Picks of the Past

The way Harry Potter fans carry on, you’d think they were the first little bookworms to sneak out of chores and homework for the sake of a good book.

Well, of course, they aren’t, and with the next installment in J.K. Rowlings’ phenomenally popular series about Hogwart’s School for Witchcraft and Wizardry not due out until July, parents of schoolchildren might want to dust off some of the classics of their childhoods to share with the Potter-deprived.

Not that all the oldies have been shelved.

“Charlotte’s Web,” by E.B. White (1952), “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle (1962) and “The Chronicles of Narnia” by C.S. Lewis (1965) are required reading in many schools. Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries are still popular, both in their modern adventures and in reissues of the originals.

We asked some veteran children’s book authors (who have penned well-loved stories of their own) and ordinary grown-up book lovers to recall some of their childhood favorites. Happily, all the titles are still in print and generally available in libraries.

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Theodore Taylor, 78, is the author of 23 books for children and young adults, including “The Cay,” required reading in many fifth-grade classrooms. He was a terrible student, but a vigorous reader, lying in bed for up to two hours each night with the novels and short stories of Mark Twain and Jack London.

“I got my hands on every adventure story,” the Laguna Beach resident said. “The more action, the more blood, the better.”

Beverly Cleary, whose Henry Huggins and Ramona series have become contemporary classics, loved “Dandelion Cottage,” (reissued by Marquette County Historical Society) by Carroll W. Rankin, originally published in 1904. When Cleary, 83, began her writing career, she bought a copy as an homage to the author.

The setting was dated, but not the secrets, fun and trials of a group of girls who were given the key to a cottage for plucking its yard clean of dandelions.

“I had started life on a farm where my ambition was to have children to play with. That’s what appealed to me about the book,” Cleary said, speaking from her Northern California home.

Don’t underestimate fairy tales, either, Cleary added. They offer “a chance to go into your imagination.” Cleary especially remembers “The Blue Fairy Book” (Dover Publications), the first of a 12-volume series by Andrew Lang, each named for the color of its cover, originally published at the turn of the century. The stories were gathered from cultures around the world, adapted by Lang and elaborately illustrated. Many of the stories are familiar, but keep their earliest forms. The “Three Little Pigs,” for example, trot off to build houses of cabbage, mud and bricks. Monsters, magicians and mean ogres abound.

“Little Men” by Louisa May Alcott was one favorite of Granada Hills resident Marilyn Morton, whose stories have been published in Highlights for Children Magazine. But her passion was for the “Five Little Peppers and How They Grew” (Buccaneer Books), by Margaret Sidney. The series first appeared in 1881, so they were already a source of nostalgia when Morton read them in the 1950s.

“I didn’t need fantastic events or things outside the natural world,” Morton said. “The main character baked a cake from scratch on an old wood stove, and that fascinated me to think that somebody could do that.”

Huntington Beach writer John Reynolds Gardiner, author of “Stone Fox,” a novel routinely read in fourth grade, was a reluctant reader, so his mother read aloud to him for many years. A favorite was the 1941 Caldecott Honor book, “Paddle-to-the-Sea,” by Clancy Holling. A Native American boy carves a little canoe with a figure inside and launches it on an amazing journey from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.

“Ever since then, when I go fishing, I send little boats off,” Gardiner said. “I get bored with fishing, but I don’t get bored sending little boats off.”

All those lake boats the Hardy Boys cruised around in sounded pretty swell to Phil Zuckerman when he was growing up in the 1950s.

“For years, I imagined building an ice boat in my backyard,” Zuckerman said. Years later, he was disappointed when he read his favorite, “The Mystery of Cabin Island,” to his own children and found much of its original 1930s style diluted in a modern rewrite.

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The experience led him to start Applewood Books, a Massachusetts-based publishing house that reissues a variety of American literature, from pilgrim writings to early Tom Swift books, complete with original cover art of that derring-do boy scientist, Tom Swift, flying off in such exotic inventions as “aeroplanes.”

The Tom Swift books--99 in all--were produced by the same group, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, at churned out Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys. But Tom was all science, created by ghost writers who read Scientific American and Popular Mechanics for inspiration. That’s how that spunky kid knew o whip up a “Photo Telephone” in 1914.

Michael Berns loved the books, and as director of the Beckman Laser Institute at UC Irvine, is perhaps what Tom might have grown up to be in the real world. “I would read those things rather than do my homework,” Berns said.

Another boy scientist with his own book series, “Danny Dunn: Scientific Detective,” captured Karen Rutland’s imagination in the 1960s.

“The scientific stuff that he does was all very new and almost science fiction-like. Reading them now, it’s pretty hysterical because they’re so outdated,” said Rutland, the Irvine mother of two boys, ages 9 and 7. Still, her local library has several. “I’ve read them to my boys and they really like them.”

And that’s reason enough to dust off any good, old book . . . at least until the next Harry Potter arrives.