American history – Page 7 – Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories

Posted on July 1, 2019 by TracyC

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.

Posted on March 20, 2019June 1, 2021 by TracyC · 2 Comments

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:

Whistles 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.

Orphans 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.

Skipping 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.

Have 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.

Four 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 March 8, 2019 by TracyC

Annie’s Promise

AnniesPromise

Annie’s Promise by Sonia Levitin, 1993.

This is the final book in the Journey to America Saga. Annie, the youngest of the Platt girls, is more of a tomboy than her older sisters. Her father thinks that she’s been growing up too wild in America, running around and climbing like a boy. This summer, in 1945, while her best friend goes to visit their family’s farm in Wisconsin, Annie’s father wants her to stay home and help him with sewing for his coat business, and Annie’s mother has a list of chores for her to do. It all sounds so boring and dreary. Twelve-year-old Annie longs for excitement, but because of her recent appendix operation and her migraine headaches, her parents worry about her health.

Then, Annie gets the opportunity to attend summer camp. She wants to go and do all the fun summer camp activities that other girls do, but her parents worry at first. They worry about Annie’s health, and they don’t know who is running the camp or what they do there. Annie’s older sisters, Ruth and Lisa, tell their parents that it’s normal for girls in America to go to summer camp and that the experience might do Annie some good. When the family doctor says that Annie is healthy enough to go, her parents finally agree.

At first, camp is hard. Annie faints soon after her arrival, and she worries that maybe her parents were right about her being delicate. However, one of the counselors tells her that these things happen and that she was probably just overtired, overheated, and still suffering from the rough bus ride to the camp and that she will be fine after she rests. Annie is physically fine, although one of the other campers, Nancy Rae, makes a big deal about the incident, calling Annie a “sickie” and other names. Nancy Rae is a terrible bully, and Annie nearly drowns in the lake after accepting a dare from Nancy Rae to swim across it, in spite of not being a good swimmer. Annie overhears the counselors saying that Nancy Rae should probably be sent home for goading Annie into a dangerous stunt, but they know that Nancy Rae comes from a bad home and that her father abuses her. For her own sake, they decide to give her another chance.

However, even knowing Nancy Rae’s troubled history doesn’t help Annie when Nancy Rae keeps picking on her and a black girl named Tallahassee (Tally, for short). Nancy Rae calls Tally and her younger brother (who is also at the camp) “nigger” and says that Annie is a “nigger-lover” when she tries to protect the younger brother from one of Nancy Rae’s tricks that could have really hurt him. (Note: I’m not using the n-word here because I like it. I’m just quoting because I want you to see exactly how bad this gets. Nancy Rae uses this word multiple times, and so do others when quoting her. This book is not for young children. Readers should be old enough to understand this word and beyond the “monkey see, monkey do” kind of imitation some kids do when they learn about bad words. The management assumes no responsibility if they aren’t.) Nancy Rae is a thrill-seeker, who frequently does wild stunts to get attention and tries to make other girls hate Annie as much as she does. At one point, she snoops through Annie’s things and tries to take her diary. Eventually, she figures out that Annie is Jewish and makes fun of her for that, painfully reminding Annie of what it was like living in Nazi Germany and of her relatives, who died in the concentration camps.

Finally, Annie reaches the breaking point with Nancy Rae. At a camp talent show, she arranges with other kids to dump horse manure on Nancy Rae’s head after she finishes singing a song. Nancy Rae is so humiliated by the experience that she ends up leaving camp. Annie is relieved that she is gone, but one of the camp counselors, Mary, makes her feel guilty about her revenge because she sees Annie as being stronger and more talented than Nancy Rae and wishes that she could have made Nancy Rae her friend instead, giving the bully a chance to improve herself. (I disagree with what the counselor says, but I’ll explain more later why.) Annie feels badly about how things turned out, but the incident blows over, and the rest of camp is a great adventure for her.

At camp, Annie mixes with different kinds of children from the ones she usually sees in her neighborhood and at school, and everything is a learning experience. She becomes friends with Tally and gets a crush on a boy named John. There is an ugly incident in which an assistant in the camp kitchen tries to molest Annie when he finds her alone (this really isn’t a book for kids), but the camp counselors dismiss him for what he did. Annie and Tally talk about many things together, and Tally is very understanding. The incidents with Nancy Rae and the kitchen assistant bring up the subjects of people who try to victimize others and how to deal with them. Annie resents that people like that force others to be on their guard, limiting them in ways that they can behave in order to avoid being victimized, but Tally says that there’s no help for that. As long as people like that exist, she says, protecting yourself is a necessity. They also compare the way Annie feels when John gives her a little kiss to the repulsed and frightened way that she felt when the kitchen assistant tried to force himself on her. Both incidents involved a kiss, but the way it was delivered and the person delivering it made each experience feel very different. In the end, Annie’s crush on John turns into friendship rather than love as she realizes that the kiss was just a friendly gesture. It is a little disappointing to her at first, but it is still a learning experience for her.

Annie learns that everyone at this camp has been through something bad in their lives. Annie’s family are war refugees, but Tally’s father has been married three times, and she’s often the one to take care of the house and her younger brother, while her current stepmother cleans other people’s houses for money. Other kids are poor or orphans or have fathers in jail. The camp gives them a chance to get away from their problems for awhile, to make new friends, and to develop talents that they can be proud of. Annie really blossoms at camp, learning to ride horses and work on the camp newspaper. As Annie’s session at camp comes to an end, Mary offers Annie a position as a junior counselor for the final session of camp, helping the young children. Annie is enthusiastic about the prospect, but family dramas at home threaten to derail her plans. Ruth’s fiancé is shell-shocked from the war and has broken off their engagement. Lisa is tired of arguing with their parents about every small piece of independence in her own life and has decided to move to a place of her own. With all of this going on, and their parents upset about everything, what chance is there that they will sign the permission slip that Annie needs to become a junior counselor?

This book shows how much the lives of the girls in the Platt family have changed since they first left Germany for America. It’s partly because they are living in a different country, partly because times and habits are changing everywhere, and partly because all of the girls are growing up and making decisions about what they really want to do with their lives. The older girls in the family, Ruth and Lisa, are women now and thinking about careers and marriage. As the girls suffer disappointments and changes of heart, their parents suffer along with them, and Annie realizes that she has to make up her own mind about what she really wants. As Annie tries to decide what she really does want, her parents struggle to cope with all of the changes in their daughters’ lives and in the changing world around them. They fight against it in a number of ways, and when things go wrong, whether it’s Annie’s illnesses or the older girls’ romantic problems, they tend to get angry or panic. As the book goes on, it becomes more clear that what the parents really feel is helplessness. More than anything, they’ve wanted life to be better for their daughters in their new country, and it upsets them when things don’t work out. They want to help guide their daughters and make their futures work out for the best, but in the process, they often come across as too controlling or making the wrong decisions because they don’t fully understand the girls’ feelings or situations.

Ruth and Lisa each suffer romantic disappointment before they settle down. Ruth had a fiancé, Peter, who went away to fight in World War II, but having seen the prisoners in the concentration camps, he has returned disillusioned and dispirited. He was Jewish, but now comes to associate his religion and heritage with pain and suffering and wants to give it up, breaking off his engagement to Ruth in the process. At first, Ruth is angry with him, saving that it’s like he wants to give up on his whole life, on the whole world. The girls’ father says that he wants to kill Peter for leading his daughter on, but part of his feelings turn out to be his own feelings for somehow failing his daughter, that he is somehow to blame for allowing this disappointment. When Lisa is upset because the young man that she’s been seeing says that he doesn’t want to get married, she argues with her parents about the course of her life and leaves home to live on her own. Her parents see that as turning her back on their love and protection, but Lisa says that she just wants the independence that other girls have. Even Annie feels abandoned by Lisa because Lisa was always there to comfort her as a sister and help her persuade their parents to listen to her, but Lisa says that she has to deal with problems on her own and that Annie will understand someday, when she’s in the same position. Annie realizes that, in a way, she already is in the same position.

The one time that Tally comes to visit Annie at her house and the girls go to the beach together, Annie’s parents make a scene when she gets home because she’s left sewing all over the house and eaten more food than she should have. Tally was going to apply for a sewing job with Annie’s father, which would have helped both of them, but Annie’s parents send her away, thinking that she’s a bad influence who encouraged Annie to goof off. Then, Annie hears her own parents use the n-word. It’s the final straw for Annie, and she runs away to camp.

The people at camp are glad to have her because they need her help, but being there, helping them, and thinking about her own life and future help Annie to realize what’s really important to her. She’s been feeling bad about the hate she got from Nancy Rae and the hate that she felt from her parents with their insults to her friend. However, her parents don’t really hate her, and in spite of what they’ve done, she doesn’t really hate them. She realizes that, before she does anything more with the camp, she needs to go back and see them.

Annie rethinks what Nancy Rae was really about, how she was filled with hate for everyone, dealing out hatred because of all that she’d received from everyone else. The counselors realized that she needed love more than anything, but Nancy Rae’s own hateful behavior pushed away the people who would have given her more positive attention and Annie’s revenge (although provoked) ended her camp experience. Annie realizes that she doesn’t want to go down the same path and that she must mend her relationship with her family.

I said before that I disagreed with the counselor’s approach to the problem of Nancy Rae and what she said to Annie about her revenge. I see what they were trying to do with giving Nancy Rae another chance, but what bothers me about it is that they act like Annie was in a much less vulnerable position to Nancy Rae and that she should have been strong enough to take what Nancy Rae dished out without hitting back, and I don’t think that’s true. All of the kids at the camp were there because they had something troubling in their lives, some vulnerability, including Annie. To say that Annie was more fortunate and more talented and that it should have been enough was to discount the harm that Nancy Rae was doing. I know that the counselors were trying to make the camp experience positive for Nancy Rae, but she was making the camp experience more negative for everyone else around her and needed to be stopped. Everyone suffers from something in life (as this book also demonstrates), but not everyone chooses to become a bully because of it. Nancy Rae made that decision herself, within herself, and for herself alone.

Part of the problem, I think, was that there were no obvious consequences for Nancy Rae’s bad behavior, and therefore, she had no reason to stop doing what she was doing. The lack of punishment and the inequity of the situation was what finally sent Annie over the edge with her. Since the counselors didn’t make it obvious that Nancy Rae was in the wrong, Annie felt that she had to, and that says to me that there was a lack of responsibility and accountability. I think that life is a balance and that both positive reinforcement (giving rewards to people who do good) and negative reinforcement (punishment for bad behavior) are necessary. I believe in plain speaking, and if I were in the counselors’ position, I would make it plainly and specifically clear that no campers were to use the n-word, to mess with others’ belongings, or to do the other things that Nancy Rae was doing and that there would be consequences for doing so, telling them exactly what those consequences were so that no one could say that they were surprised. I would also make it clear to Nancy Rae that I knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it and that it was unacceptable. When we choose what we do and say in life, we all consider (or should consider) what we want to happen in life, and I would put it plainly to Nancy Rae how she really expects others to react to her and how their reactions would change if she did things differently. Clearly, no one has ever told her that in her life before, and it was about time that she heard it from someone. I suppose we could guess that the counselors may have said something of the sort to her out of hearing of the others, but I would also say the same thing to Nancy Rae’s victims. Letting them know that I’d dealt with her adequately might head off their attempts to deal with her themselves and talking about what our behavior might lead others to do might also discourage revenge.

Also, the counselors were counting too much on the idea of friendship with Annie to get Nancy Rae to stop treating her badly, but that’s not at all the way that bullies work. One of the primary reasons why people bully is that they know that there are a lot of people who like mean humor, and they use their bullying to bond with those people, not their victims. Their friendships are formed on mutual contempt for the victim and the fun of humiliating that person. They’re getting everything they want through their bullying, so there’s no reason for them to stop until someone else gives them consequences and puts an end to their bully support network. I think that the counselors should have also talked to the people Nancy Rae was trying to bond with, explaining that they know what Nancy Rae is attempting to do and telling them that they would also be punished if they tried to help her, further cutting off one of Nancy Rae’s incentives to keep doing what she’s doing.

I’m not saying that it’s a perfect solution or that it would be guaranteed to work, just that I believe in being direct rather than letting things slide and just hoping that people will someday see the light. Sometimes, people just need to have things spelled out for them in no uncertain terms. If they chose to ignore what you say, then it’s on their own head, and they can’t say otherwise because you were clear and backed up your words exactly how you said you would. I do think that the counselors were right that, in the long term, revenge never turns out well. It often turns into a vicious cycle, as Annie later considers. However, in this case, some proper handling in the first place, with consequences as well as words, might have headed off the situation before it got that far.

We don’t know what eventually happened to Nancy Rae by the end of the story, but I’m not sure that Annie is right to think that she wronged her. In fact, she might have actually done her some good. Sometimes, seeing others react badly to bad treatment can make a difference to someone’s future. In my experience, people sometimes don’t realize that they’ve pushed another person too far until that other person finally reacts and says or does something. Realizing that they’ve pushed someone too far can give them a reason to change because they realize that people won’t put up with their behavior forever. Part of me thinks that maybe, at some point in the future, Nancy Rae might look back on this experience and quietly admit to herself that she had provoked it, being more careful the next time not to pick fights because she can be humiliated or excluded when people get fed up. It might even help Nancy Rae to realize that she doesn’t have to put up with her father’s ill treatment forever because she also has the right to lose patience with bad treatment, too. At least, I hope that this was a learning experience for her.

Annie realizes that both her parents and Nancy Rae are angry and hateful because of what they’ve suffered in their lives, but the problem is that both of them are taking it out on the wrong people. Annie’s parents, at least, seem to realize that what they did was going too far and taking out their feelings on someone who didn’t deserve it. By the time that Annie arrives home, they are also ready to make their peace with her and even support her return to the camp as a junior counselor, if that’s what she really wants to do.

The final days of World War II frame this story, beginning with the reports of Hitler’s death in the late spring of 1945 and ending with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender in August. With the end of the war comes a new chapter in the lives of the Platt family. They’ve been through a lot together, but in spite of the girls growing up, moving out, and arguing with their parents, they still are a family. There are no more books in the series, but Annie explains that Lisa gives up the dream she once had of being a dancer because she doesn’t think that she’s star material and because she decides that what she really wants is to get married and have children of her own. In the end, she and her boyfriend get married, and she is happy with her life. Similarly, Ruth, who is now a nurse, meets a new love when she visits Annie at camp and later marries him. Annie realizes that she has found what she loves most in teaching young children, taking care of animals, and writing, and these things will form the basis of what she does with her future life.

Posted on December 21, 2018January 17, 2020 by TracyC

Changes for Molly

American Girls

MollyChanges

Changes for Molly by Valerie Tripp, 1988.

MollyChangesLetter Molly’s family has wonderful news! Molly’s father is coming home from the war to take charge of a veterans’ hospital right in their home town! Everyone in the McIntire is happy, but Molly has one worry: In her father’s letter, he talked about how much her brothers and sister have grown and changed since he’s been away, but not her. Molly still feels like plain old Molly, and she thinks that her father will look at her like she’s still a dumb little kid. What can she do to show her father that she’s grown in the last two years, like her siblings have?

One thing she can do is get the role of Miss Victory in her dance school’s performance. She’s favored to get the party anyway because she dances it so well. But, with her plain, old, straight braids, Molly thinks that she looks too plain and little-kid like to get the part. What she wants more than anything is to have curls. Miss Victory’s pretty crown would look great on a girl with a head full of curls.

MollyChangesPinCurls Her friends try to help her by buying a box of hair permanent and offering to help her use it, but it soon becomes obvious that they really don’t know what they’re doing. Fortunately, Molly’s older sister, Jill, catches them before their experiment goes too far and talks them out of it. Molly’s older sister likes to trade hair tips with her friend, Dolores, and she’s more experienced with doing hair. She says that if curls are important to Molly, she’ll help her to set her hair in pin curls until it looks the way she wants.

As Jill helps Molly with her hair, Molly talks to her about how grown up she is and how she still feels like such a kid who hasn’t changed much since their father went away. Jill says that she doesn’t think that it’s true. Jill is five years older than Molly, and she tells her that growing up is something that takes time. A ten-year-old like Molly just isn’t going to be the same as a fifteen-year-old like Jill, and she shouldn’t try to be. Jill says that the war and their father’s absence has made them all grow up a little faster than they would have otherwise. They’ve had to become more mature, more accustomed to making little sacrifices and making do. In a way, Jill envies Molly for having some of her childhood left to spend with their father when he comes home. Jill has already left a lot of hers behind. But, she says that even if Molly doesn’t look very different on the outside, she’s changed somewhat on the inside. She’s developed a more mature outlook on the world. She’s become more aware of some of realities of life and what’s important (at one point in the story, she and her friends talk about the people they know who have returned from the war permanently injured and some, like their teacher’s fiancé, who were killed and will never come back), and she’s starting thinking about other people more (Jill reminds Molly of how understanding and generous she became when Emily was staying with them). Molly just wishes that she would look more mature on the outside, too. More than anything, she hopes that her father will arrive home in time to see her as a beautiful Miss Victory!

Molly gets part of her wish in getting the role of Miss Victory, but it seems like everything is ruined when she comes down with a bad ear infection and won’t be able to be in the performance at all. Her father’s arrival home is also delayed, so Molly is stuck at home alone while everyone else is at the performance. But, just when Molly is feeling horrible and gloomy, what seems like a disappointment turns into something good when she is the first person to welcome her father home, a father who is glad to see her looking just the way he remembered her, braids and all!

In the back of the book, there is a section of historical information about the end of World War II and what happened when soldiers began returning home.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

MollyChangesHistorical

Posted on December 19, 2018January 18, 2019 by TracyC

Molly’s Surprise

American Girls

Molly’s Surprise by Valerie Tripp, 1986.

Christmas hasn’t been the same in the McIntire house since Molly’s father went overseas as a doctor during World War II. As Molly writes her father a letter before Christmas, she and her mother and siblings talk about whether or not he might send them presents. Molly is sure that he’ll send something and adds a “thank you” to the letter she’s writing, but her older sister, Jill, is less sure and worries that he’ll feel bad if Molly thanks him for presents that he was unable to send. The boys talk about whether or not any presents that he might send could be shot down before reaching them, and Brad, the youngest child in the family worries about whether Santa might get shot down, too. The children’s mother reassures them, but it’s just another sign of how the war has changed the feeling of Christmas.

Jill tries to be realistic and tells Molly that she should be, too. Jill thinks that there probably won’t be many presents this year, and what they get will be mostly practical things, handmade gifts, or hand-me-downs because of war rationing and the family’s need to be frugal. Everyone is determined to be practical and patriotic, but Molly finds all this “realistic” talk depressing. When her father was home, Christmas was always a time of surprises, and she likes to believe that, somehow, he will still find a way to surprise them.

When the children’s grandparents call and say that they won’t be able to come after all because of car trouble, and they won’t be able to bring them a Christmas tree as promised. The kids are depressed, but Molly says that they’ll just have to do as their mother told her earlier and rely on themselves to make their own Christmas surprises this year. Jill, Ricky, and Molly pool their money and go out to buy a tree. As in the Charlie Brown Christmas special, the only tree they can afford is small and scrawny, but it’s better than no tree at all.

Once they get the tree decorated, it looks much better. As they decorate the tree, Jill admits that some of her attitudes about how this Christmas should be different and more simple from others is because she really misses their father, and when everything looks the same as it did before he left, it just reminds her of how much she misses him. Molly also admits that she doesn’t really care what presents their father sends; she’s only worried that, if a package doesn’t arrive, it might mean that something bad had happened to him. All of the kids want the reassurance that their father is still okay.

The next day, when the children go out to play in the snow, they find the package from their father that they’ve been waiting for! However, there is a note on the package that says, “KEEP HIDDEN UNTIL CHRISTMAS DAY!” Probably, their father wanted their mother to hide the package from the children, but since Molly and Jill are the first to find it, they decide to do the hiding themselves, putting the box in the storage room above the garage. Jill thinks they should tell their mother about it, but Molly persuades her to wait because she doesn’t want to ruin their father’s surprise.

On Christmas Eve, the girls retrieve the box and put it under the tree after everyone else is asleep. However, that’s not the end of the Christmas surprises. Their father has one more special surprise for them . . .

There is a section in the back of the book with historical information about Christmas during World War II. Many families couldn’t be together during the war because families members were overseas and because many civilians limited their traveling during the war in order to save gasoline. In fact, speed limits were greatly reduced in order to save gas – the “Victory Speed Limit” restricted people to driving no faster than 35 mph. Public transit, like trains and buses, was often needed to transport soldiers, so civilians avoided traveling as much as possible.

People also had to get creative about Christmas treats because some essential ingredients, like butter and sugar, were rationed. People also made their own decorations. The selection of toys was somewhat limited because factories had been converted to making war materials, and many families gave their children practical gifts. However, there were still toys available, and people managed to give their children a few special surprises.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on December 17, 2018January 18, 2019 by TracyC

Happy Birthday, Molly

American Girls

Happy Birthday, Molly! By Valerie Tripp, 1987.

Molly is excited because she has just learned that an English girl will be coming to stay with her family for a while. The girl, Emily, is one of the child evacuees from London. Really, she’s supposed to be staying with her aunt, who also lives in Molly’s town, but her aunt is in the hospital with pneumonia and won’t be able to take her for another couple of weeks. In the meantime, Molly and her friends are eager to meet her, imagining her to be something like the English princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose.

The girls have a fascination for England after all the things they’ve seen in movies and newsreels. Recently, they saw a newsreel about bomb shelters in England. Inspired by what they’ve seen, the girls make a pretend bomb shelter under an old table and enjoy pretending that they are like the people in the newsreel. Molly’s brother, Ricky, says that it isn’t very realistic, and the girls say that they’ll have to ask Emily when she comes.

However, Emily turns out to be very shy and quiet. She’s pale and skinny and hardly talks at first. When the girls show her their “bomb shelter”, she doesn’t want to play in it. Molly thinks that maybe Emily doesn’t like them, but her mother reminds her that, in World War II England, bomb shelters aren’t places to play. Emily is the same age as Molly, and the war has been going on since she was a little kid. Molly’s mother points out that Emily probably doesn’t remember much about life before the war. Emily is accustomed to bombings and danger all around her, and Molly’s mother compares her to a flower “who’s not sure it’s spring yet. It will take some time for her to realize it’s safe to come out now.”

Emily goes to Molly’s school, and their classmates are fascinated with her. This fascination makes Emily even more shy than she would be otherwise as kids try to imitate her accent and ask her questions about what it’s like to see buildings bombed. To the America kids, the war seems exciting, and they want to know what it’s like to see it up close, but Emily dodges their questions.

Molly finally comes to understand why Emily is so evasive when their town has a blackout drill. When the drill starts, a siren sounds, and everyone has to go down into their basements until they get the signal that it’s all clear. Molly is surprised to see that Emily is actually frightened by the drill, but everyone assures her that it’s just for practice, not because Illinois is actually going to be bombed. In Molly’s family, it’s almost like a game, but Emily has memories of real bombings during the Blitz. As they sit in the basement during the drill, Emily explains it to Molly: the fear, the explosions, destroyed buildings, people getting hurt or killed. Molly and her friends thought it was exciting to hear about the war in newsreels, but living it is an entirely different thing. The drill and everyone’s questions about what bombings are like bring back bad memories for Emily.

As Molly comes to understand Emily’s feelings more, Emily opens up to her. The girls discover that they share a fascination with Princess Elizabeth and her sister Margaret Rose. They start playing a game where they pretend to be the princesses, dressing alike in blue skirts and sweaters. Because the princesses have pet dogs, the girls also pretend that they have dogs, using jump ropes as leashes for their imaginary pets.

Molly’s birthday is approaching, and she offers to let Emily share in her party and help plan it. She’s curious about what people in England do on their birthdays, and the idea of an English tea party sounds great to her friends. However, Molly doesn’t like the way that Emily describes English birthdays, and the types of sandwiches that the English tea with tea don’t sound very good. Worst of all, Emily says that, at her last birthday before the war rationing started, she had a lemon tart instead of a cake. Molly can’t imagine her birthday without a birthday cake. Mrs. Gilford, the housekeeper, has been saving up rationed goods for her cake this year, and it’s what she’s been looking forward to the most!

Sharing things with Emily becomes more of a trial for Molly, and when the girls argue about their countries’ contributions to the war effort, they get into a fight and Molly starts thinking that she doesn’t even want Emily at her birthday party. However, Molly’s mother points out to the girls that the war effort is a team effort. A couple of special birthday surprises help the girls to make up, including something extra special that helps Emily to heal further from the trauma of the war.

In the Molly, An American Girl movie, Emily plays a larger role than she did in the books. This is the only book in the series where Emily appears. Her story was changed somewhat for the movie, too. In the movie, she says that her mother was killed in a bombing. In the book, her parents are both still alive, and it was her dog who was killed. Molly doesn’t learn that until the end of the book when her family gives the girls a pair of puppies as a present, and Emily tells her about her pet dog who died.

In the back of the book, there’s a section with historical information about what it was like to grow up in the 1940s. It explains how women used to stay in the hospital for about a week after giving birth, and sometimes, they could hire a practical nurse to help them at home as well. Canned baby food was a new invention, and vaccines helped to prevent disease. Back then, people still got smallpox shots because the disease hadn’t been eradicated, but there was still nothing to prevent chicken pox or measles, so children with those diseases had to be kept at home with warning signs out front to tell people to stay away from the quarantined house. (Note: My father was born in 1944, the year that this series takes place, and he said that throughout his early childhood, parents who knew of a child who had chicken pox would deliberately take their children to visit and get the disease. It wasn’t that they really wanted their children to get sick, but since there was no way to prevent the disease at the time, they had to accept that it was inevitable that their child would catch it eventually, and chicken pox is somewhat peculiar in that there is a kind of age window in which the disease isn’t likely to be too bad. If you waited too long, and the child got older or even to adulthood without getting it, it was bound to be much worse when they eventually caught it. So, if your child was about the right age for getting it, in early childhood but no longer a baby, people thought it was best to get it over with so they could benefit from the lifetime immunity afterward. This remained true even up through the 1980s, my early childhood, which is why I have a permanent scar on my face from the disease. Now, there are vaccines to prevent it, although I understand that some people still have chicken pox parties in places where the vaccine isn’t readily available. If you have the option, go for the vaccine. Preventing chicken pox also prevents shingles.)

The historical section also talks about child evacuees, like Emily, and what teenagers did during the 1940s. It was around this time that people began looking at the teenage years as being a distinct phase of life, and businesses began specifically catering to teenagers.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on November 28, 2018November 18, 2021 by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Unbreakable Code

The Unbreakable Code by Sara Hoagland Hunter, illustrated by Julia Miner, 1996.

A young boy, John, is upset because his mother has recently remarried, to a man from Minnesota. Now, John is faced with the prospect of moving to Minnesota, and he doesn’t want to go. He would much rather stay with his grandfather on his farm on the Navajo Reservation. His grandfather points out that he’ll return in the summer, but that hardly seems good enough. Then, his grandfather tells him that he’ll be okay because “You have an unbreakable code.”

John asks what his grandfather means by that, and he says that the Navajo language is the unbreakable code. John worries that he’ll forget how to speak Navajo, but his grandfather says that he never did even though he had to attend a government boarding school at a young age and that the language saved his life during World War II. John’s grandfather was a code talker.

John’s grandfather tells John the story of how he became a Code Talker, starting with when he was at boarding school. The purpose of the government “Indian Schools” was to assimilate Native Americans into white American culture. They were known for forcing their students to abandon traditional clothing, cut their hair, take English names, and speak only English. John’s grandfather describes having to chew on soap whenever he was caught speaking Navajo. He was only allowed to return home during the summer to help his family with their sheep and crops.

Then, when he was in his teens, during World War II, he heard an announcement on the radio that the Marines were looking for young Navajo men who could speak both English and Navajo. Seeing it has a chance to escape, he ran away from school and enlisted. After life at a harsh boarding school, the military marches and drills were no problem, and all of the Navajos already had wilderness survival skills.

After they had completed basic training, they were told that they were needed for a secret mission in the Pacific. The Japanese had intercepted American radio transmissions and broken the codes they were using. The Marines wanted Navajo speakers because the language was almost unknown outside of the United States, not many non-Navajos had ever learned it, and at that point in its history, the language had not been recorded in writing, so there was no way that the Japanese could research it and learn it. The Marines and code talkers developed a system of code words in Navajo and military terms to use, so it wasn’t as simple as just speaking the language plainly. The system was highly effective.

John’s grandfather goes on to tell John about how bloody the war was and how his life was constantly at risk. Once, another American soldier even mistook him for a Japanese spy because he didn’t know what language he was speaking. Fortunately, one of his friends intervened and saved his life.

The code was never broken during the war, and John’s grandfather eventually made it home safely. However, the code talkers were not hailed as heroes because, for many years, the government wanted to keep the code a secret. No one was allowed to talk about it. John’s grandfather was glad to return to a peaceful life on his farm.

His grandfather’s story gives John the courage that he needs to face moving to a new place. After all, his grandfather had been to far more frightening places and faced them with courage. Knowing his family’s history gives John a new sense of his own identity and the knowledge that his identity and language will remain with him wherever he goes.

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

My Reaction and Additional Information

Even though this is a picture book, it isn’t really a book for very young children. There are descriptions of the blood and violence of the war that would be more appropriate for older children. There is a brief note from the author at the beginning of the book that explains a little about World War II and code talkers, and at the end of the book, there are charts that demonstrate how the code worked. This book is an a good way to introduce students to the topic of code talkers if they have never heard of them before.

In modern times, there is a written form for the Navajo language, and since I grew up in Arizona, the colleges I attended had classes in Navajo for those who wanted to study the language. I used to see the books for the classes in the school book stores, although I never studied Navajo myself. I met one of the code talkers once when he came to speak at our college. I believe that there are a few who are still alive at the time of this writing.

Posted on November 21, 2018June 15, 2021 by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Courage of Sarah Noble

The Courage of Sarah Noble by Alice Dalgliesh, 1954.

SarahNobleCooking In 1707, a man living in Massachusetts named John Noble bought some land in Connecticut which had recently been purchased from a tribe of Indians (Native Americans) living nearby. He planned to move his family there and start a new homestead, but with his children so young and the baby somewhat sickly, it was decided that he would travel to the new land ahead of his family and start building a new house there. The only family member to accompany him was his eight-year-old daughter, Sarah, who came along to cook for him. Before they leave home, Sarah’s mother tells her to “Keep up your courage,” something which Sarah repeats to herself from time to time.

SarahNobleFamily On the way to their new property, Sarah and her father have to camp out in the wilderness, although they do manage to stay one night with a family called Robinson. The Robinson boys tease Sarah, saying that where she’s going, the Indians will probably chop off her head and eat her or do other horrible things. Their sister tells Sarah not to worry because her brothers just like to tease. Sarah’s father and Mistress Robinson also reassure her that the Indians in the area are friendly and that they sold their land knowing that new people would come there.

The Robinsons make Sarah uncomfortable. Sarah later says to her father that there doesn’t seem to be love in the Robinson house. Her father agrees with the observation and says that the Robinsons should learn to watch their words and teach their children to do the same, adding “there are people in this world who do not help others along the way, Sarah, while there are those who do. In our home all will be treated with kindness-always, Sarah. The Indians, too, and they will not harm us.” Although the Robinsons allowed the Nobles to stay the night in their house, they didn’t exactly make them feel welcome, and both of them realize that the things the boys were saying and their rough manner were clues to the Robinsons’ real attitudes and the kinds of things the parents talk about when no one else is around.

SarahNobleReading When Sarah and her father reach the land that is to be their new home, they take refuge in a hollow place in a hillside, and John begins building their new house. However, Sarah is still very nervous and lonely. Then, while Sarah sits, reading the Bible, some curious Indian children from the nearby tribe come to see her. She reads a Bible story aloud to them, and they listen, but she when she finishes the story, she can tell that they didn’t understand what she was saying. Sarah can’t understand them, either, when they try to talk to her. She gets impatient and snaps at them for not knowing English, and they run away from her. Sarah is sorry about that because she realizes that she shouldn’t have been so irritable, and even if they couldn’t talk to each other, it was still nice to have people around.

Fortunately, the Indian children come back to see her again, and they become friends. She tries to teach them English, but they don’t make much progress at first. Even without being able to talk to each other, though, they can still do things like picking berries together.

Sarah’s father also becomes friends with an Indian he nicknames “Tall John” because he can’t figure out how to pronounce his real name. John and Tall John trade with each other, and John allows Sarah to visit Tall John’s home to play with his children.

When John finishes building the house and it is time for him to go and fetch the rest of their family, he decides that it would be better for Sarah not to make the long journey again, so he leaves her in the care of Tall John and his family.

At first, Sarah is a little worried about living with the Indians. Being friends and visiting during the day is one thing, but what would it be like to actually live with them? Although Sarah likes her Indian friends, it’s obvious that the stories that she’s heard all her life about “savage” Indians bother her, and she still has some prejudices and misconceptions to overcome. There are also the worries that often accompany children who are staying with someone other than their parents: what if something bad happens, her father never comes back, and she never sees her family again? Sarah worries that, even though the tribe that lives nearby is nice, there are other Indians who aren’t, and some of them might attack while her father is away.

Fortunately, things go well during Sarah’s time with the Indians. She finds some of their habits strange, and she notices that Tall John’s children (nicknamed “Small John” and “Mary”) find some of her habits strange, like the clothes she wears and the way she prays at night. Tall John’s family gives Sarah some deerskin clothing, like they wear, and some moccasins, which she finds surprisingly comfortable. There is a scare about a possible attack, but that passes without incident, and Sarah ends up enjoying her time with her Indian friends, playing games and participating in chores with them. Tall John and his wife treat Sarah like one of their own children.

When it’s time for her to rejoin her family, Sarah changes back to her old clothes, but they no longer seem as comfortable to her, and she decides to keep wearing the moccasins. A little of her Indian friends has rubbed off on her, and she is a different person because of her experiences. Sarah’s mother expresses some concern about her daughter having lived with “savages” (her word), but Sarah is quick to defend them, saying that they aren’t savages and that they’re friends. Her father agrees that Tall John and his family are good people who took good care of Sarah.

This book is a Newbery Honor Book. It is currently available online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

Throughout the story, various characters have obvious prejudices about American Indians, and the language used isn’t what we would use today (ex. “Indians” instead of “Native Americans” and nobody says “squaw” anymore (or shouldn’t – white people used to think it simply meant “woman” but it has other connotations as well, better to just say “woman” when that’s what you mean)), but these are fitting with the time period when the story takes place. The overall attitude of the story, especially Sarah’s evolving attitudes toward her new Native American friends, is good. Sarah begins by being frightened because of all of the scary things people have told her about Indians, but once she begins spending time with them and living among them, she sees that the things she heard before weren’t true, and she values their friendship. The parts where characters behave in prejudiced or condescending ways are uncomfortable, but you can’t have a story about improvement without someone behaving or thinking wrongly in the first place. At least, that was my interpretation. I understand that there are others who are more concerned. At the end of the story, Sarah’s mother doesn’t seem convinced about the Indians, but I like to think that experience may change her as it did Sarah. I think Sarah’s mother represents where Sarah came from but not where she ends up. I think it’s important to explain to children the historical context of the story and put the emphasis on Sarah’s changing opinions. Sarah’s experiences help her to see the truth about her new neighbors.

The author’s note in the beginning of the book explains that the story of Sarah Noble is based on the life of the real Sarah Noble, who did accompany her father to the family’s new homestead when the community of New Milford was forming in order to cook for him while he built the family’s new house. The real Sarah did live with the nearby tribe of Native Americans for a time, although the author of the story had to invent some of the details of her stay. It also says that the real Sarah maintained a friendship with the Indian the book refers to as “Tall John.” The real Sarah become a school teacher as an adult, as the Sarah in the story said that she wanted. She also married and had children.

Posted on November 19, 2018November 22, 2021 by TracyC · 1 Comment

Molly’s Pilgrim

MollysPilgrim

Molly’s Pilgrim by Barbara Cohen, 1983.

Molly has been unhappy since her family moved to the smaller town of Winter Hill, New Jersey so that her father could get a better job. In New York City, there were other Jewish girls like her, and she didn’t feel so strange and out-of-place. The Winter Hollow girls don’t understand her at all and don’t like her. Molly’s family fled Russia to escape persecution, and they’ve only been living in America for about a year. Molly still has a Yiddish accent and doesn’t quite speak proper English yet. Molly is constantly teased about the way she talks and her unfamiliarity with American habits.

MollysPilgrimSchool

One girl in particular, Elizabeth, makes up rhymes to make fun of Molly, even following her home from school like a creepy stalker, to continue singing them at her. The other girls follow Elizabeth’s lead because they kind of admire her and because she is always giving them candy.

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Then, one day, the girls’ teacher begins teaching them about Thanksgiving. Of course, Elizabeth makes a big deal about the fact that Molly has never heard about Thanksgiving before. But, Molly finds the story about the pilgrims interesting. The teacher says that for their Thanksgiving activity, instead of making paper turkeys like they usually do, the children are going to make clothespin dolls to look like American Indians and pilgrims, so they can create a scene like the first Thanksgiving.

MollysPilgrimClass

When Molly gets home and explains the assignment to her mother, she has to tell her mother what a “pilgrim” is. She explains it by saying that they were people who came from across the ocean in search of religious freedom. Her mother understands that and offers to help Molly with the doll.

However, when Molly sees what her mother has done with the doll, she is worried. The doll is beautiful, but her mother has dressed the doll in the clothes of a Russian refugee, like Molly’s family, not in the traditional Puritan garb of the pilgrims. At first, Molly is sure that she’ll be teased more than ever at school when she shows up with a doll wearing the wrong clothes and that people will think that she’s stupid for not understanding how pilgrims dressed.

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But, Molly’s mother is correct in pointing out that their family are modern pilgrims, coming to America for the same reasons that the original pilgrims did. Molly does get some teasing from Elizabeth (that’s not a surprise, since it’s Elizabeth, after all), but when the teacher asks Molly about the meaning of her doll, it leads everyone to a better understanding, both of the holiday and where Molly and her family fit in with their new country and its history.

Molly’s teacher points out that the holiday of Thanksgiving wasn’t entirely an original idea that the pilgrims invented all by themselves but that they took their inspiration from a much older Jewish tradition from the Old Testament. Human beings do not exist in a vacuum, and we all regularly take ideas that we’re exposed to and build on them in our own lives. Although Puritans were generally known for their belief in religious “purity” (hence, their name) and noted for their intolerance to different religions and beliefs, they also strongly believed in education, which frequently involves taking past ideas and knowledge and applying them toward new situations. Their Thanksgiving celebration was just an example of that, an older idea that they used for their own purpose, adapted to the lives of the people who adopted the tradition. It was their celebration, but not their sole intellectual property.

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

There is also a sequel to this book called Make a Wish, Molly, in which Molly learns about birthday parties in the United States.

My Reaction and Additional Information

The book doesn’t mention it, but the word “pilgrim” itself is also much older than the early Puritan colonists in America. Before the development of the America colonies, it referred to any religious traveler on their way to a holy place, and many people still use it in that sense. A person on a pilgrimage could be just about anyone from anywhere going to anywhere else as long as the journey has spiritual significance. The Puritan colonists used that term for themselves to emphasize the reasons why they were seeking new homes in a new land. For them, it was a kind of pilgrimage to a place where they could start again. Molly’s family came to America in search of religious freedom, just as the Puritans did. Their journeys weren’t quite the same, but they shared a common purpose and ended up in the same place (more or less).

By showing the links between Molly and her family and the pilgrims, Molly’s mother and her teacher help the other students to understand that Molly really does fit in, that her being there makes sense, and that she has a place in their class and in their celebration of Thanksgiving.

This story was also made into a short film. I remember seeing it in school when I was a kid in the early 1990s. I checked on YouTube, and there are trailers posted for this film. One thing that I hadn’t remembered from when I was a kid was that the time period of the book was earlier than the film. In the film, the characters are shown to be contemporary with the time the film was made, but the style of dress of the girls in the book’s pictures and the things that Molly’s mother says about why the family left Russia indicate that the book probably takes place during the late 19th century or early 20th century, possibly around the same time as the events in the famous play/movie Fiddler on the Roof.

As a side note, if you’re wondering why the girl is named Molly, which doesn’t sound particularly Russian, Molly is typically a nickname for Mary and other, similar-sounding, related names. Molly’s mother also calls her Malkeleh, which may be her original name or perhaps another variant, if her original name was Malka, as another reviewer suggests.

In spite of the warning on that last site I linked to about reading a book with your child that may be covered in class, I say to go ahead and read it anyway. It’s hard to say what books may or may not be used in classes by individual teachers, and if your child’s teacher doesn’t happen to use this one, it’s still a good story. Perhaps just warn your child not to say something that would spoil the ending for their classmates who haven’t read it yet.

Posted on October 12, 2018January 19, 2019 by TracyC

Blossom Culp and the Sleep of Death

BlossomSleepDeath Blossom Culp and the Sleep of Death by Richard Peck, 1986.

This book starts shortly after the previous book in the series ends. After Blossom’s old history teacher was run out of town for his scandalous behavior, he was replaced by Miss Fairweather. Miss Fairweather is a tough, no-nonsense woman who pushes her students to study hard and take history seriously. Unexpectedly, she comes to appreciate Blossom, an outcast from a poor family, because Blossom demonstrates some knowledge of Ancient Egypt. Little does Miss Fairweather know that Blossom’s comments in class were inspired by one of the visions that Blossom occasionally gets because of her psychic gifts.

Blossom experiences a visitation from the spirit of an Ancient Egyptian princess who says that she needs Blossom’s help. Years ago, her mummy and some precious objects were stolen from her tomb. The princess doesn’t seem to know exactly where her “earthly form” is now, but she’s sure that it’s somewhere nearby. She’s very concerned because she senses that archaeologists in Egypt are digging to find her tomb and knows that when they finally reach it, they will discover that she isn’t there. Rather than being concerned about her tomb being violated by the archaeologists, the princess senses that they are searching for her remains in order to venerate them, that if they find her mummy, they will take it to a place of great beauty where it will be treated with the utmost care and respect (a museum). She wants that and fears that she will miss her chance at the kind of immortality that this form of glorification, care, and study will provide. So, she asks Blossom to find her earthly remains and inform the searchers of her true whereabouts. At first, Blossom has no idea how she can accomplish that, but the princess threatens her with a true Egyptian curse if she doesn’t try.

Then, Blossom receives a clue to the mystery in the form of a beautiful Egyptian scarab that her mother found one day while she was out scavenging. If Blossom can find the place where her mother found the jewel, she can also find the princess’s mummy. Fortunately, Miss Fairweather has assigned the class special projects about Ancient Egypt, and she is thrilled when Blossom says that she wants to study grave robbers. Blossom sees this as a good way to collect some extra information about grave robbers that she can use to find the princess’s mummy as well as get a good grade in Miss Fairweather’s class. It also proves to be an excellent way to draw Alexander Armsworth into her search for the mummy.

Alexander still denies to Blossom that he has real psychic abilities like hers, even after their previous adventures together. He insists that it was just a phase that they were going through, one that he wants to leave behind. He’s been busy flirting with Letty, the class snob, and he’s trying hard to get into a prestigious fraternity so that he can give Letty his fraternity pin. Not only does Blossom think that the boys in the fraternity are a bunch of idiots who do stupid things, but the idea of Alexander giving Letty his pin as a sign of their relationship is just sickening.

Blossom is reluctant to admit her real feelings for Alexander, but the two of them are close in ways that Letty and Alexander never will be because of their shared abilities and adventures, and Blossom has a sense that their futures will be intertwined as well. Alexander is angry that Blossom is roping her into yet another supernatural escapade, but he has to go along with her project idea because he has already gotten on Miss Fairweather’s bad side and needs to do well on the project to save his grade in class.

Along with the supernatural adventure, there is also a look into the past, the world of 1910s America as well as Ancient Egypt. First, there are the traditions of stunts associated with Alexander’s initiation into his fraternity and the tradition of giving a girl a fraternity pin as a precursor to engagement (“engaged to be engaged”). Then, they discover that Miss Fairweather is a suffragette, which is the reason why she left her previous teaching job. Her feminist ideals cause problems for her in her new, small town when they become known, but with Blossom’s help, she wins over some of the influential women in town as well as a male admirer.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

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

Chapters

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The Unbreakable Code by Sara Hoagland Hunter, illustrated by Julia Miner, 1996.

My Reaction and Additional Information

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The Courage of Sarah Noble by Alice Dalgliesh, 1954.

My Reaction

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Molly’s Pilgrim by Barbara Cohen, 1983.

My Reaction and Additional Information

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