything.  However, when Innie’s uncle is worried about the legal papers he has to sign in order to open his new grocery business because his English still isn’t good enough to understand them, Innie points out that Carmela’s English is the best of the family because of all the books she had to read and the paperwork she had to complete when she was applying for citizenship and that she would be the best person to study the paperwork.  At first, her grandmother makes her try to be quiet and her male cousins laugh, but Carmela speaks up and says that she can help her father, if he wants her to, and her father agrees, on the condition that she act as translator and adviser and let him make the final decisions about the business.  Carmela is happy because the arrangement allows her to use her skills without taking her away from the pottery painting that she loves.  The point of this part of the story is about acknowledging the talents that people possess and not disregarding them because they are outside of the usual roles and expectations.  It fits in with the subplot about the grandmother’s expectations for Innie’s future, which are not really in keeping with either her talents or character.  The young people in the story are growing up under different circumstances than their parents, and they will have to learn to find their own way in life, using the abilities they have and the education they can find.

In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about Boston in 1908.  The fire that happens around the time that the story takes place was a real event.  The settlement house with its library club was also real, and the ladies who run the settlement house, Miss Brown and Miss Guerrier, were also real people.  The book explains more about what life was like for immigrant families like Innie’s and about what the future held for girls like her.  Many of the girls who attended the library clubs later became librarians and teachers themselves, which may be Innie’s eventual destiny when she grows up.  The book also mentions that the area of Boston where Innie’s family lived still has many Italian restaurants and groceries that were started by immigrant families like Innie’s, so we can imagine that the grocery store that Innie’s uncle wants to open will be successful.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Lyddie

Lyddie

Lyddie by Katherine Paterson, 1991.

The year is 1843. Thirteen-year-old Lyddie’s father left home to go West and seek his fortune, and he hasn’t been heard of since. Lyddie helps her mother to take care of their farm in Vermont and the younger children, but they are very poor, and her mother has given up hope of their father returning home. The children’s aunt and uncle, Clarissa and Judah live nearby, but they are of little help, full of fire-and-brimstone talk. Lyddie and her brother Charlie, who is ten, more often turn to their Quaker neighbors, the Stevenses, for help. They are kinder than their aunt and uncle, although their mother disapproves of them for being abolitionists and, in her mind, heathens. Lyddie and Charlie are just grateful for their help. Because of their mother’s depression at the loss of their father, she pays little attention to the things that her children do to keep the farm going and the family together.

However, when a bear enters their house and eats the oatmeal that Lyddie was preparing, their mother, primed by Clarissa’s and Judah’s talk of signs of the end times and such, goes into a panic and sure that the world is going to end. Lyddie and Charlie let her go with their younger sisters to stay with Aunt Clarissa and Uncle Judah while they continue managing the farm as best they can. However, even though their mother sees that the world doesn’t end, she decides that she’s going to hire Lyddie out as a maid at the Cutlers’ tavern and Charlie to work at the mill because the family has too many debts and they will have to rent out their fields and animals.

Luke Stevens, the youngest of the Stevens sons, although much older than Lyddie and Charlie, gives them a ride to their new homes and employment at the mill and the tavern and promises to keep an eye on their house while they’re away. Lyddie is lonely and unhappy working at the tavern, badly missing the family farm and her siblings, especially Charlie. Then, one day, a woman visiting the tavern mentions that she’s one of the factory girls from Lowell, Massachusetts. The woman tells Lyddie that she seems like a good worker and that she could earn a good wage in the factories herself. At first, Lyddie doesn’t believe what the woman says that girls can earn there.

When Lyddie is allowed a brief visit home to her family’s farm, she discovers that Luke Stevens has been allowing a runaway slave to hide there. Lyddie isn’t sure what she thinks of it at first. Ezekial, the fugitive, frightens her because she has never met a black man before, and she knows that if she were to turn him in, there would be a handsome reward that could solve her family’s money problems. However, Ezekial seems to understand the situation that her family is in without her father. Although Lyddie and Charlie are not technically slaves, they have become a kind of indentured servant because of their family’s debts. Ezekial is a father himself, hoping to send for his family when he has found a safe place for them. Lyddie still wonders if her own father is alive, perhaps hoping to send for his family when he can. Having come to a better understanding of Ezekial, she knows that she can’t turn him in, even for the reward money.

Her talks with Ezekial make Lyddie understand that working in the tavern won’t solve her problems, though. As a maid there, she basically works all day for her room and board and has nothing else to show for it. Mrs. Cutler just sends a little money to her mother now and then and even then, she doesn’t always bother, and her mother is in little position to insist on proper wages, making Lyddie little better than a slave. Mrs. Cutler cares nothing about Lyddie or her family’s welfare, just trying to get as much labor out of her for as little as she can. Lyddie finally makes up her mind to seek factory employment in Lowell, Massachusetts, seeing it as her only chance to earn some real wages.

Life in Lowell turns out not to be as glamorous as the woman she met at the tavern made it sound, although the wages are definitely better. The company that owns the fiber mill where Lyddie gets a job has all sorts of rules and regulations for the girls who work there, even ones that intrude on their personal lives outside of work. Anxious to give the impression that all of their workers are of good moral disposition, they insist that the girls attend church on Sundays. Lyddie never had the money to pay pew fees back home, so she is unaccustomed to going to church, but finds that other girls in her position tend to go to Methodist churches, where there are no pew fees, saving their precious wages. Lyddie, who never had much time for schooling when she and her brother were trying to keep the farm going, has trouble understanding all of the terms of the employment contract that she signs but signs it anyway. Her employment turns out to be an education that changes Lyddie’s life, although not in all the ways that she had hoped.

Like Mrs. Cutler, the bosses at the factory have little real care for their workers, trying to get as much work out of them as they can for the least amount of pay they have to give them. The work is hard and the hours are long, but Lyddie keeps at it because the pay is the best she’s ever had and she is starting to save up for her family’s future. The poor working conditions contribute to health problems among the girls, and some of them petition for better working hours, but Lyddie is reluctant to do so because girls who are dismissed “dishonorably” from the factory are blacklisted all over town, and she fears not only risking the loss of her job but the potential to find a new one.

Through her interactions with the other girls and young women at the factory, Lyddie also develops into a young woman. She had previously wished that she’d been born a boy instead because a boy would have a better chance of running her family’s farm, but she comes to realize that there are opportunities out in the world for young women who are willing and able to go out and seek them. In Lowell, Lyddie gets a taste for literature through the books that her friend Betsy reads to her and acquires more lady-like behavior by watching the lady-like Amelia. Neither of them plan on working at the factory forever, and their ambitions, to get married or continue their education, cause Lyddie to consider what she really wants for her own future. Through the difficulties she encounters and everything she learns while facing them, Lyddie really becomes her own woman.

In the end, Lyddie is unable to save her family’s farm and reunite their family there. Her mother dies, and her father’s whereabouts are still unknown, so her uncle sells the farm to pay the debts. However, Charlie and her younger sister Rachel are provided for, the Stevenses decide that they will purchase the farm themselves, and Lyddie becomes reconciled to the loss of the farm through her new vision of the future. She is unfairly discharged from the factory after she catches an overseer molesting another girl and stops him because he blackens her name in retaliation. But, by then, Lyddie has acquired some money and new confidence in herself, and she begins making other plans for her future, which may include both further education and the possibility of marriage. One thing that she knows for certain is that, whatever she does with her life, she wants to move forward as her own, independent person.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

Posted on by TracyC

The Traitor’s Gate

TraitorsGate

The Traitor’s Gate by Avi, 2007.

The story is set in London, in 1849. Fourteen-year-old John Huffam lives with his parents and sister and their servant, Brigit and attends a school taught by a former military man who acts like he is still in the army and teaches them little beyond discipline and what army life would be like.

Then, one day, John is called home suddenly because of a family emergency. His family has fallen on hard times, and his father is in debt, so the family’s belongings are being confiscated. His father is summoned to appear in court, and if he cannot find the money to pay his debt, he will have to go to debtors’ prison. John’s father is shocked because he doesn’t actually owe any money to the man who is trying to call in the debt, Finnegan O’Doul.

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In spite of this, John and the rest of the Huffam family must spend the night in the bailiff’s sponging house, the Halfmoon Inn. There, John’s father again promises John that there is no debt between himself and Mr. O’Doul. He even says that he doesn’t really know O’Doul, although John doubts him. It seems like his father has had dealings of some kind with the man that he wants to keep secret.

John’s father, Wesley Huffam, was originally from a fairly well-off family, but all the family’s money ended up going to a great-aunt instead of to him (possibly because it became obvious to his relatives that he had little skill at handling money in the first place). John’s father is resentful toward the great-aunt, Euphemia Huffam, for inheriting when he thinks that, as a man, he should have been first in line for the family’s money. However, with this enormous (although possibly false) debt hanging over his head, he may be forced to appeal to Great-Aunt Euphemia for help. He persuades John to go and visit Great-Aunt Euphemia on his behalf, since he is not allowed to leave the sponging house for now and the past quarrels between him and his aunt would make it unlikely that his aunt would want to see him. John is beginning to realize that there are pieces of his father’s life and their family’s past that have been kept from him, and he doesn’t like the idea that his father has been deceiving him, but with their family in such a desperate situation, he agrees to visit Great-Aunt Euphemia.

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The bailiff, John’s mother, and Brigid all agree that John is going to have to be instrumental in solving their family’s problems. Of all the people in his family, he is the most practical, in spite of his young age. His father is an impractical man, stuck in a vision of his family’s former glory (and his aunt’s current money, which he does not share in) that doesn’t fit their current circumstances. John’s mother thinks that her husband’s job as a clerk for the Naval Ordinance Office doesn’t provide enough money for the family to live on, even though he earns more than twice what typical London tradesmen of the time do. The real problem is that the family doesn’t live within its means (it is eventually revealed that Wesley Huffam has been withholding money from his family that he uses for gambling), and John’s father’s snobbish attitude because he thinks of his family as being more grand than the commoners around them alienates people who might otherwise be friends and help them. John knows that he’s young, and he’s not completely sure what he can do to help his family, but he knows that there is no other option but to try. In the process, he learns quite a lot about life, himself, the people in his family, and the wider issues in the world around him, including some political intrigue that hits uncomfortably close to home.

Great-Aunt Euphemia agrees to see John when he comes to her house, but their first meeting doesn’t go very well. Great-Aunt Euphemia is ill (or says she is), and she bluntly tells John that his father was always bad with money. She is not at all surprised that he is in debt and needs her help. John gets upset at the bad things that Euphemia tells him about his father, and she gets angry when John tells her the amount of the debt. At first, John is sure that she will refuse to help them completely, but Euphemia tells him not to assume anything but that he should come back the next day.  Her eventual contribution to helping John’s family in their troubles comes in the form of a job for John.

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As John moves around the city, he gets the feeling that he is being followed, and he is. One of the people following him turns out to be Inspector Copperfield (or so he calls himself) from Scotland Yard. When John confronts him, the inspector seems to have a pretty good idea of the difficulty that his family is in and what John himself has been doing. John asks him why he cares, and the inspector says that John’s father is suspected of a crime and that John had better learn more about what his father has been doing and share that information with him. John doesn’t believe that his father could be a criminal, but the accusation is worrying because he knows that his father is hiding something (his gambling addiction isn’t the only secret he has).

The other person following John is a young girl in ragged clothes. The girl, who calls herself Sary the Sneak, approaches John herself, freely admitting that she’s been following him. In spite of her young age, Sarah (or Sary, as she is frequently called) lives on her own and must support herself because her mother is dead and her father was transported to Australia. People don’t often notice a young girl on the street, so sometimes people will pay her to follow someone and provide information about them. The reason why she tells John about it is because she isn’t above playing both sides of the street; sometimes, she gets the people she’s been following to pay her to provide them with information about the people who hired her to spy on them. She considers it even-handed. However, John has no money to pay her for information and finds her spying distasteful, so he doesn’t want to take her up on the offer at first.

However, John does a little spying of his own when his father sneaks away from the Halfmoon Inn, which he is not supposed to do. He follows his father to a pub called the Red Lion, where he witnesses his father gambling with money that he had claimed not to have. More than that, he sees his father arguing with a man who turns out to be O’Doul, another gambler. To John’s surprise, his teacher also shows up and seems to know O’Doul. When John later confronts his father with what he saw at the Red Lion, all his father will say is that he is carrying a fortune around in his head. Later, John overhears the bailiff speaking with someone else, an Inspector Ratchet from Scotland, saying that it appears that Wesley Huffam may be a traitor involved with spies and that the Inspector Copperfield who spoke to John earlier was an imposter, probably also a spy.

Could it be true? Is John’s father really a traitor, selling naval secrets from his job? If so, who can John trust?  Conspirators seem to be around every corner, and John has the feeling that the people who are closest to him may be the biggest threats.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.