Finding "Lost Times"

So, looking for the "Terrapin Turtle of Zanzibar," I ran across this story that I'd been looking for in a vague way for a few years. The first time I read it was in Fourth Grade (about 1973), and what impressed me at the time was an illustration that accompanied it.

It's the story of four children whose habit of wasting time puts them in the power of four wizards who mean to steal their time to become young again. The picture that fascinated was the evil magicians who have momentarily become young, their angry staring eyes and grim expressions contrasting horrifyingly with their youthful forms. Once more I had no memory of the title or author, so a few difficulties there.

While riffling through the Loganberry "Find A Book" site, I read the description of the story, and knew I'd found it. It was "The Tale of Lost Times" (sometimes translated as "The Tale of Stolen Time"), a Russian story, first published in 1940, and even adapted into a movie in 1964. The author's name is Evgeny Schwartz (or Yevgeny Schwarz, or Evgeniy Shvarts, depending on who you ask). Haven't found the picture that so affected me, but there it is.

Thinking About Another Old Book

Once more ancient memories have been teasing my brain. I don't know if it's the season, or what, but I've been remembering a couple of old stories I read back in third grade or so, stories whose name and author elude me.

The details I recall are few. As I remember it, these were animal stories where the animals acted like humans, but were drawn in a very realistic manner. One of the books was mainly about mice; the other had more of a mix of creatures.

In the latter tale, a group of homeless animals come across an abandoned castle or great house. They decide they will live there, pretending to be its lord's servants. I remember a mouse in fancy dress, carrying a ring of keys, saying something like "I am his lordship the [something like the Duke of Carrabas]'s Master of Keys." There was also a song sung (by the pretend minstrel, I suppose) called "The Terrapin Turtle of Zanzibar." It began:

"The Terrapin Turtle of Zanzibar
Rode a tricycle and smoked a cigar..,"

There was an illustration of this.

All searches so far have turned up nil. If anybody out there has a clue, or knows what I'm talking about, I would appreciate any information you could supply.

Reader's Digest Great Stories For Young Readers (1969)

On May 18 of last year I wrote a post about my search for a book that I had read way back in the early Seventies, when I was about nine or ten. I knew I had read it at the house of one of my aunts. I had a pretty strong memory that it was from Reader's Digest (she had a ton of Reader's Digest books; I think she belonged to some club). I remembered some of the stories I had read in it, especially some with illustrations that had made an impression on me. I put down every detail I could remember about it, and asked for any help that anyone who saw the post could give. I got no replies, which isn't very surprising (my readership isn't very broad, though I like to think it's choice), but I kept searching periodically, and hoping.

Finally last week my Googling brought up a listing from a library that looked very promising; it showed the contents of a book that matched in every way my memory of that long-ago volume. This was the Reader's Digest Great Stories For Young Readers. A quick check on Amazon found a copy offered as "Good" (for $1.78!), and it wasn't long before I had ordered it and it was on it's way. I wasn't absolutely sure it was the right book until I actually opened the box yesterday, flipped through the pages, and saw the well-remembered pictures of forty years ago.

The book contains many childhood favorites of old. Stories of King Arthur, Robin Hood, Till Eulenspiegel, Anansi, Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Johnny Appleseed, as well as Hindu, Finnish, Dutch, and old Greek legends are here. Excerpts from Mr. Popper's Penguins, Ben and Me, Rabbit Hill, and Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang are included. Authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oscar Wilde, Carl Sandburg, Rudyard Kipling, Isaac Asimov, A. A. Milne, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and James Thurber are represented. There are many illustrations by one of my personal favorite artists, Darrelll K. Sweet. All in all there are seventy stories, but I would like to describe the four that really stuck with me down the years.

Ichabod Paddock, by Josef Berger (Jeremiah Digges), with an illustration by Charles Gehm. A re-telling of the folk-tale about a New England whaler and his adventures with a mermaid/witch in the belly of a whale. I must admit that although I had remembered the composition of the picture I had forgotten the style, which is that sort of Sixties macabre with purple, blue, and orange.

Three Young Men and Death, by Geoffrey Chaucer, retold by Jennifer Winwood, with an illustration by Jean-Leon Huens. Three drunken youths decide to find Death and kill him. An old man tells them he saw Death down the road under a tree; when they get there they find a golden treasure. They quickly forget their plan, but greed ensures that all three do indeed find Death. I remember thinking at the time that the one with the long chin looked like Dick Van Dyke.

O'Halloran's Luck, by Stephen Vincent Benet, with an illustration by John Falter. Another of Benet's American fantasies, about an Irish railroad man who disguises a leprechaun as his nephew so that both can fulfill their destinies. I didn't remember this story, although I remembered the picture, but had forgotten it belonged to this book. The peculiar image of shaving a leprechaun in the wild at night tends to stick with you.

The Devil's Hide, a Finnish folk-tale retold by Parker Fillmore, with another illustration by Jean-Leon Huens. Erkki makes a deal with the Devil to work for him until one of them loses their temper; then the winner gets enough of the other's hide to sole a pair of boots. The Devil is crafty, but Erkki shows that he really knows how to irk. It was hard getting a scan of the picture because it spanned two pages, but I wanted to show that crazy cat in all his glory.

And so another childhood memory is found and nailed down. It was curious to see what had stayed and what had slipped around in my mind: the firm general impressions, and the twitchy, flitting details. There are apparently other editions of Great Stories For Young Readers for different years, but it was this one that was the particular bottle for my time, the one that I can open and enjoy the taste and fragrance of a long-past era.

Mr. Rabbit, Mr. Rabbit

Rabbits have been much on my mind of late, starting with the Chinese New Year last month. According to that system we are in the Year of the Rabbit; more specifically, the Year of the Golden (Metal) Rabbit, for not only does their horoscope cycle through twelve signs every twelve years, but each sign cycles through the five Chinese alchemical elements of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. So it takes a larger cycle of sixty years before each specific sign (like Golden Rabbit) comes around. I myself was born in a Water Rabbit Year, and I find that the traits ascribed to such a person fit me more that the aggressive, outgoing character of a Leo which I am strapped with under the Western system: as a Water Rabbit I am creative, compassionate, home-loving, avoiding of confrontation, conservative, outwardly calm with a passionate core, and easily taken advantage of. The sign of the Rabbit is one of the luckiest ones, though this is a bad year for Rabbits, apparently.

Anyway, last month, on the Chinese New Year, when rabbits were prominent in my consideration, I decided to once again look for George, a book I've always remembered from when I was ten. It's about a rabbit named George, who wears glasses and helps a brother and sister with their life. It was an obscure little volume, and I'd been searching the Internet for it for ten years, at least, without a clue to author or publisher. Imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered that the world-wide web had finally been spun fine enough to catch my memories, and George, by Agne Sligh Turnbull, turned up on the radar.

Within a week I had a nice, inexpensive ex-library copy in my hands, and could see that all the details that I could remember were accurate. I read it in less than a hour (it is only ninety-four pages long, and that is with many good line drawings by Trina Hyman). When I put it down I was pleased but puzzled. It was a nice book, but there seemed nothing particularly excellent or special about it. Why had it teased and hung onto my memory over all these years?

George H., a talking rabbit who wears glasses (he doesn't need them, but inherited them from his grandfather, a Belgian hare), turns up at the Weaver household. He helps the mother calm her migraines by letting her pet him (without revealing his unusual talents); but he talks to the children Milly and Tommy, helping them with their manners, their homework, and their vocabulary; the common-sense, working father never sees George and remains sceptical till the end, when he finds George's glasses. George leaves, in best Mary Poppins fashion, when he has solved many of the family's problems.

Perhaps that's why it impressed itself so on me at the time. Perhaps I wanted a secret mentor and friend to help me with my life (and anyone who thinks a ten-year-old doesn't have problems isn't remembering things correctly or was just extraordinarily lucky). The family was just enough like mine that I could squeeze us into their situation. And the odd thing is, looking back, that even pretending at the time to have an imaginary friend helped. Asking myself what would someone like George do, and then doing it myself, helped me get through. I suppose, in a more rarified and advanced way, I still do the same thing.

As anyone who has regularly read this blog knows, I have been gathering many of the old books I read when I was a child. This has been not only an exercise in nostalgia and delight, but in an odd way one of retroactive self-analysis. When I started this entry I had no idea it would lead me where it has. But there it is.

10 Books A Day: #165

Uncle Wiggily's Story Book...Howard R. Garis...Platt & Munk

Uncle Wiggily Goes Camping...Howard R. Garis...Whitman Publishing Co.

Jack and the Beanstalk...ill. by Anne Sellers Leaf...A Rand McNally Book

Captain Kangaroo and the Panda...Kathleen N. Daly...A Little Golden Book

How The Grinch Stole Christmas!...Dr. Seuss...Random House

The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter...Beatrix Potter...Derrydale

The Munsters and the Great Camera Caper...William Johnston...Whitman Publishing Co.

The Secret of Crossbone Hill...Wilson Gage...Weekly Reader Children's Book Club

Legends of the North...Olivia Coolidge...Houghton Mifflin Co.

Treat Shop...Charles E. Merrill Books, Inc

Enchanted Isles...Charles E. Merrill Books

Uncle Wiggily books were another "fiction series" at McQueeney at about the same level and popularity of the Thornton Burgess books. Stories of the "old bunny gentleman" and his candy-stripe cane, his constant helpmeet Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, and the rascals Skeezicks and Pipsisewah were full of whimsy and fun, if laced with inevitable Lessons To Be Learned. What I particularly remember was Uncle Wiggily's automobile with tires made out of sausages, that he would sprinkle with pepper when he wanted them to go faster.

The Secret of Crossbone Hill holds a peculiar place in our family lore. If I remember correctly, we got it at an old second-hand/army surplus store, not because we really wanted it but because it was pretty cheap: in other words, a parental decision. But we all read it, at one time or another. We had two summer occupations as children. There was the week-end trip to the beach, and there was camping out in the country. We found that Crossbone Hill pretty much described the quality of those outings, the spirit of what we experienced. The old blue book even accompanied us on several of these trips. It helped develop our appreciation of nature and of the wildlife we saw. So even though it never became what I would call a favorite, it was always around and a sort of quiet influence; so much so that when I found this newer copy I had to get it.

Book Count: 1975.

The Drunkard's Lone Child

When my dad's mother was put into a nursing home, her remaining possession's were split among her children. As part of my father's portion he received several old German books that had come down through his mother's family, the Jandt's. He was never really a great caretaker, and when he passed away and I got them they had been stored in damp, dusty conditions for a while, and when I opened the tin box they were contained in, I was confronted by what appeared to be a mass of black mold. Not willing to simply toss them away I put the box in drier, more secure storage, and only recently have had the will to face them again.

To my surprise the mold seems to have dried away, and the books themselves no longer present the appearance of papier mache bricks; in fact they are so thoroughly dried one can once again thumb through them page by page. They are, as I said, all in German, and seem to be mostly works of Lutheran theology. There are inscriptions by various members of the Jandt family, and the publication date of at least one of them is 1863; it is possible these books came across from Germany with the family when they immigrated. The books (of which there are 12) are still in no great shape, being brittle and crumbly, but they are fascinating familial artifacts.

Inside one volume I found the clipping above. It had yellowed so deeply it was almost brown; there is no way to date it that I can see. A little research reveals it is a version of a traditional Ozark folk song, lamenting the evils of drink. As you can see, whoever clipped and saved it pencilled in the word "hell" on it. Why did they do that, precisely? Was it something they feared, or something they knew about personally, or did the words "no mother, no friends, and no home" just sum up for them what constitutes a hell on earth?

My brother and I had just had a long conversation about the "unknown" qualities of our ancestors. While we can know their names and dates, so little of their personality is transmitted to later generations; we speculated on what traits we might have ourselves that were passed down the line from persons unknown. Suddenly opening this enigmatic little window to the past, so haphazardly preserved, put a very big accent mark on that thought. Whoever clipped this--were they struggling with alcoholism, or did they have pious objections to drink? Or was it for poetic, sentimental reasons? We'll never know now in this world.