Not long ago, I mentioned a series of books from my childhood to someone and asked if they had ever heard of them. Somewhat surprisingly, they hadn’t. That got me thinking about all the books I enjoyed reading as a child, adolescent and teen and if anyone had heard or read any of those as well. That’s where the idea for this two-part series came from. Not only to reminisce over books I enjoyed in my youth but to look at them now with adult eyes.
Hopefully, you remember summer reading programs from your childhood. Before Pizza Hut took over summer reading in 1985 with their “Book It” program (encouraging literacy and reading in exchange for free pizza), my local library, my schools and and another pizza joint in my hometown, Ken’s Pizza, had similar type programs where they would give away prizes to kids who read a certain amount over the summer. That’s where our title comes from. I won’t be giving you any prizes for having read any of the books I’ll be talking about this month but I would love to hear from you if you happened to have read some of the more obscure or lesser known books I list off. Are you ready? Here we go…
I wasn’t what you would call an avid reader when I was a child but I read quite a bit. Some of the first books I remember reading and enjoying were by the late, great Beverly Cleary. By her own admission, Ms. Cleary wanted her books to focus on and depict the everyday lives of children. I found most of her characters very related but no more so than Henry Huggins. Ms. Cleary, a librarian before she started writing full time, wrote the first Henry Huggins book in 1950, in response to the boys in her library searching for books “about boys like us.” I remember identifying with the way Henry thought at times and with the way he acted. When someone didn’t like his dog he took that as a personal offense because, in his view, if you didn’t like his dog you didn’t like Henry. Made perfect sense to me. There are five books in the Henry Huggins series but my three favorites are: Henry Huggins, Henry and the Clubhouse (because several of my friends had clubhouses either in their backyards or near their houses) and Henry and Ribsy.
The other two Cleary books that I loved as a child were The Mouse and The Motorcycle and Runaway Ralph. The two books tell the story of Ralph S. Mouse, a house mouse that is able to speak to children and goes on adventures riding his miniature toy motorcycle. Like most boys my age, I had an abundant collection of Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars. While it was usually the sports cars that got the most play, I had two matchbox motorcycles that I loved. One happened to be a little roadster much like the one on the cover of The Mouse and The Motorcycle. When Keith (the boy in the book) and Ralph first speak, Ms. Cleary writes, “Neither the mouse nor the boy was the least bit surprised that each could understand the other. Two creatures who shared a love for motorcycles naturally spoke the same language.” I had the joy of re-reading Motorcycle when I was in my 40’s and this quote hit me in an entirely different way as an adult. I’ve reread it several times since.
Another set of books I started reading around this same age was the Choose Your Own Adventure series. If you’ve never seen these, the stories are formatted so that, after a few pages of reading, the reader faces two or three options, each of which leads to further pages and further options, and so on until they arrive at one of the many story endings. According to an article written by Christian Swinehart:
“The number of endings varies from as many as 44 in the early titles to as few as 7 in later adventures. Also, there is no clear pattern among the various titles regarding the number of pages per ending, the ratio of good to bad endings, or the reader’s progression backwards and forwards through the pages of the book. This allows for a realistic sense of unpredictability, and leads to the possibility of repeat readings, which is one of the distinguishing features of the books.”
For the most part, I remember them being mindless but extremely entertaining reads. They were big hits at the Scholastic Book Fairs that happened quarterly at my school. My favorite title would have to be The Lost Jewels of Nabooti, wouldn’t you agree?
In the summer of 1982. I was twelve and it was the first summer that I was allowed to just ride my bike all over the place. My friends and I would usually take off mid-morning and explore our area of town in a 2-3 mile radius of our neighborhood. One of the places we would go was, at the time, the biggest shopping center on our side of town, Eastland Center. There were several attractions for us there: a two-screen theater, a t-shirt shop (remember those?), a trading card store and a bookstore, Betty’s Book Rack. We spent a good amount of time in those three stores but the one store that seemingly indulged our presence the most was Betty’s Book Rack. It wasn’t a large store, semi-multilevel with racks and dark wood shelves full of books that were arranged in such a way that they formed little corner nooks here and there. In one of those little nooks is where I discovered a book series called The Three Investigators.
The Three Investigators were created by Robert Arthur, who wrote the first few books and then oversaw and edited the rest of the series. Arthur installed Alfred Hitchcock as the patron of the team made up of Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews. Hitchcock would introduce each case, and often called the boys in to set them off on their latest adventure. The boys, who lived in a small town on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, used their spare time to solve any riddles, enigmas and mysteries that came their way. Their motto was “We Investigate Anything”. Pete and Bob lived with their parents while Jupiter lived with his aunt and uncle who owned and operated The Jones Salvage Yard, a fabulous junkyard where one can find almost anything. Headquarters for the team was a damaged mobile home trailer within the salvage yard (which had been cleverly hidden from view by stacks of junk which surrounded it) and was accessible only by several secret passages and hidden entrances.
After I discovered the series, I sat in that corner many times and read an entire book little by little every time we went to the bookstore. One day my friends actually left me behind because I was so enthralled with reading that first book. There were a couple of dozen books in the series and I eventually read all of them. My favorite part of their universe was probably their headquarters hidden in the junkyard. We had a little hideout in a wooded area near our neighborhood. Nothing as elaborate as the one in the books but my buddy, Jeff (who was also hooked on the books), and I dreamed of making it that way. In sixth grade, one of our class projects was about writing a book. We were to write an outline of the book then we eventually wrote the first chapter. My choice, of course, was writing a Three Investigators book. I remember titling it The Mystery of The Wooden Indian but for the life of me I can’t remember the outline.
Not long after this, someone gave me a book set of The Chronicles of Narnia. In much the same way that other people my age fell in love with J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, I fell in love with Narnia. The Lion, The Witch And the Wardrobe appealed to me immediately probably because I’ve always had a fondness for stories centered around a world hidden within our own (which may explain my strange fondness for shows like Fraggle Rock.) My second favorite book in the series is The Horse And His Boy.
I was also playing D&D at the time. I wasn’t heavily into it like some of my friends but I played occasionally. Also around this time, the “satanic panic” was gearing up. If you’ve read other articles I’ve written you’ll remember that I grew up in the evangelical church culture. One Sunday night, some chicken breath preacher came to our church and made his “Satan is in everything your kids are doing” presentation. After that, D&D was off limits but because there were supposed “biblical undertones” in the Narnia series, my youth pastor declared they were still suitable for consumption. While I didn’t really catch the Christian undertones until I was well into my adult years, it never made sense that D&D was out but these books weren’t. In my mind, they contained the same type of content (strange individuals, magic, anthropomorphic creatures, etc.) and neither compelled me to sacrifice pets or murder my family. I’ve reread this series several times over the years and still love it so much.