Homer Price by Robert McCloskey, 1942.

Homer Price is a collection of short, humorous stories about a boy who lives in a Midwestern town called Centerburg. His parents own a tourist camp with cabins and a filling station, and Homer helps out there with odd jobs. In his spare time, he has a hobby, building radios.

Many people remember this book specifically for the episode of the doughnut machine that goes out of control. Stories in the collection have been made into tv episodes or short films three times, and two of those are based on the doughnut machine story. (Sometimes, they appear on YouTube.) There is also a sequel to this book called Centerburg Tales: More Adventures of Homer Price.

It didn’t occur to me until I started reviewing the book for this site, but it was first written and published during WWII. The war doesn’t play any part in any of the stories in the book, but it occurred to me as a fun collection of stories that its first audience of 1940s children might have enjoyed as a break from the chaos of the world around them. Various aspects of 1940s society and culture appear in the stories in humorous ways, like the comic book superhero who resembles Superman (a character introduced in comic books in 1938), lunchrooms (small diner-style restaurants), and the concepts of advertising, mass production, and suburbs with prefabricated houses.

There is one incident that readers should be aware of that concerns descriptions of Native Americans. When the town holds its 150th anniversary celebration, Homer and his friends have roles in skits about the history of the town, playing Native Americans, and part of their costume involves dyeing their skin, which would be considered tasteless and racist in the 21st century. Their skit also includes a “scalping scene” (not really described, except saying that it “had to be modified somewhat”), which would also definitely not pass modern standards in any public performance. Because this is a collection of intentionally humorous stories, I’m not sure whether the author included this stereotypical depiction of kids playing Native Americans in a tasteless way to poke fun at such depictions or not, but I though it was worth mentioning for the benefit of people sharing these stories with children, so you know that part is there.

I didn’t notice anything particularly concerning about the depiction of black people in the book. Black people are included in the stories as members of the community without too much attention to the fact that they’re black. They’re simply part of the town, and nobody makes a big deal about them being there or refers to them by any derogatory names. One black boy finds a wealthy lady’s bracelet inside a doughnut in the doughnut machine story, and the local African Baptist Church choir performs at the town celebration.

Stories in the Book:

The Case of the Sensational Scent

One evening, Homer gets his usual bedtime snack of milk and cookies and leaves some milk out for his pet cat. However, a skunk wanders in and finds the milk. Homer decides to try keeping the skunk as a pet, naming it Aroma. Aroma helps to thwart a gang of robbers.

Case of the Cosmic Comet

Homer and a couple of friends are reading comics and marveling over a superhero called Super Duper (who is sort of like Superman). Later, Homer’s friend Freddy says that there’s going to be a Super Duper movie playing in town and that Super Duper himself will be there. Homer isn’t quite as enthralled with Super Duper as Freddy is because he knows it’s just fiction, and he thinks the stories are kind of formulaic, but he agrees to come to the movie. When the Super Duper’s car crashes as he leaves, they see that the Super Duper is actually an ordinary human who doesn’t really have super strength and can get hurt. Fortunately, he isn’t hurt badly, and the boys take their disillusionment well, profiting from the help they give him.

The Doughnuts

Homer’s aunt and uncle own a lunchroom, and his uncle is a gadgeteer with a weakness for buying labor-saving devices. One of these devices is an automatic doughnut-making machine. One day, Homer’s uncle is trying to fix the doughnut-making machine, and he asks Homer if he can finish fixing it and make some doughnuts for him while he runs an errand (really, he’s going to play pinochle at the nearby barber shop) because Homer is good with mechanical devices. When Homer gets some help from a patron, mixing up masses of doughnut dough from her family’s old recipe and runs the machine, Homer has trouble turning off the machine. It just keeps making more and more doughnuts! What are they going to do with all these doughnuts, and will they ever get the machine to stop?

Mystery Yarn

Miss Terwilliger is locally known as a great knitter. She’s taught most of the local women how to knit, and everybody also loves her fried chicken. She has two admirers who would like to marry her, the local sheriff and Homer’s Uncle Telly, but she just can’t make up her mind which she would like to marry. When the Sheriff and Homer’s Uncle Telly compete to see which of them has the largest collection of string, the Sheriff arranges for the two of them to unroll their giant balls of string at the local fair to prove which of them has more string. They also decide that whichever of them win the contest will also win Miss Terwilliger … until they discover that Miss Terwilliger also collects string and is determined to enter the contest … and she just might be beat them both. All’s fair in love and string collecting, and to the winner go the spoils!

Nothing New Under The Sun

A strange man comes to town. He seems a little odd and kind of shy. The sheriff is a little concerned about who he might be. The stranger himself just makes an odd comment about having been away from people for a long time. The stranger might be a shy eccentric, but the sheriff is concerned that he might be some kind of fugitive. The sheriff talks to various people around town, and they all offer their advice about how to judge a person’s character and what they think about the stranger. Various people say that he reminds them of someone from a story, and the town librarian identifies the character they’re thinking of as Rip Van Winkle. Could this stranger really be an old man who fell asleep for 30 years in the mountains, like in the story? If so, what’s with the bizarre vehicle the stranger has? When Homer finally persuades the man to show him his car and tell him who he is, the story turns out to be stranger than fiction: he’s a man determined to literally “build a better mousetrap” and turns out to be a kind of modern-day Pied Piper.

Wheels of Progress

Centerburg is celebrating its 150th anniversary with a public celebration and the creation of a new suburb with mass-produced, prefab tract houses (the kind made fun of in the song Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds, which “all look just the same”). The identical nature of the houses turns into a nightmare when the street signs aren’t ready in time for the grand opening celebration, confusing the townspeople.

Fun fact: The original name of the town is revealed to have been “Edible Fungus” after the edible fungus that kept the original settlers who founded the town alive. The choir in the story sings a song about it.