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.