Librarian Is Keeper of ‘The List’ About Children’s Books

Dignified, amusing, bemused and dedicated Doty Hale says she alternates “between being Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-duck, being mischievous and fixing things up.”

It makes sense that the 48-year-old book lover, sports fan, college professor and mother of three sees herself in terms of characters from Beatrix Potter’s classic children’s book.

That’s because, when she’s not teaching about writing or children’s literature at California State University, Los Angeles, and Claremont Graduate School, Hale spends her long working hours here on 10th Street in a redwood cottage crowded with children’s books.

The former dwelling is a vibrant, hospitable place often filled with excited youngsters tearing around in most unlibrary-like fashion, laughing, pulling books out of floor-to-ceiling shelves, chattering, reading. This very alive old house jammed with 18,000 volumes is Claremont Graduate School’s George G. Stone Children’s Book Center, and its palpable energy directly reflects the joi de libre of its director, Doty Hale.

“Doty once told me she likes to mix duty and pleasure,” graduate school president John Maguire recalled. “It’s hard to imagine a better fit of someone who knows about children’s literature, has a strong sense of how children learn, and who also has the too rare and altogether wonderful quality of taking delight in her job.”

Hale is an extraordinarily popular teacher and administrator. It’s hard to find someone who will criticize her. Winnie Ragsdale, a retired instructor of children’s literature at Claremont Graduate School and a former director of the Stone book center, said:

“Doty is a special friend of mine, and I admire her greatly. She is very sharp, very bright, very opinionated, somewhat argumentative and quite stubborn. If I had to criticize her, I would say that Doty’s most prominent negative characteristic is that she is ardent in the pursuit of things that will put forward her own cause. In other words, she is very ambitious.”

Hale’s ambition relates to her work with children’s literature, a field for which she feels a “genuine love.” The love affair began, logically enough, when Hale was a child. It seems just as logical to her that her attraction to kids’ books never flagged.

“Children’s literature is like baseball,” Hale said, her brown eyes brightening as she warmed to a couple of her favorite subjects. “As poet Kenneth Koch said, both baseball and literature can be appreciated at many levels by audiences of many ages.” On the spur of the moment, she held out Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” David Macaulay’s “Castle” and Maurice Sendak’s “Outside Over There” as many-faceted volumes that bring thought-provoking pleasure to readers of all ages.

When pressed as to her favorite book, Hale named “Charlotte’s Web,” the warm and caring E. B. White tale of a pig named Wilbur, and a spider named Charlotte who saves Wilbur’s life before her own death.

But it took a while to get Hale to admit she even has a favorite. Mostly, she cited “The List.”

“The List” fills a 14-page booklet called “Gifts to Open Again and Again” that Hale compiled with her associate director, Carolyn Angus. It contains the names and brief analyses of about 120 children’s books in print that both Hale and Angus like. If one of the two women doesn’t like a book, it’s banished from the list. That fact accounts for the surprising absence of a few-time honored works, like A. A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh,” which Hale considers “overly sentimental and condescending to the child reader.”

Once a volume gains approval from Hale and Angus, it faces a test they consider more important and more severe than their own combined approval: at least one of the women has to have observed children enjoying the book, and repeatedly requesting it. So “The List,” which includes books for children from 2 through the high school years, passes the double muster of endorsement by young and old experts. (The list is available for $3 including postage from the George C. Stone Children’s Book Center, 131 East 10th St., Claremont, Calif. 91711.)

Doty Hale didn’t know it at the time, but she began preparing to direct a children’s book center in the small town of Buford, Ga.

She grew up there as Doty Doherty, the daughter of parents who were “great readers.” With a delighted smile, Hale recalled “the sheer excitement” of the moment on the back porch of the house on Mareno Street when she realized she could read enough to make sense of a story. “I was 6,” she said. “I was looking at a Bible alphabet book with stories in it.”

Social life in a small Southern town in the ‘50s centered around churches, to which Hale did not belong, and athletics and music, “and I wasn’t much good at those, either.”

That left a lot of time for reading between Saturday night football and basketball games and summertime trips to the town pool, where Hale went to “hang around.” In 1956 she found herself valedictorian at Buford High.

Hale enrolled in Emory University in Atlanta, about 35 miles southwest of Buford, since the campus was “close to home.”

There she fell in love with Bill Hale, who “sat behind me in a Bible class and kept murmuring blasphemous things.”

In 1960, the year before she graduated from Emory, Hale “didn’t want to be married, didn’t want to work and didn’t want to go to grad school.” Six months after graduation she was doing all three.

She was a Ph.D. candidate in English at Emory, she was a recorder for a psychiatrist’s group therapy sessions and an aide in a psychiatric ward, and she was married to Hale.

Her husband was a medical school student at Emory. When he graduated in 1963, the couple began a four-year odyssey that took them to Salt Lake City, Tulare, Baltimore, Downey and Pasadena, keeping up with Bill’s internship and residency assignments.

“I was young enough to enjoy that kind of life,” recalled Hale, who spent the time “having babies and getting ready to move again.”

Hale’s three children are Celia, 25, a UC Berkeley graduate planning to get her graduate degree in education; Eileen, 23, a first-year law student at Boston University; and Ned, 20, a junior at the University of Chicago.

In 1969 Hale completed her dissertation on “a relatively unknown British novelist named Arnold Bennett.” The family moved to Claremont that year. Bill began practicing orthopedic surgery in Pomona, and Doty began teaching English at Cal State L.A. Three years ago they separated.

Last summer while Hale was on a trip to South America, Malcolm Douglass, chairman of the Stone Library Committee and a professor of education at Claremont Graduate School, was looking for a new director for the Stone book center.

“When the directorship of the book center came open, Doty was a natural,” Douglass said. “She knows her field, she’s got a lot of enthusiasm and she’s a very intelligent woman. What more could you ask?”

Hale returned from South America in September. By October, she had accepted the job.