Books I Have Loved

Title: The Green Poodles
Author: Charlotte Baker 
First Read: Stadium Elementary School library
When: Fifth Grade (maybe even Fourth)

Over the years I've had many books I've loved, but The Green Poodles was the first book I ever went head over heels over. I took it out of the Stadium School library as often as I could. It's the story of Allan Green, who lives with his older brother Charley and older sister Ann at Pond Farm in East Texas. After their parents' deaths, they were adopted by their Aunt Lena, a dress factory worker, who wouldn't hear of them being sent anywhere else because "A Green is a Green, and Greens stick together." So when the family gets news that Fern Green, of the British branch of the Green family, has been orphaned, the only decision Aunt Lena would make is to have Fern come live with them. But when Fern arrives, she shows up with something Aunt Lena has never been fond of, a dog, a prizewinning grey poodle named Juliet. Aunt Lena has no sooner taken to Juliet than she gets ill and can no longer work. How will the Greens make a living?

 There is a mystery to be solved in the book, but it took second place to the fascinating world of dog shows as revealed by Fern and Juliet, especially obedience trials. I started researching CD, CDX, and UD degrees—a hard task back in those pre-internet days when one had to look it up all through card catalogs at the library. When Mom asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I said "A copy of The Green Poodles!" and, oh, she tried! No Amazon Marketplace back then, or Bookfinder.com. She went from bookstore to bookstore in downtown Providence and into each of the big department stores, from the Shepard Company to the Outlet, talking to people about possibly ordering it for me. Perhaps if she'd gone to Dana's Bookstore, which sold old volumes (Poodles was from the 1950s), she might have had better success, but she knew only of the ones which sold new books. And it was a sign of the times that the store employees tried their darnest to research the book and see if they could find it for Mom, all to tell her it was out of print and not available.

(It's so easy to find books today that it's hard to imagine the difficulty you had before the internet and online book sites. Later in fifth grade, I wanted a copy of Johnny Tremain. Today you can find a paperback copy of Tremain anywhere, from a brick-and-mortar Barnes & Noble or Books-a-Million to Amazon.com, and it's even in e-book format. The only copy Mom could find back then was a teacher's edition of the book that cost five times the price of a 1967 paperback. She bought it for me anyway.)

It wasn't the first book I went looking for when I found out about online sales (that was my beloved copy of Kate Seredy's The Open Gate), but it was right up there at the top. It's still a crackerjack story, and I'll love it forever.

Reprint: "Will You Be My Valentine?"

I guess we were pretty typical as mid-60s elementary school kids go.

The boys wore their hair short and parted to one side or the other. The occasional cowlick or bowl cut appeared. They wore button-down shirts—often "cowboy shirts" with piping—and pressed troussers (often courderoy in this winter season, or wool). They wore sturdy lace-up shoes in winter and sneakers in summer. The girls were in dresses, skirts and blouses, or jumpers. Short hair was popular (especially with moms who had to wash that hair), held back with a headband or a gold or plastic barrette. They wore sturdy Oxfords or Hush Puppies, or strap shoes. A few extroverts whose moms allowed it wore patent leather dress shoes and might have had their hair permed. Ringlets were still popular, too, and hair bows. To stay warm during a long walk to school or at recess, the girls often wore snow pants under their dresses; these came off in the morning along with the thick winter coats and hats and scarves and rubber boots that fit over your shoes and were stowed in the chaos known as the cloakroom behind pivoting bulletin-board doors that had corkboard on them. When the doors were closed, the best papers from that week were displayed pinned to the corkboards.

Valentine’s Day didn’t start immediately after Christmas as it does now. Yuletide was allowed to wind down past the new year before the candy started to appear, but it was only at the tail end of January and into February that schoolchildren started to gear up by surveying what classroom valentines were for sale in the eternal delight of the 60s child, "the five and ten"—Woolworths, Newberrys, McCrory, Ben Franklin, McCrory, and whatever other local store plied the trade.

The least expensive Valentines, most endorsed by Mom because of their cost, were just plain little hearts and cupids with cartoony boys and girls or animals wishing each other a happy day or professing love or affection. Girls' Valentines featured dolls, flowers, cute animals, and lots of hearts. Boys' Valentines would more likely have their youthful protagonist in a train engineer's uniform or spacesuit, or would feature trains, cars, airplanes, sports equipment, or construction equipment. Specialty cards, like those with Disney characters or the cartoon heroes of the day like Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound, or theme cards involving real-life race cars or spaceships or television programs were pricier. There was always one, larger Valentine in the box reserved for the teacher; the most common design was some sort of a blackboard with the message written in white "chalk." These were purchased and (sometimes) laboriously signed over and over for twenty to thirty classmates until the day you could dump them in the big box on the teacher’s desk. (Mom always insisted you make out one for everyone in the class, even the kids you didn’t like, so it would be "fair.") In the lower grades, the teacher decorated the box herself, usually with white or pink construction paper. White was favored since then the hearts could be made in both pink and red, and on it in red crayon would be neatly printed the grade and the teacher’s name.

As you grew older the teacher would allow the best artist in the class to decorate the big box. It was an honor to encrust the box with layered hearts or tissue paper flowers, although some students always wanted input on the design.

One February art class closest to the fourteenth was always reserved for making Valentine cards for your mom and dad and grandparents. Stacks of white, pink, and red construction paper (sometimes black was added for a cool shadow effect) were put into service. Sometimes the teacher purchased foil-like cupids or hearts to embellish each card, and lace paper doilies were always a favorite for backgrounds for mothers' cards. Some kids brought in magazine clippings of flowers to further add to the decorative effect. Twenty-five children wielded twenty-five snub-nosed scissors, folding a red sheet in half and carefully reproducing the lopsided teardrop shape with the flat side that would open up into a really-truly heart. The more ambitious children cut odd shapes from the edge and the interior of the folded heart and what unfolded was a confection in "lace" design. These hearts, plain or cut-out, were layered with smaller or larger hearts and then stacked together permanently with the inevitable paste (the flicking paste brush sending bits of white everywhere, including on the clothing and hair of unsuspecting classmates) and cheerfully crayoned with greetings.

We also cut out hearts, again both the plain and lacy variety, to decorate the bulletin board at the back of the room or on the pivoting cloakroom doors, white or red scalloped edges surrounding our best designs.

Later, at home, you would happily hand the now-stiff hand-fashioned card to Mom and/or Dad with a proud "Happy Valentines Day!" and Mom and Dad would admire it and then set it on top of the television console or on the kitchen table, leaned up against the vase of flowers Dad had brought for Mom, so everyone could see it. If you were lucky, Dad would take Mom out to dinner and you could come, too, although in most households this was postponed to the Sunday closest to the holiday. Still fresh in your Sunday dress or suit, you'd all troop out to a nice restaurant where the waiters wore suits and there were cloth napkins instead of the paper ones you had everyday, separate salad forks, and white tablecloths.

In that Valentine afternoon at school, however, you had received your own haul. The Valentine box was opened and the cards distributed. A few girls shyly smiled at a few boys, and a few boys tucked special Valentines away, their ears pink with embarrassment. There was the constant squeal of a few girls who had received sarcastic comic cards from the few whose moms had not supervised their card purchases and were sticking their tongues out at the guilty, laughing boys. Afterwards, there might be cupcakes and punch or some chocolates Hershey kisses and then it was time to run home and show Mom your cards (after carefully anointing a chosen favorite classmate with that ultimate winter Valentine, a snowball!).

Tea

For Mom's birthday:

I confess: I hate tea. At least of the tea bag variety, and especially iced tea. How does one drink something that smells that bad? Coffee was my favorite. Mom bought the local brand, Autocrat, with the little bird on the tin and the legend "A swallow will tell you..." and at breakfast the rich, full scent was as good as reveille. Even today I sniff the coffee aisles of the supermarket with delight.

On cold winter nights when the wind would have whistled through the north-facing front door if we did not have it blocked up for the season, though, Mom loved tea. And I loved the ritual.

I was usually in bed, at the center of a wooly cocoon that consisted of a sheet, two blankets, and a light summerweight blanket doubled up on top of me, pillowed on two feather pillows and clad in flannel "feetie" pajamas with socks on underneath. In radiator versus cold winter wind, the latter won most of the time. My bedroom was right off the kitchen and by lying on my left side I could look directly at the gas stove. Back in those days I walked in my sleep, had nightmares, and woke up screaming. If I was in the dark I would awaken not knowing where I was, so in my bedroom on the dresser there was a little plaster nightlight base, putty-color and oval shaped and strewn with tiny seashells. At one end a large seashell half stood on end, and inside in the grotto the shell made was a small statue of the Virgin Mary. The nightlight flooded her with light and was a warm beacon in the dark. There was also a less prosaic, grocery-story type of nightlight in the kitchen. Between them I slept comforted.

On chilly nights Mom would pad out from the living room, taking care not to wake me although I usually was still awake anyway. She'd be bundled in a quilted bathrobe and slippers over her pajamas, with a pink hairnet on, and she would go to the cupboard where the pots and pans were kept and extract the littlest saucepan, wider than it was tall and bright aluminum silver, so small only a couple cups of water would fill it. Mom saw no need to keep a teakettle; it was easier just to boil water in the saucepan and then just pour it over the teabag slumped inside the jade green coffee mug.

From the bed with drowsy eyes, I would see Mom's silhouette bowed over the stove, the bit of steam lit by the nightlight bulb, and the flickering blue gas flame, which was like a small hearth burning just for me, and quiet and safe, I fell asleep.

Reprint: "The Peter Principle"

Recalled as I slowly re-read my collection of Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries—with a digression about the best bookstore ever.

My "old friend" Alistair Cooke, who once upon a time hosted one of my favorite television programs of all time, America, introduced me to the dapper Lord Peter Wimsey long ago, as Murder Must Advertise was my initial exposure to Lord Peter when it was broadcast on Masterpiece Theatre. Needless to say, I was captivated by the jazz-age Lord Peter, who solved mysteries with the help of his devoted valet, Mervyn Bunter, who, earlier in Lord Peter's life, had saved him after he was buried in a trench during a First World War battle. Not only was he British—calling on my long-simmering Anglophila stemming from Lassie Come-Home, Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, and watching Richard Greene's Robin Hood series as a child—he was ably assisted by a collection of regulars who included Chief Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard, Inspector Sugg, the unforgettable Miss Climpson, and the stories featured such memorable supporting characters as Mr. Ingleby and Miss Meteyard at Pym's Publicity, the Reverend Venables of Fenchurch St. Paul, and the delightful Dowager Duchess of Denver, Lord Peter's mother, whose tart and funny observations were always welcome. (One of my favorite Dowager Duchess moments is from a letter she is writing where she refers to a family in reduced circumstances; "how," she wonders, "does one reduce a circumstance?") A few years later I managed to record both Murder and my other favorite, The Nine Tailors, on video from broadcast, but both copies were deteriorating and had interference since they were telecast from Boston. Later I bought all five of the broadcast stories (the others being Clouds of Witness, Five Red Herrings, and The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club) on DVD.

I was in college at the time Lord Peter entered my life, on a limited budget, and forewent schoolbooks to buy all the Wimsey novels, re-released by Avon to coincide with the series being featured on Masterpiece Theatre (Nine Tailors, which for some reason was owned by Harcourt, was luckily also re-released in a paperback edition). The paperbacks were (gasp!) the then enormous sum of $1.25 in the mid-1970s, so I ended up buying them two at the time, and had no sooner finished those two when I went to buy more.

However, this was no chore: while the bookstore situation in Rhode Island was a bit thin in those days (Read-All didn't carry a big line of mysteries and I hadn’t yet discovered the two Brown University-oriented bookstores on Thayer Street; the Waldenbooks at Warwick Mall didn’t carry all of the Wimseys, just what had been shown on TV), so the quest for Lord Peter meant I had to go to downtown Providence to perhaps one of the best bookstores I’ve ever shopped in—such a hardship!

It certainly didn’t look like much. It was located in a little storefront tucked in between boring clothing stores on Weybosset Street, cat-corner from the Outlet Company department store. The plain white banner sign over the front said simply “Paperback Books.” On either side of the door were show windows which displayed a collection of books much sunned and faded. Inside the floor was of worn linoleum, sometimes worn down to the backing, the shelves of finished but aged and worn wood. A wire rack right near the cashier featured the bestsellers of the day, but better treats were located further inside. The interior itself wasn’t very large, although the store described an L-shape and opened out to the right as you walked toward the rear. Leaving just enough room in the aisles for the average person, every other square inch of the floor was covered with back-to-back book shelves (the ones lining the perimeter of the room were nearly up to the ceiling); the cashier sat up in a large booth overlooking the store, not only to keep a weather eye out for shoplifters, but so that more books could be crammed around her.

If it wasn’t at the paperback bookstore it wasn’t anywhere. How they managed to cram such a large selection of books into such a pocket-sized store I never figured out. They carried classics for the college crowd, lurid true-crime novels for those who liked that sort, classic science fiction, romance novels, nonfiction, and an entire corner of mystery books at the back of the store. (I could still walk in that store now and find everything perfectly. The Wimsey books were on the bottom shelf in the right rear corner of the store.)

They must have had the world’s best distributor, too, because books showed up there almost a month before any other bookseller. Their media book shelves were especially appealing. You could tell when one of the television networks was going to have a movie or special based on a novel because that novel, with its photo cover, would appear sometimes even two to three months before the movie was released. Novelizations based on movies were also sold there, and I can still tick off the volumes I bought: Cromwell, Strange Report (the mystery series with Anthony Quayle), Red Sky at Morning, The Gathering, The Homecoming, Spencer’s Mountain, The Waltons...

I suspect the habitual cashier, a stout, quiet young woman, was also a closet science fiction fan, since I saw my first fanzine at the paperback bookstore, “Night of the Twin Moons,” a Star Trek Sarek-and-Amanda zine. I picked it up with some wonder at the hand-drawn and lettered cover, the pica-typed interior with more original illustrations, the stapled spine. I'd read about fanzines in a book called Star Trek Lives! but that was the first time I had ever seen one. The other note of interest was...the ceiling. Like all good stores trying to cater to the “in” crowd in the 1970s, the paperback bookstore sold posters. However, with the bookshelves along the walls reaching all the way to the ceiling, there was no room to display them. But the ceiling however–big posters of the Partridge Family, the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Bobby Sherman, and other rock luminaries of the day regarded you from above as you shopped. There were even counterculture black light posters and the ubiquitous rainbow unicorns.

So like Noah, two by two I collected Lord Peter–the store even sold the big trade paperback Lord Peter, which contained all of Sayers’ short stories about Wimsey, and was even more difficult to find. It cost...gasp!...$3.95! My mother thought I had gone mad, spending that much for a book!

(The paperback bookstore continued to be a mainstay until it was “remodeled” in the early 1980s: they added new snazzy metal shelves and carpeting, and stripped the ceiling–and took away 90% of the books. The “ambiance” and mostly empty shelves just didn’t fly. It closed not a year later.)

In the late 1980s PBS showed a second series of Wimsey mysteries, these featuring Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane and Edward Petherbridge as Lord Peter. I enjoyed Walter as Vane, but I never did warm up to Petherbridge, even if he was closer to Sayers’ description of Lord Peter, with the sleek blond hair and nondescript face. He always appeared unbearably stiff to me and terribly Byronic; I can't imagine Petherbridge's Wimsey dressing in a Harlequin costume and diving off a fountain or hanging about in Marjorie Phelps' art studio or going to the Soviet Club—although honestly I can’t imagine Carmichael’s Wimsey proposing to Harriet, either! Many Petherbridge fans say that he was younger than Carmichael and therefore better fit the role of the late 20s-early 30s Lord Peter was in the majority of the books. In fact, Petherbridge was fifty-one when he made the three Harriet Vane stories, the same age as Carmichael was when he did the first of his Lord Peter Wimsey stories. In the end, it may simply be a case of “the one you saw first,” like fans of different regenerations of the Doctor, and my money is always on Carmichael.

It will be interesting to see in the future if the BBC or ITV will try to make a new Lord Peter Wimsey series with an actor closer to the age the character was in the books.

(Speaking of film versions of Lord Peter, I have in my video collection a great curiosity, an American version of Busman’s Honeymoon, which was re-titled The Haunted Honeymoon and stars Robert Montgomery and Constance Cummings. Montgomery is the most unlikely Lord Peter you’ll ever see, although there’s a nice solid British supporting cast, including Sir Seymour Hicks as Bunter.)