"Centerburg Tales" by Robert McCloskey (1951)

This is the 2^nd of the Homer Price books by Robert McCloskey. The book opens in Centerburg, the town which sits just a couple of miles from Homer’s home at the intersection of two highways. Mr. McCloskey has a way of getting right to the heart of the matter when it comes to children’s things, and he starts off with a chapter called "The Hide –A-Ride".

The kids in town all know and love Grandpa Hercules; whom they call Uncle Herc for short; and he is a big part of their lives as they go about their daily lives. He spins stories while they spin tops, and he manages to infuse all of his tales; true or not; with a bit of local history. In this chapter he spins an unlikely, though wonderful tale about a ride he helped to build for the Indian natives way back when.

That endeavor involved a barrel rolling down hill, which had an intoxicating effect on the Indians, but was bad for the barrels. So, Grandpa Herc invented the Hide-A Ride, which was a mechanized way for the barrel to be spun without destroying it each time. It’s kind of a Rube Goldberg contraption, with a wonderful illustration by the author for the more unimaginative. This story would probably be politically incorrect by today’s standard, illustrating just how “enlightened”; or thin skinned; we have become.

In "Sparrow Courthouse" the author spins the yarn about the time the town of Sparrow got their days and nights mixed up by following the time on the Courthouse clock without question. A stranger passing through realizes that the problem is being caused by the sparrows sitting on the hands of the clock, making time move slower in a sense. By the time the stranger is able to convince the town of the cause, they have been living night by day, and day by night. (This story was written at the beginning of the HUACC hearings and I can’t help but wonder if this is a sly poke at blind loyalty.)

Grandpa Herc has had many experiences, all of which he eagerly shares with the kids of Centerburg. Like the time he went hunting for gold in California. His adventures there with Hopper McThud are so enthralling that at one point Grandpa has the crowd so mesmerized that they are all looking at the luncheonette ceiling as he describes a cliff hundreds of feet in the air. This guy is some story teller!

One day Grandpa gets a package from Gravity-Bitties, a breakfast food for champion jumpers. This cereal is so potent that it comes with a chunk of lead to put inside your coat to keep you from jumping too far. But Grandpa is wiser than all of the advertisements and proves his wisdom by not eating the Gravity-Bitties and jumping far anyway. His point was proving that the advertising people don’t know what they are talking about. Heck, he fed the cereal to the chickens!

From Homers experiments at home to the goings on at the barbershop, these stories are emblematic of what life was like in the years after the Second World War. In so many ways we were at the acme of our strength and influence as a nation. Socially there were still kinks to be worked out in the areas of Civil Rights and poverty, but for the most part these was the best of times. And in Robert McCloskey’s books about Homer Price those times are palpable.

Dr. Seuss Week

I read in the paper that this is Dr. Seuss week, which bought me back to 1st grade and learning to read. By the 2nd grade I had already breezed through everything that he had written at the time. His books represented the perfect reward for having mastered the Dick and Jane series, which were the standard for teaching reading at the time. With a more complex story, and colorful characters, such as "The Cat in the Hat", Dr. Seuss, born Theodore Geisel, was able to make reading fun for the countless students whose lives he touched.

Theodore Geisel was born in 1904. His earliest literary efforts were at Dartmouth College, where he graduated in 1925. It was while at Dartmouth that he began to sign some of his work on the school's newspaper as "Seuss". This was a result of his having been caught drinking gin, and as a punishment he was not allowed to participate in any extracurricular activities for 6 months. After graduation, Geisel went on to become an illustrator, and writer, for such publications as "Judge", "Life", "Vanity Fair", and "Liberty", all of which were the top magazines of the time. In 1937, while on a return voyage from Europe, he wrote 'Mulberry Street", and an American icon was born.

When I got older and began to look at things like copyright dates, etc., I was surprised to find that some of his books had been written in the 1930's. I just thought my Mom was cool for knowing which of the latest books I would enjoy, never realizing that she had already read some of them when she was a child. And she used those books to teach me the value of having an imagination, while at the same time not letting that imagination roam so far as to obliterate reality. "And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street" is a good example of both Dr. Seuss's writing, coupled with my mother's wisdom.

As a kid I liked to make up stories. I still do. I undoubtedly inherited this trait from my mother's Uncle Irving, my venerated Uncle "I", who could take any ordinary event and spin it into something worthy of Pasternak's "Dr. Zhivago." That's quite a feat! If I were going to the Chinese Laundry, for instance, I would come home with tall tales of all the things I had seen on the way to and from the store. Notice that I say "things I had seen" in reference to the stories I would tell about them. The stories were based on something real, yet, as most children do, I felt the need to embellish them in some fashion. It was never an attempt at self aggrandization, but rather a child's way of enlarging my small world, and making it more than it was. Dr. Seuss made it possible for me to do this by showing me the difference between reality and my own imagination.

This was never more true than in my favorite Dr. Seuss book, "And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street". This book could have been my autobiography as a child. If I were on the way to school and a fire truck raced past, by the time I got home it was a three alarm fire that I had witnessed. If a man was arguing with another man over a parking space, I had seen a life and death struggle worthy of anything on "Animal Kingdom". In short, I was a very imaginative child. My parents called it "telling lies."

In the "Mulberry Street" book, Dr. Seuss outdoes any of his later works, with the imaginative Marco taking his customary walk to and from school, during which he encounters a simple horse and wagon on Mulberry Street. During his walk, the horse easily becomes a Zebra, and then the wagon becomes a chariot drawn by a reindeer. The chariot, naturally becomes a sled, and the reindeer becomes an elephant, complete with a Rajah riding it. By the time Marco is finished with his embellishments, the simple horse and cart have become a major procession, involving the Mayor,an airplane, motorcycles, a full marching band and an old man in a trailer house. Chinese people, and magicians, round out his fantasy. But when he gets home his dreams are laid waste when he is asked, by his father, what he has seen on the way home. In that instant, all of the colorful embellishments pass away, and Marco is left with the reality of the simple horse and cart that he has really seen.

I still have the 1937 first edition of "Mulberry Street", which belonged to my mother. And I still pull it off the shelf periodically, if only to remind myself of the dividing line between truth and fiction. But it also helps me to keep alive the bit of "Marco" that exists in all of us.