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Molly’s Cook Book

American Girls

Molly’s Cook Book by Polly Athan, Rebecca Sample Bernstein, Terri Braun, Jodi Evert, and Jeanne Thieme, 1994.

This is a companion book to the Molly, An American Girl series.  It has recipes from the 1940s that people would have made during World War II.  A section at the beginning of the book explains how shortages and rationing during the war changed the way that people shopped for food and cooked.  For example, people on the homefront didn’t have many canned foods because many canned foods were shipped overseas to soldiers and much of the metal that would have been used to make more cans for food was being used to make other war supplies.  Because certain types of food were in short supply, individuals and families would receive ration books, which contained stamps that represented which types of foods they would be able to buy and how much.  Cookbooks printed during the war focused on creating meals that used little or no rationed products.  People also planted Victory gardens and grew their own vegetables to fill out their meals.

The cookbook is divided into sections for different meals:

Breakfast – Fried Potatoes, Toad-in-a-Hole (not the British dish – this is eggs cooked in a frame of bread, what I first learned to make as Eggs-in-a-Frame), Fried Bacon, Quick Coffee Cake, and Frozen Fruit Cups.

Dinner – Vitamin A Salad (made with carrots and lemon gelatin), Deviled Eggs, Carrot Curls and Celery Fans, Vitality Meat Loaf, Parsley Biscuits, Volcano Potatoes, and Applesauce Cupcakes.

Favorite Foods – French toast, Waldorf salad, PBJ Roll-ups, Jelly Flags, Victory Garden Soup, Nut-and-Raisin Bread, and Fruit Bars.

In each section of recipes, there is more historical information about food in World War II.  There is also a section in the back with party ideas from the 1940s.

For more World War II recipes, I recommend The 1940’s Experiment, which is a blog with recipes from World War II and an explanation of how they can be used to both save money and lose weight because they were intentionally designed to make maximum use of limited resources, both economically and nutritionally. In Molly’s Cook Book, there is a chart that government experts during World War II used to give people guidance on how to budget their food money among seven food groups. The diet that they recommended, both nutritionally and to limit certain rationed foods, was heavy on vegetables and fruits and lighter on meats, grains, and dairy products. This type of diet is basically in keeping with modern nutritional advice, which also emphasizes the importance of vegetables and fruit.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

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Pirates

Magic Tree House Research Guide

Pirates by Will Osborne and Mary Pope Osborne, 2001.

This book is the nonfiction companion book to Pirates Past Noon, part of the Magic Tree House Series. While the Magic Tree House Series is a fantasy series that involves time travel, there are companion books to some of the novels with nonfiction information related to the stories. The fantasy series is meant to introduce children to different historical periods and encourage an interest in reading, but the companion research guides take children further into certain subjects.

This book focuses on pirates throughout history, explaining how pirates functioned from the time of Ancient Greece and Rome, into the Middle Ages with Vikings, and beyond. It explains that, while legends and adventure stories make the lives of pirates seem fun and exciting, the realities of their lives were more harsh. Throughout the book, Jack and Annie, the characters from the main series, appear in illustrations and side notes to define certain terms or tell the readers fun trivia.

There is a chapter about New World pirates that explains the buccaneers and privateers that preyed on Spanish treasure ships in the Caribbean. The Golden Age of Piracy was in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. It was a period of intense pirating activity as governments recruited privateers to attack the ships of enemy nations. Pirates also attacked ships that traded with American colonies as they increased in size and number. The Golden Age of Piracy ended in the 1720s, when governments began instituting harsher punishments for pirates and sending more warships to confront the pirates. The book includes a Gallery of Pirates where it gives brief biographies of famous pirates, like Henry Morgan, Sir Francis Drake, Blackbeard, and “Calico Jack” Rackham with Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

There are chapters that describe the lives that pirates lived on their ships. One chapter talks about the types of ships that pirates used, how to distinguish between different types, and the trade-offs between size and speed. For example, sloops could move faster, but schooners were larger and could carry more. Although pirates operated outside of the law, they had rules for themselves to establish order and resolve conflicts on their ships, and there were punishments for people who broke the rules. People also had different jobs on pirate ships.

Part of the book also talks about legends of buried treasure and sunken ships. There is some truth to the legends, although mostly, pirates tended to spend their loot shortly after getting it instead of hiding it for later.

At the end of the book, there is a guide for doing further research which suggests research tips, other books to read and documentaries to see, and websites to visit. Of the websites listed in the book, only one still exists as of this writing: Maritime Pirate History. Another one, Treasure Island, pops up thanks to the Wayback Machine. It might be possible to find the others through the Wayback Machine by actually searching the Wayback Machine for them, but with so many other new sites and books that are probably equally as good, it might not be worth the time.


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You Wouldn’t Want to Be a Pirate’s Prisoner

You Wouldn’t Want to Be a Pirate’s Prisoner by John Malam, 2002.

This picture book, which is part of a series, explains what it would have been like to be a pirate’s prisoner in the 18th century.  It sets the stage by casting the reader in the role of a Spanish ship captain in 1716.

The reason why the reader is cast as a Spanish captain, captured by English pirates, is because England and Holland had been at war with Spain until 1714.  During the war, the government of England (as well as Holland and France) authorized some ship captains to act as privateers, conducting raids on Spanish ships and outposts.  When the war ended and the privateers were dismissed from service, some of them continued to act as independent pirates.

The book explains the geography of the “Spanish Main,” the area between the southern coast of North America and the northern coast of South America – basically, the Caribbean Sea and its islands and the Gulf of Mexico.  Spanish galleons in the 18th century carried gold and treasures from the Americas to Spain as well as timber from the rainforests and goods that were transported to the Americas across the Pacific Ocean, such as spices and silk.  All of these goods made Spanish treasure ships tempting targets for English pirates.

As a Spanish ship’s captain, there were a few precautions that you could take against pirate attack.  One of the most basic was traveling as part of a convoy because pirates would be more likely to attack a lone ship than one that was part of a group.  A fleet of ships would have a warship traveling with them for protection, and the closer your ship sailed to the warship, the less likely a pirate ship would try to separate you from the group and attack.

If the worst situation happened and the ship was taken by pirates, a captain could try to dress like other members of the crew to disguise his rank, but that didn’t always work.  The captain of the ship was in danger of being taken captive because he might have information that the pirates would find useful, like the exact route of other ships in a convoy.

The gruesome part of this book (and the source of the title, because this series basically focuses on the gruesome parts of history) is the part where they describe different forms of torture that pirates might use on a ship’s captain to convince him to tell them what they wanted to know.  Besides the direct physical abuse, pirates could also keep a captive in squalid conditions to make him weaker, more vulnerable, and exposed to disease.  In the end, they might simply decide to maroon the captive somewhere, even if they got the information they were after.

However, pirates could also face gruesome fates if they were caught. They could be hung and their bodies displayed publicly, as a warning to others.

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The Best Book of Pirates

The Best Book of Pirates by Barnaby Howard, 2002, 2006.

This is an easy and informative non-fiction picture book about pirates.  Rather than focusing on any particular time period or geographic area, the book gives a broad overview.  In the beginning, it explains a little about different groups of pirates through history, including Vikings, Corsairs, Buccaneers, and Privateers.  There is also a brief explanation of the Pirate Round, a sea route often taken by pirates during the late 17th century and into the 18th century.  The route led from North America and the Caribbean to Africa, circling the coast of South Africa to Madagascar and on to the Middle East and India.  (If you’ve seen the movie Cutthroat Island, the crew will basically be taking this route when the movie ends, heading from the Caribbean to Madagascar.)

There is a diagram of a pirate ship from the late 17th century, showing what it would have looked like on the inside, and there are also examples of Jolly Roger flags, which were designed by individual pirates as personal identification, typically including skulls and skeletons to frighten their victims.  There is also some general information about what life would be like on board a pirate ship and the types of weapons they might have.

Then, the book begins to focus more on groups of pirates that operated in specific geographical areas and some of the more famous pirates from history.  The Barbary pirates (also called Barbary corsairs) were Muslims who raided Christian ships along the coast of North Africa and the Mediterranean during the 1500s.  Among the most famous Barbary pirates were a pair of brothers called Barbarossa (“Red Beard”).  Sometimes, European and American pirate ships that went to Africa to find gold and ivory also entered the slave trade.

In the section about the Spanish Main, it explains how privateers and pirates raided Spanish ships taking Aztec treasures from Mexico to Spain.  Buccaneers were specifically pirates who raided ships in the Caribbean.  Their name came from the type of fires they used when cooking meat (boucan or buccan).

There were also Asian pirates who raided the coasts of China and the Philippines and areas around the Indian Ocean.  Chinese pirates and Dayak pirates from Borneo were powerful in the region until the 1840s, when the British Navy destroyed many of their ships.

There is a section in the book specifically about female pirates.  Mary Read and Anne Bonny, who sailed with “Calico Jack” Rackham, were famous.  Grace O’Malley was a famous Irish pirate who was also an Irish noblewoman.  Madame Cheng was a Chinese pirate who took over her husband’s fleet after his death (but because this is a children’s book, it doesn’t mention her previous career).  Alwilda was a Medieval Swedish princess who turned pirate after her father tried to make her marry a man she did not want to marry (although her story may only be legend).

The book also talks about the famous stories of pirates burying treasure, although it says that pirates would usually spend their money quickly, sell items for money they could spend, or gamble it all away.

At the end of the book, there is a short section about modern pirates and how their goals and tools of the trade have changed.

The book isn’t very long, but I think that it provides a good, general overview of the subject of pirates throughout history, and the pictures are fascinating and detailed.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

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Meet the Men Who Sailed the Seas

Meet the Men Who Sailed the Seas by John Dyment, 1966.

This book is part of a series of historical biographies for children. Unlike other books in the series, the book doesn’t focus on a single person, talking about the lives of many famous sailors and explorers with some historical information about sailors and sailing ships in general.

When I was a kid, I went through a phase where this was a favorite book my mine, and I carried it around and read it constantly. It’s a little surprising that I became so attached to this particular book because I grew up in Arizona, in the middle of a desert, miles from the nearest ocean. I was seven years old before I even saw an ocean and a sailing ship in real life, and even then, it was a matter of years before I saw these things a second time. Because of that, as a child, I wasn’t particularly attracted to boats or interested in ocean travel. I wasn’t even a very good swimmer (liked it, just not good at it because I didn’t get a chance to do it much when I was young), and I was kind of afraid of deep water. We learned about Christopher Columbus in school, but I thought that Columbus Day was the most boring holiday on the calendar (there was no candy and no dressing up in costumes, and I’m not even sure that we got that day off of school, which were my requirements for what made a really good holiday), and Christopher Columbus was not remotely my most favorite historical character. So what was it about this book that caught my attention? Why did I like it so much?

There are a number of things about this book to like. When I was a young kid, I wasn’t fond of nonfiction books because it was a little too much like school, but this book was different. It was one of the first nonfiction books that I really wanted to read. The large, friendly type is encouraging to younger children who are just starting to read nonfiction chapter books, and the detailed drawings are fascinating. Best of all, it’s a journey through time as well as across oceans. I always liked history.

The book starts off by explaining how early sailors might have traveled. It speculates that people first realized that they could travel by water by floating on logs and then realizing that they could carve those logs into canoes and paddle them to move in the direction they wanted to go, eventually adding sails to move even faster with less effort.

It then describes how ancient civilizations such as the Egyptians and Phoenicians traveled by ship. There is a chapter about Hanno of Carthage, a Phoenician who commanded a fleet of ships and was known for sailing around the coast of Africa. (That section and the next one use the old name for the rocks at the Strait of Gibraltar, the Pillars of Hercules.) The next chapter describes the Battle of Salamis between Greece, led by Themistocles, and Persia, led by Xerxes. This battle is particularly notable because the Greeks defeated the Persians through a clever trick even though they were out-numbered, proving that a good battle strategy could allow even smaller fleets to gain the upper hand in battle. There is also a chapter about Pytheas, a Greek sailor who sailed to Britain in search of tin and “Thule” (it’s not completely clear what he meant by Thule, although it was apparently a place north of Britain) and wrote a book about his travels.

In the early Middle Ages, Viking raiders began attacking Britain. The chapters about Vikings describe Eric the Red and his adventures in Iceland and Greenland, where he founded a colony of people from Iceland. Vikings also established a colony in the Americas that they called Vinland. However, they eventually abandoned Vinland because of conflicts with the people they called Skraelings (Native Americans). (The exact location of Vinland was in dispute for some time, and some people speculated that it might actually refer to multiple locations, but the likely site is at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.)

The other explorers and adventurers described in the book are Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan (known for sailing around South America to the Pacific), Francis Drake (his section includes an account of the battle with the Spanish Armada), and Captain Cook (known for sailing to Australia and New Zealand and claiming them for England and for insisting that his sailors eat cabbage and onions to prevent scurvy, later killed in Hawaii).

The book also discusses the Mayflower and Pilgrims, and there are chapters about American ships and sailors, like John Paul Jones, and the roles they played in the American Revolution and the new United States shortly after. Because the focus of the book focuses on sailing ships, it ends with Robert Fulton‘s steam ship, the Clermont, and Joshua Slocum, who sailed around the world alone.

So, the reason why I’m still kind of attached to this book, which was old even when I first read it, is that it was my introduction to a world that I wasn’t even really interested in at first, a world that became more interesting after seeing the history and other countries connected to it. I’m still more of an armchair explorer than anything else, but this book added a dimension to my early armchair travels that probably wouldn’t have occurred to me before. As a side note, I don’t think that the book mentions that the navigation instrument that one of the men on the front is holding is an astrolabe, but I now own one of these myself. If you want to try one, you can make a simple version at home yourself. They can be used on land as well as sea!

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For Those Thinking of Notre Dame …

Sometimes, current events remind me of the events of children’s books. I debated about bringing this one up because I haven’t gotten hold of this particular book recently (partly because I’m probably not the only person who’s thinking about it right now), and I don’t have a proper post prepared for it, but years ago, a teacher introduced my class to Cathedral by David Macaulay. David Macaulay wrote a series of children’s books, explaining the architecture of historical buildings, including one about the construction of Gothic cathedrals, like Notre Dame in Paris.

The pictures in these books are fascinating, which is why I’m sorry that I don’t have a proper post prepared with example pictures. (I’ll probably do one later, when I can get hold of the book again) The book is available in multiple copies through Internet Archive, although there is a waiting list to get it right now.

However, the book was also made into a documentary film. Part of the story-line involves a fictional Medieval town replacing their cathedral after their first cathedral was destroyed by fire. (In the book, the cathedral was damaged by lightning, not destroyed by fire. The two stories aren’t the same.) This fictional cathedral serves as an example of the process of constructing a Medieval cathedral and the difficulties and dangers it might involve. The story of the town alternates with explanations about the history and architecture of cathedrals. This short clip explains the basic architecture of a Gothic cathedral, using Notre Dame as an example toward the end.

One of the aspects of the story that I find most inspiring is the dedication that the people who funded and built the cathedral showed. The construction of a cathedral in the Middle Ages could take a lifetime or even longer, and not everyone who began the task would live to see its completion. Their motivation was not mere personal gain but a glorious accomplishment that would both honor their beliefs and last far beyond them.

I’m not sure how long it will take to complete the renovations after the fire that damaged Notre Dame, but whatever it takes, I’m sure it will be worth it.

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Cheaper By the Dozen

CheaperDozen

Cheaper By the Dozen by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, 1948.

These are the real reminiscences of children from the Gilbreth family about their unusual childhoods during the 1910s and 1920s.  There are a couple of movies based on this book, including the 2003 movie that features the dad who is a football coach, but that story is fictional and bears almost no resemblance to the actual lives of the real Gilbreth family.  The older 1950 movie with Myrna Loy as the mother is closer.  The only parts that they have in common are that there were a dozen children in the family, and they had some unusual systems for handling their chaotic household.

The father of the Gilbreth family, Frank Gilbreth, Sr., was a motion study and efficiency expert.  He was one of the early pioneers in the field, studying the ways that people do things, whether it was routine household chores or making things in factories and trying to find ways to help them perform their tasks more efficiently.  Saving time was a passion for him, and he often used his own children and household as guinea pigs for his projects.  His wife, Lillian Gilbreth, was also a psychologist and engineer and was his partner in his work, continuing it after his death.

Part of the reason Frank Gilbreth was so interested in efficiency was that, in his early life, he worked with his hands and built a reputation as an efficient worker.  Later, he also learned that he had a heart condition that might cause him to lead a shorter life.  He had wanted a large family, and he and his wife had agreed that they wanted an even dozen of children, six boys and six girls.  He got his wish, but he was concerned about helping his children to make it as far as they could through school and giving his large household a structure that would last even after he died.

The stories in this book are mostly funny stories as his children fondly remember the things their father taught them and the usual systems in their house that were designed to keep a dozen children in order.  The stories jump around a bit in time, and it isn’t always clear exactly which children were alive at certain points in the stories.  Whenever Jane, the youngest, is mentioned, the stories take place between 1922 and 1924, and there should be eleven living children in the family at most.  Although the Gilbreths did have a total of twelve children, as they had hoped, they were all single births (no twins or other multiples), spaced out over 17 years.  Also, although this book does not mention it (the sequel, Belles on Their Toes contains a brief footnote), one of the older girls in the family (Mary) died very young of diphtheria, before her youngest sister was born, so there was no point at which all twelve children were together.  Even so, the Gilbreths always referred to their children as their “dozen,” and the stories make it sound like all twelve were together.  (This article explains a little more about Mary’s death and its effect on her family and the reasons why the books explain little about it.)

The children’s birth order isn’t specified in the stories, but for reference, these are their birth and death dates (courtesy of Wikipedia):

Anne Moller Gilbreth Barney (1905-1987)

Mary Elizabeth Gilbreth (1906–1912)

Ernestine Moller Gilbreth Carey (1908-2006)

Martha Bunker Gilbreth Tallman (1909-1968)

Frank Bunker Gilbreth Jr. (1911-2001)

William Moller Gilbreth (1912-1990)

Lillian Gilbreth Johnson (1914-2001)

Frederick Moller Gilbreth (1916-2015)

Daniel Bunker Gilbreth (1917-2006)

John Moller Gilbreth (1919-2002)

Robert Moller Gilbreth (1920-2007)

Jane Moller Gilbreth Heppes (1922-2006)

Wikipedia also claims that there was a thirteenth baby, an unnamed stillborn daughter, but this child isn’t mentioned in the books, and I don’t know for sure if that’s true.  Most of the children lived to adulthood, married, and had children of their own.

Racial Language Warning: I usually make notes about racial language in the books I review.  There are a couple of things I’d like to point out, although I also have to point out that, since this book is non-fiction, the people writing it were quoting people from memory.  Just be prepared for a few things that people said back in the 1910s/1920s that wouldn’t be acceptable in modern speech.  They aren’t central factors in the stories, but they are there.  For example, one of the children’s grandmothers used to get dramatic when threatening the children with punishment and say that she would “scalp them like Red Indians.” (I’m not completely sure if she meant that the Indians would get scalped like that or do scalping like that, but I’m guessing that she probably wasn’t being particular.)  The mother of the family also frequently used the word “Eskimo” to describe bad language or “anything that was off-color, revolting, or evil-minded.”  Most of the time in the book, she says it kind of like the way some people say, “Pardon my French” when using bad language, and her definition of bad language was pretty mild.  I’ve never heard the word “Eskimo” used in that sense anywhere else, and it makes me cringe here.  There is some pay-off to the word when a couple of pet canaries whose full names the mother had declared were “Eskimo” escaped during a boat ride, and one of the kids tries to explain to the boat captain that he’s upset about “Peter” and “Maggie” being lost but he can’t say their last names because they’re “Eskimo,” making the captain think that a couple of Alaskan natives have mysteriously disappeared over the side of his boat.  It reminded me of something similar in Fudge-A-Mania, where Fudge accidentally made people think that his lost pet bird was his crazy uncle.  When sharing this book with children, like other older books, it might be a good idea to make it clear that they shouldn’t try to imitate some of the expressions the book uses because it might cause problems and misunderstandings.  There is also a Chinese cook in one chapter who speaks a kind of pidgin English that no one should imitate, either.

Overall, these are calm, funny stories about a somewhat eccentric family that can make nice bedtime reading.  The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Chapters

Each of the chapters in this book talks about a different topic or period in the family’s life:

CheaperDozenShavingWhistles and Shaving Bristles

Introduces the father of the family and his experiments in motion study.  Frank Gilbreth was highly self-confident and frequently took at least some of his children (and sometimes the whole family) with him on visits to factories where he was helping to increase their efficiency.  He gave the children notebooks and pencils and had them take notes about what they saw.

To keep the household orderly and make sure that each child got ready for school on time and did their chores and homework, the parents instituted a chart that each child had to initial after completing certain routine tasks such as brushing teeth or making beds, and there was a special whistle that their father would give to get all of the children to come quickly for a meeting.  The father would sometimes take moving pictures of the children doing chores, like washing dishes, so that he could study their motions and determine if there were wasted motions that could be eliminated so that the task could be completed more efficiently.  He also used himself as a guinea pig, always trying to do daily tasks, like buttoning his coat or shaving, more quickly and efficiently.

Pierce Arrow

The family moves from their home in Providence, Rhode Island, to Montclair, New Jersey.  This chapter explains the move and also the father’s love of practical jokes.  Before taking the family to their real new house, he takes them to one that’s really old and run-down so that the new one will look that much better when they get there.  When they get their large Pierce Arrow car, big enough to carry the whole family, the father tricks each of the kids into looking for the “birdie” in the engine and then honks the horn to scare them.  He thinks it’s funny until one of the kids does the same thing to him.

CheaperDozenCarOrphans in Uniform

This chapter explains that the mother of the family was a psychologist.  While the father instituted systems and dealt out discipline, the mother was often the one who made the systems work, resolving conflicts among the children and making sure that everyone was doing what they needed to do and that they had everything they needed.  Older children also helped by looking after a designated younger sibling.

Much of the chapter explains how things often happened on family outings.  They always took roll call because there were a couple of incidents when children had been left behind by accident on earlier trips.  As a large family, they also attracted a lot of attention.  Sometimes, their father would try to get discounts on things like ticket prices and toll booths by pretending that his children were the nationality of whoever seemed to be in charge, and he was pretty good at guessing that correctly.  All of the Gilbreths were either blonde or red-haired, so Mr. Gilbreth was known to gleefully pretend that they were Irish, when in fact, their heritage was Scottish.  He always thought jokes like that were funny, but finally his wife and children put a stop to his playacting the day that the family was mistaken for an orphanage on an outing.

Visiting Mrs. Murphy

The family enjoyed going on picnics together.  While they were eating, the father would often try to squeeze in an educational lesson, pointing out things like the way ants work together, how a nearby bridge would have been constructed, or what was going on at a nearby factory.  The children learned a lot from him, especially how to notice details in the world around them, but they noted that it was their mother who often put the lessons in perspective for them by pointing out the human side of each of these things, such as describing the fat queen ant in a colony with all of her slaves (their word, I’ve usually heard them referred to as “workers”, but you get the idea) waiting on her or the workmen on a construction project in their jeans, stopping for lunch.  Their father was also pleased by the mother’s descriptions, which complemented his lessons so well.  These stories help explain how the parents worked well together as a team.

The “visiting Mrs. Murphy” was a euphemism for going to the bathroom in the woods because the family didn’t really trust public restrooms.

Mister Chairman

This chapter explains a little about Frank Gilbreth’s youth and how he got his start.  His father died when he was young, and his mother encouraged her children to get the best education they could.  However, Frank Gilbreth decided to get a job instead of going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology like his mother planned because he was concerned about the family finances and his sisters’ education.  He became a bricklayer and drove his supervisor crazy because he always had tips for working faster and more efficiently.  Eventually, the supervisor adopted some of his suggestions, and Frank discovered his passion for motion study.  He worked his way up in construction until he became a contractor, and he was also hired to study working methods in the factories he built.  He became a wealthy man and met his wife as she passed through Boston on her way to a trip in Europe.  Lillian was from a wealthy family in California, and she had a college degree in psychology.  Although many people didn’t take female scholars seriously in those days, Frank did, and the two of them became a team, both personally and professionally.  They were both interested in the psychology of management, and they applied many of the principles from the professional world to their household and vice versa.

To help organize household tasks and make family decisions, Frank created a Family Council with himself as the Chairman and his wife as the Assistant Chairman that was similar to an employer-employee board.  For the most part, it did help to keep order in the family, but once in a while, the Chairman was overruled, including the time when the children ended up persuading their parents that they should get a family dog.

Touch System

This chapter goes into more detail about how responsibilities and chores were assigned in the family.  It also describes how the father arranged to make best use of “unavoidable delay” in the bathroom by putting Victrolas with language lessons in the children’s bathrooms, so they could learn while bathing or brushing their teeth.  He also taught them how to take baths efficiently, so that they could be in and out of the bathroom as quickly as possible.  Mr. Gilbreth took every opportunity and free moment to improve his children’s minds, including teaching them ways to perform complex math problems at the dinner table.

While working as a consultant for the Remington typewriter company, Mr. Gilbreth developed a system for teaching touch typing, and he taught it to his children.

CheaperDozenSchoolSkipping Through School

Not knowing how long he was going to live, Mr. Gilbreth was anxious to see as many of his children get through school as he could, and he had great confidence in their abilities, so he often pushed his children to skip grades in school, using persuasion and his bombastic personality to get their schools to agree.  The children’s mother, however, saw her children more as individuals who needed time to grow up emotionally and socially as well as intellectually and tempered her husband’s enthusiasm for skipping grades.

The parents also had their children attend church and Sunday School, although the father wasn’t very interested in organized religion.  Lillian volunteered for a number of church projects and committees.  Once, as a joke, a friend of hers who had eight children of her own, referred her to a birth control advocate who was looking for someone local to volunteer to promote the movement.  The friend thought that it was a great joke, and the family saw the humor and made the most of it when the advocate showed up at their house.

Kissing Kin

When the United States joined World War I, Mr. Gilbreth offered his services to the U.S. Army.  While he was working at Fort Sill, Mrs. Gilbreth took their children (they had seven at the time) to visit her relatives in California.  The Mollers were a wealthy family, and the children enjoyed being spoiled by their grandparents and their aunts and uncles after the arduous train journey there.

Chinese Cooking

At first, the children felt like they should be on their best behavior when visiting their grandparents and aunts and uncles.  However, the adults were a little worried about how subdued the children were, and constantly being on their best behavior grew more difficult for the children.  One day, when the adults made the children wear new outfits that they hated for a special party, the children finally rebelled and got them all wet by playing in the garden sprinklers.  From then on, everyone was much more relaxed and informal.

The grandparents had servants, and Billy became rather attached to their Chinese cook, Chew Wong (I’m not completely sure if “Chew” was his real name or a nickname), who was known for being somewhat temperamental.  The cook enjoyed Billy’s company also, although when Billy got troublesome, he sometimes picked him up, held him in front of the oven, and threatened to cook him.  It was an empty threat, but one day, Billy (five years old at the time) pushed the cook when he was standing in front of the oven, also joking that he was going to cook him, and the cook apparently got his hands burned.  (This incident alarmed me a bit.  It seems that the cook wasn’t badly hurt, but still, that’s the kind of problem that horseplay like that can cause, and it could have been really serious.  The cook is described as speaking a kind of heavily-accented pidgin English.)

On the way home, all of the children came down with whooping cough.  When they picked up Mr. Gilbreth, Mrs. Gilbreth told him that next time, he could take the kids to California, and she would go to war instead.

Motion Study Tonsils

The family didn’t get sick very often (and tried hard to ignore it when they did), but this chapter describes what happened when the children all came down with measles and when several of them needed to have their tonsils taken out at the same time.  Their father decided to turn the tonsil operations into a motion study experiment.

Nantucket

The family had a vacation home in Nantucket, Massachusetts that they called “The Shoe” (after the nursery rhyme about the old woman who lived in a shoe and had so many children that she didn’t know what to do).  Although the father promised the kids that there would be no lessons and studying over the summer, he still found ways to teach them things by turning the lessons into games, like when he painted Morse code messages all over The Shoe and offered prizes to the children who could solve them.

This chapter also explains about the Gilbreths’ concept of “therbligs.”  The word comes from “Gilbreth” spelled backward, and it refers to a single unit of thought or motion.  Every task a person does is composed of a certain number of therbligs.  Reducing the amount of time needed for each therblig makes a task more efficient.  They taught this concept to their children as well, putting symbols representing the different possible therbligs on the walls of The Shoe as well.

For a while, The Shoe became a point of interest on local tours.

The Rena

The Rena was a catboat that the family owned.  Their father liked to run it like he was a real ship’s captain.

CheaperDozenBabyBathHave You Seen the Latest Model?

The births of new children were a regular experience in the Gilbreth family through much of the children’s early lives.  This chapter explains how the parents approached the births.  They decided very early in their marriage that they wanted a large family, choosing the number twelve as their target on the day they were married.

Mr. Gilbreth had a lot of theories about babies which he started testing on their first child, Anne.  He refused to allow people to speak baby talk around the babies (although he caved in and did it sometimes himself) so they would learn to speak properly.  He hired a nurse who spoke German in the hopes that the baby would start learning a second language immediately, and the nurse’s horror, he once tried to see if babies have an innate ability to swim by trying Anne in the bathtub. (No, they don’t, and he was careful not to let Anne almost drown.)

Mrs. Gilbreth had her first seven children at home, finding the hospital too dull because they wouldn’t let her work on anything while she was there.  As time went on, the children in the family began to wonder more about where the babies came from, although they knew that it involved their mother spending the day in bed, the doctor coming, and sometimes hearing their mother yell (she was embarrassed that they’d noticed).  Their mother tried to explain babies to them in terms of bees and flowers, but she was too shy to give them any real, direct information about it, and their father didn’t want to discuss the subject with them at all.  This chapter also mentions that part of the family tradition was that the mother would read the book The Five Little Peppers to her children while she was recovering from a birth.  (I also reviewed this book.)

Flash Powder and Funerals

Mr. Gilbreth loved taking pictures of his children (using a frightening amount of flash powder whenever he was in charge of it) and also frequently used pictures and movies of his children as part of his projects or as promotional images.  One of the most bizarre promotions they did was when Mr. Gilbreth was hired by a company that made automatic pencils.  They took pictures and movies of the Gilbreth children burying a coffin full of regular old wooden pencils.  The kids had to bury the coffin and dig it up again multiple times while they took all the pictures and movies they wanted.  Then, when the filming was over, Mr. Gilbreth made them dig up the coffin again and use all the wooden pencils in it so that none of them would go to waste.

Sometimes, these pictures and promotions were embarrassing to the children when they were made public and classmates and teachers talked about them at school.  Some of the reporters who interviewed the family for human interest pieces made up bits of dialogue to make their stories more interesting and embarrassed the family.  (Ex. “I am far more proud of my dozen husky, red-blooded American children than I am of my two dozen honorary degrees …”)

Gilbreth and Company

This chapter explains what it was like for special visitors to come to the Gilbreth house.  Most people found it pretty strange, with so many young children and the strict household rules which the children would also try to enforce on visitors.  The chapter mentions that Mrs. Gilbreth never liked using physical punishments on the children, but Mr. Gilbreth used them regularly.  Mrs. Gilbreth kept trying to tell him that he shouldn’t spank the children on various body parts because of the harm it could do.  At one point, Mr. Gilbreth asks her, irritably, “Where did your father spank you?  Across the soles of the by jingoed feet like the heathen Chinese?”  (It was a thing, but not exclusively Chinese.)

In particular, this part of the book describes two special visitors to the Gilbreth house: the father’s older sister, the children’s Aunt Anne, who came to look after the children while the parents were out of town, and a female psychologist who was trying to analyze the children for a paper she was writing.  The children generally liked Aunt Anne, who also gave them music lessons, even though none of them had any talent for music.  However, they started playing pranks on her when she started getting too militant with them, replacing the routines that their father gave them with ones of her own.

The children were more offended by the visiting psychologist, who asked them deeply embarrassing questions (ex. “Does it hurt when your father spanks you?”) and who seemed to have an agenda to prove that, while the Gilbreth children were smart, they were socially or behaviorally abnormal for living in such a large family under unusual systems.  The children also played pranks on her, getting hold of the answers to the intelligence test that she was giving them so they could give her either abnormally correct answers or psychologically abnormal answers and purposely behaving abnormally in her presence, intentionally twitching and scratching themselves.  Eventually, the psychologist caught on to what they were doing and left in a huff.

Over the Hill

This chapter is about family entertainment.  The Gilbreths liked to go to the movies about once a week, often staying to see films twice.  (Films were silent at this point.)  The father loved the movies as much as the kids, if not more so.  The children also sometimes put on little shows or skits for their parents.  In particular, they liked to do imitations of their parents, many of which involved either taking the children places or being asked questions about what it was like to have so many children.  Mr. Gilbreth also liked to do a “Messrs. Jones and Bones” cross-talk routine like the ones from minstrel shows, where a pair of actors perform pun-based jokes, except that he would play both parts himself, putting on accents like the black-face minstrels.  (Ex. “And does you know Isabelle?” “Isabelle?” “Yeah, Isabelle necessary on a bicycle.”)  The jokes are corny puns, but it’s a little uncomfortable now that I’m old enough to know the origin of this act.  It went over my head as a kid.

CheaperDozenUnderwearFour Wheels, No Brakes

The oldest girls in the family were getting old enough to start dating in the early 1920s, around the time that flapper culture was beginning.  Their parents were fairly conservative in their habits, and the girls argued with them about being allowed to bob their hair and wear the latest fashions, like short dresses.  The parents finally broke down and allowed the girls to have their hair professionally bobbed after Anne gave herself a dreadful bob.  The father drew the line on make-up, however.

Motorcycle Mac

During the early 1920s, girls often referred to their boyfriends as “sheiks” in reference to the popular silent movie The Sheik.  The father of the family often chaperoned his daughters on dates or had one of their brothers do it, although he eased off after getting to know some of the young men better.  The younger siblings enjoyed teasing the older ones about their dates.  My favorite episode when I first read this as a kid was the time when one of Ernestine’s boyfriends climbed a tree outside of her window to spy on her, hoping to see her getting undressed, and the other siblings decided to teach him a lesson by pretending that they were going to set the tree on fire and roast him alive.  (They didn’t do it, they just threatened to.  It’s a dangerous prank, but effective.)

The Party Who Called You…

Mr. Gilbreth knew that he had a bad heart condition even before his last two children were born, and he made preparations that would help his wife to run the household efficiently after his death.  He died in his 50s while he was on his way to a series of conferences in Europe.  He had called his wife from the train station and was on the phone with her when he had his fatal heart attack.

The book ends with describing what his wife and children did after his death.  One of the things that I found most touching was the way that the children described the changes in their mother after her husband died.  They said that in their mother’s youth, she had been accustomed to other people making decisions for her, first her parents, then her husband, who guided their work and who had the idea of the large family in the first place.  In some ways, their mother had been a very nervous, anxious person, afraid of things like going out alone at night, lightning storms, and making speeches (although she did them anyway).  After her husband died, Lillian’s fears seemed to drop away because the thing that she had always feared the most, losing her husband, had happened, and she discovered that she and the children could still manage.  When Lillin’s mother suggested that she move the family out to California to be close to their relatives there, Lillian held a Family Council with the children to decide what they were going to do.  Lillian said that she planned to continue their father’s work, even going to Europe in her husband’s place to present his papers, and that would mean that the children would have to take on greater responsibilities in running the house and caring for the younger children.  The children agreed, and although money was tighter than it was before, they were able to carry on.

Posted on by TracyC

I Am Fifteen and I Don’t Want to Die

I Am Fifteen – And I Don’t Want to Die by Christine Arnothy, 1956.

Christine Arnothy was a fifteen-year-old girl during the siege of Budapest during World War II.  In this book, she recounts her memories of that time, based on diaries that she kept.  Following the war, she worked in a bookstore in Belgium before writing her memoirs.  This book was awarded the Prix de Verities, which is a French prize for nonfiction.

When the book begins, Christine and her parents are hiding in a cellar during the siege of Budapest along with their neighbors.  It is difficult for them to keep track of the time because they must remain in the cellar and limit lights that could give their location away.  After living in such cramped quarters for many days, everyone is getting on everyone else’s nerves.  They quarrel over scarce resources and hoard things for their own families, worried that their neighbors will take too much.

For a time, a young ex-soldier they call Pista (although he has another name) comes to stay with them, and he goes out to scavenge goods for them from ruined parts of the city.  While he does this, it raises their spirits and hopes for survival.  Unfortunately, death is all around them, and Pista is eventually killed by a mine.  There are scenes in this book that would make it frightening and disturbing for young readers.  Christine is fearful for her own life, worried that she will die in the cellar that has been their shelter.

When the German and Russian soldiers arrive, there is more slaughter.  Eventually, Christine and her family are able to get out of the city and go to the villa where they had originally hoped to go to escape the bombings.  They had already stocked the villa with provisions and were allowing some refugee friends of theirs to use it.  When they arrive, they discover that their “friends,” believing that they were killed in the bombings, have appropriated their belongings and actually seem disappointed to find that they are alive and want some of the provisions that are left.  Christine reflects on how quickly morals and ethics can be put aside in wartime.  Their supposed “friends” are not so friendly when resources are scarce and their deaths would have meant that they could keep more for themselves.

Transportation has been disrupted, but they are finally able to board a train to get to a small house they own in the countryside.  They remain there for three years before deciding that they need to leave entirely.

I found the story difficult to read because of all the sad and gruesome parts, but I found it interesting that Christine reflects that the part of her that died in the cellar in Budapest was the child that she used to be.  At the end of the story, she realizes that she has become an adult and, although she is worried about the life that she may be heading for, she is ready for a new life.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

Posted on by TracyC

Ghosts, Witches, and Things Like That

GhostsWitchesThings

Ghosts, Witches, and Things Like That by Roderick Hunt, 1984.

This is a collection of information about the history of Halloween and other things related to Halloween, like folklore, games, recipes, crafts, and poems.  There are sections about specific topics, starting with the section about Halloween itself (spelled Hallowe’en, this is a British book).  The section about Halloween talks about the origins of the holiday and has tips for holding a Halloween party, including how to make costumes and decorations, the rules for games to play (including some old traditional games), and recipes for various Halloween treats.

Other sections of the book focus on various monsters and mythical creatures associated with Halloween, such as witches, ghosts, fairies werewolves, and vampires.  There is a section of ghost stories and some fascinating historical information about spiritualists and how people have faked ghosts in the past, including the Pepper’s Ghost illusion that is still used in the haunted house in Disneyland.  The sections about witches, fairies, and monsters also include a mixture of history and folklore along with some jokes and poems about the various creatures.

GhostsWitchesHistory

This is a fun book to read around Halloween.  It’s a mixture of historical background, folklore, party-planning tips, games, and recipes.  I think that the information about traditional games is still my favorite part.

GhostsWitchesApples

Posted on by TracyC

Monster Manual

MonsterManual

Monster Manual by Erich Ballinger, 1989, 1994.

This book was originally written in German and then translated into English.  It’s not a story about monsters but a kind of guide to monsters and other creatures found in fantasy, horror, and science fiction books and movies.  There are articles about different types of monsters, fictional characters, and monster-related concepts that are organized in alphabetical order, like a encyclopedia.  The creatures in the book range from traditional monsters from folktales and classic literature, like vampires, mummies, dragons, ogres, and creatures from Greek mythology, to modern ones from popular fiction, as seen on this monster family tree.

MonsterManualFamilyTree

Some topics, like vampires, actually have more than one entry in the book.  There is the Vampires article, which talks about the general idea of vampires and traditional beliefs about them. Then, there are the articles about Dracula and Nosferatu, specific vampires from classic literature.  In the Nosferatu section, they tell you that the famous silent movie Nosferatu was actually based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, just with the location and character names changed.  Unlike the suave-looking Dracula, who is not obviously a vampire at first sight, the vampire in Nosferatu was also depicted as an unearthly creature.  One thing they don’t mention is that Bram Stoker’s widow sued the studio that made Nosferatu for copyright infringement.  The studio went bankrupt, and all copies of the movie were supposed to be destroyed.  The only reason that we can see the movie now is that copies of it had already been sent overseas and preserved.  It’s now considered a classic silent film and has a cult following.

MonsterManualVampires
MonsterManualNosferatuOgres

Some articles are also activities, like the one about Drawing Monsters and the quiz to see how fearful you are.

MonsterManualFearQuiz

All throughout the book, there are also segments of a comic strip at the bottoms of various pages in which a monster tries to frighten a young girl, who is unimpressed.  By the end of the comic strip, the girl and the monster become friends.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.