Jacquelyn Reinach; Co-Creator of ‘Sweet Pickles’

She read her way through her local library by age 9, decided to become a writer at 10 and grew up writing stories, poems and songs. In college she penned a musical and scripts for her own radio show. As she and her career matured, she even wrote a cookbook.

But only in 1977, in middle age, did she find the perfect avenue for her multiple talents. It started with four little books with such whimsical titles as “Elephant Eats the Profits.”

Jacquelyn Reinach, who co-created and wrote most of the “Sweet Pickles” series of children’s books, musical recordings and multimedia materials to teach children how to survive life’s little crises and to learn important moral lessons, has died. She was 70.

Reinach died Saturday of lung cancer at her home in Silver Lake, said her husband, architect Dion Neutra.

“Over the years . . . I realized that there is a common theme behind everything I’ve written--a desire to communicate feelings, even to translate hard facts into a feeling state to make them relevant,” Reinach once mused. “Some ideas seem better in story form, some in song, some in graphics. The ‘Sweet Pickles’ series is a synthesis of everything I believe in.”

From 1977 to 1983, Reinach wrote 27 books about little animals getting into various pickles and getting through them with the help of various friends. Illustrated by co-creator Richard Hefter, the books charmingly ran through the alphabet and beyond with the foibles of Accusing Alligator, Goof-Off Goose, Imitating Iguana, Jealous Jackal, Loving Lion and the rest who lived in the storybook town of Sweet Pickles.

More than 50 million of the books have been sold in more than a dozen countries.

Reinach also helped create “Sweet Pickles” filmstrip programs, a preschool activities package and several records. The helpful little animals were spun off into stuffed toys, T-shirts, hygiene and grooming products, school supplies, ceramics and gift ware. Television’s “Captain Kangaroo” featured them; Time-Life published a “Sweet Pickles” dictionary, and book clubs spewed out the materials to schools and homes.

A veteran scriptwriter for the early 1960s Fran Allison “Learn at Home” television series, Reinach was a pioneer in educational multimedia for young children.

Between 1966 and 1968, she helped the late puppeteer Shari Lewis write the Headstart books--”Knowing and Naming,” “Looking and Listening,” “Thinking and Imagining” and “Be Nimble and Be Quick.” She also helped create a revised version of Lewis’ “Lamb Chop’s Play Along Storybook.”

“The [Headstart] books are my attempt to pin down abstractions for worried mothers who get too much advice, not enough of it practical,” Reinach told The Times in 1970. Her work with educational materials, she said, grew out of her own frustrations as a professional working mother of two sons in the 1950s, far ahead of women’s liberation.

In 1970, with the women’s movement blossoming, Reinach demonstrated the flexibility of her feminism with two seemingly disparate offerings--a women’s liberation anthem that was adopted by Betty Friedan and a cookbook.

The cookbook was titled “Carefree Cooking--How to Enjoy the Leisure Life in a Beach House, Mountain Cabin, Lake Shack, Ski Chalet, Trailer . . . Country Home or City Apartment.” She wrote it, she said, to free herself from hostess drudgery and make time for fun--by poring over more than 500 cookbooks, incorporating her considerable experience and doing her own time-motion studies in her kitchen.

“It’s a cope-and-cook-book,” she told The Times, “with 300 recipes and all kinds of how-to-be-happy-though-hostess hints.”

At the same time, she was writing the women’s song “Liberation, Now!” to vent her anger after a defense lawyer belittled her in court for seeking royalties on hundreds of children’s songs she had written. The attorney, looking at a courtroom with 10 men and Reinach, said: “Why does a mere housewife waste the busy time of all these hard-working men?”

The song, which Reinach described as funky rock, included such lyrics as: “We’re breaking out of our cage of ruffles and rage; It’s time to spell our own names, we’re people, not ‘dames’; We’re more than mothers and wives with second-hand lives; It’s time for woman and man to walk hand in hand: Liberation, Now!”

Another of her songs, “The Consonant Song,” was used in a 1998 motion picture about working mothers, “The 24 Hour Woman.”

Reinach earned an award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers for “Liberation, Now!” and another for her continuing work in “musical comedy for health.” Those projects included her song, “The Family,” as the United Nations official theme song for its 1994 International Year of the Family; the video production “Heart Power” for the American Heart Assn.; and a health education video used in elementary schools, “Smoke-Free Class of 2000,” which earned her a 1994 Emmy.

Born in Omaha, Neb., Reinach weathered her joyless Depression-era early childhood in the library. She read the formidable “Les Miserables” at age 9 because her father, worried about her spending too much time indoors, restricted her to a single book from the library for a whole week. “So I chose,” she recalled of her very adult selection, “the fattest, biggest, thickest book I could!”

Educated in psychology at Stanford and UCLA, the girl born Jacquelyn Krasne worked in television production in New York during the medium’s developing days in the early 1950s. She also wrote children’s songs and books.

Years later, the profits from the “Sweet Pickles” series bought her the perfect custom-made desk to accommodate her multiple talents. Dubbed the “Pickleodeon,” it included an electric multipurpose musical keyboard, a typewriter, a four-track mixer and two tape decks.

In addition to Neutra, her fourth husband, the thrice-divorced Reinach is survived by two sons, Alan and Barron Reinach; her mother, Dorothy Krasne; a brother, Donald Krasne; and four grandchildren.

Memorial services are planned for both coasts. In New York, the service will be at 6 p.m. Oct. 24 at the Church of the Advent Hope, 111 E. 87th St.

In Los Angeles, the service is scheduled for 3 p.m. Oct. 29 at Hillside Memorial Park, 6001 Centinela Ave.

Neutra asked that any memorial donations be made to the Institute for Survival through Design, on whose board Reinach had served.