Joan Hoffman, who curates the Holling museum in Leslie, Mich., reports a wonderful surprise to find the two Holling knives were sent to the museum from Ron VanLerberg in Shawnee Mission, Kans.
Ron had written to me, “As for the knives, get me the address for the Museum and I can send them to them. I do not think they are worth much to anyone other than someone interested in Hollings. Maybe I can talk them out of a couple of hardcover books in exchange.”
“Lucille’s knife,” Joan writes, “came in a sheath and the handles are made from deer antlers. On the front side of the knife with Holling’s name it says in Spanish, “In my hands I fear nothing but God.”
These will make a terrific addition to the Holling collection. I believe Joan is now looking at books she can send back to Ron in return for the gift and which he can share with his two-year-old grandson.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
A Mystery Rears Its Head -- Happily
I received a Facebook note a few days ago from Ron VanLerberg in Shawnee Mission, Kans. Ron owns a pawn shop where a man brought in two knives with Lucille Holling’s name engraved. Ron wrote, “I Googled the names on the knives which brought up the Paddle-to-the-Sea book, which I remembered reading as a kid. My grandson's not quite two, but I think I'm going to order some of the Holling books for him to enjoy when get older.”
She added, “According to one of Holling's letters, he bought a silver necklace for his sister in Taxco, Mexico while there on the Walt Disney trip in 1943. Taxco is near Mexico City. Oaxaca is southeast of Taxco. This seems to establish the date.”
So, there we have it. Mystery solved with a few magic clicks in this digital age of ours.
We’ll never catalogue all of the paintings the Hollings did and all the possessions that were theirs. But, like a sketch of a mountain man Glen Webster found, a copy of Sun and Smoke that turned up in a Montana thrift shop, and a military jacket Chris Martin came across in California, half the fun is chasing down details of the Hollings’ life. The other half lies in solving mysteries.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
On the Road with the Hollings
Joan has been arduous in tracking down Hoffman memorabilia and ephemera. She wrote, “I liked the photo and didn't have many pictures of them at that age. They are a nice looking couple. The information on the back only confirmed that they were at Seattle in August of 1939.” She notes that this eBay purchase took seven weeks after “being lost in the archives.”
She mentions, “I guess the attraction was that Holling was an author and they were illustrators. Holling's books were for children, but they didn't have any children of their own. Travel with a trailer during the Depression was perhaps not all that common. They were in search of material and having a good time.”
Not the most exciting news break, but during the dog days of summer there's a dearth of news.
She continues, “One of the things said was that they had already traveled 31,000 miles. Hinman in her thesis said they traveled over 100,000 miles. From Seattle, they traveled to California and that was the end of the trip. It wouldn't have taken another 69,000 to get to Calif. That's quite a difference.”
None of Holling's books were mentioned in the article.
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Amanuensis (Not)
Lucille Webster Holling has gotten short shrift. These sympathies may be misplaced because during the early part of the last century many women found their natural talents hidden under their husbands’ fame. In politics, they were the Mamie Eisenhowers and Pat Nixons. Among children’s book writers, it may have been Lucille who toiled in the shadows.
I needed to know more Lucille’s work, particularly since I’ve been captivated by her art apart from Holling’s books. Lucille was not an amanuensis, at her master's personal service. She was a collaborator.
As I wrote in this blog last year, Lucille was born on Dec. 8, 1900, in Valparaiso, Ind. In Chicago, she designed theatrical scenery and costumes, and she drew for fashion publications.
Joan Hoffman writes, “It is my impression that Lucille's art interest was in art fashion. She attended some classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, but I don't believe she finished a program there.”
A mutual friend introduced Holling to Lucille and her sister who had an art studio in the city. Lucille remembers sharing a nice date at a Chinese restaurant, but it wasn’t until she attended the Art Institute the following year that Holling was re-introduced to Lucille during one of the girls’ open houses. That night, Holling and Lucille planned a world tour and began seeing each other steadily.
While Holling grew up in rural Michigan in a large family of devoted Methodists, Lucille was in some ways his opposite. She was a city girl whose father and a baby brother died early. There was no apparent religious observance, although her personal Bible is among UCLA’s archives. She had the one older sister, mentioned earlier, who was also an artist but unstable.
Joan Hoffman reflects, “I'm not sure that Lucille regretted her choices. The one thing she seemed to have regretted in later life was Holling's referring to home as the time back in Michigan growing up and not the home she made for him. Holling reflected a lot on his early life in letters to family. That has been a plus for me; it has given me a rich source for that period in his life that would not otherwise have been available.”
Still, they were married in 1925. The following year, the couple went on the first University World Cruise, where she designed for the drama department.
Joan Hoffman notes that Lucille made specific contributions to two Houghton Mifflin books. In Pagoo all those microscopic drawings are hers and her name appears along with Holling's as illustrator on the title page. In the acknowledgment for Tree in the Trail, Holling gives Lucille credit for helping to complete the illustrations, research trail data and design the colored map at the end.
Aside from Holling’s books she illustrated, one painting stands out. A bi-plane over the coast of Hawaii was completed in 1928. Kimo, written by Alice Cooper Bailey and illustrated by Lucille, tells the story of young boy whose grandmother was the doomed Queen of Hawaii. The biplane was used to bring long parted members of the royal family back together, who had been living on two different islands following the American takeover of the islands
Lucille went on to illustrate The Book of Indians (1935). Choo-Me-Shoo (1928), and Children of Other Lands (1933) by Watty Piper. There were also postcards of Indian dancers (1941), six full color illustrations done by Lucille when she and her husband undertook an assignment in Texas. These are like the Indian dancers [Holling] painted at the new Hilton Hotel in Lubbock, Texas, at the end of 1929. Holling has reportedly said Lucille “drew women and children better than I do.”
While Lucille’s work gets less recognition than her husband’s, the partnership and collaboration made each other’s work greater than they might have been apart.
 |
Bi-plane over the coastline of Hawaii (1928), a vivid plein air painting.
|
Lucille Webster Holling has gotten short shrift. These sympathies may be misplaced because during the early part of the last century many women found their natural talents hidden under their husbands’ fame. In politics, they were the Mamie Eisenhowers and Pat Nixons. Among children’s book writers, it may have been Lucille who toiled in the shadows.
I needed to know more Lucille’s work, particularly since I’ve been captivated by her art apart from Holling’s books. Lucille was not an amanuensis, at her master's personal service. She was a collaborator.
As I wrote in this blog last year, Lucille was born on Dec. 8, 1900, in Valparaiso, Ind. In Chicago, she designed theatrical scenery and costumes, and she drew for fashion publications.
Joan Hoffman writes, “It is my impression that Lucille's art interest was in art fashion. She attended some classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, but I don't believe she finished a program there.”
A mutual friend introduced Holling to Lucille and her sister who had an art studio in the city. Lucille remembers sharing a nice date at a Chinese restaurant, but it wasn’t until she attended the Art Institute the following year that Holling was re-introduced to Lucille during one of the girls’ open houses. That night, Holling and Lucille planned a world tour and began seeing each other steadily.
While Holling grew up in rural Michigan in a large family of devoted Methodists, Lucille was in some ways his opposite. She was a city girl whose father and a baby brother died early. There was no apparent religious observance, although her personal Bible is among UCLA’s archives. She had the one older sister, mentioned earlier, who was also an artist but unstable.
Joan Hoffman reflects, “I'm not sure that Lucille regretted her choices. The one thing she seemed to have regretted in later life was Holling's referring to home as the time back in Michigan growing up and not the home she made for him. Holling reflected a lot on his early life in letters to family. That has been a plus for me; it has given me a rich source for that period in his life that would not otherwise have been available.”
Still, they were married in 1925. The following year, the couple went on the first University World Cruise, where she designed for the drama department.
Joan Hoffman notes that Lucille made specific contributions to two Houghton Mifflin books. In Pagoo all those microscopic drawings are hers and her name appears along with Holling's as illustrator on the title page. In the acknowledgment for Tree in the Trail, Holling gives Lucille credit for helping to complete the illustrations, research trail data and design the colored map at the end.
Aside from Holling’s books she illustrated, one painting stands out. A bi-plane over the coast of Hawaii was completed in 1928. Kimo, written by Alice Cooper Bailey and illustrated by Lucille, tells the story of young boy whose grandmother was the doomed Queen of Hawaii. The biplane was used to bring long parted members of the royal family back together, who had been living on two different islands following the American takeover of the islands
Lucille went on to illustrate The Book of Indians (1935). Choo-Me-Shoo (1928), and Children of Other Lands (1933) by Watty Piper. There were also postcards of Indian dancers (1941), six full color illustrations done by Lucille when she and her husband undertook an assignment in Texas. These are like the Indian dancers [Holling] painted at the new Hilton Hotel in Lubbock, Texas, at the end of 1929. Holling has reportedly said Lucille “drew women and children better than I do.”
While Lucille’s work gets less recognition than her husband’s, the partnership and collaboration made each other’s work greater than they might have been apart.
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Unforgettable Minn
By Brad Fisher
In 1951, Holling Clancy Holling muddied the waters of fiction and nonfiction and came up with a winner of a tall tale.
A snapping turtle, like the heroine of Holling Clancy Holling’s Minn of the Mississippi encountered in the wild, is a primeval, elemental thing. Even if she doesn’t bite you, she’s going to leave a mark. Her cragged, mossy back, long dinosaur tail and cruel predator’s jawline warn you that she is no dime-store pet. She is an ancient, alien intelligence that will take your arm — clean off — if she’s so inclined. Or, as in the fevered nightmare of a hapless human who meets Minn in her native element, she may just grab you by the belly and split you like a melon.
My own unforgettable encounter with Holling’s river monster took place at a suburban Seattle library in the summer of 1961. It wasn’t face to face, it wasn’t in the field, but it was memorable nonetheless.
Minn was ten years old at the time. I was nine, and was allowed, with a friend, to walk the half mile to the library. Our path cut across a hayfield and a blueberry farm, affording us irrigation ditches and filled-up tractor ruts that teemed with frogs and salamanders, which we often captured to bring home.
And perhaps it’s that casual, wet, green context that made Minn stick in the back of my mind for most of my life.
For Minn is nothing if not watery and green. The story of a snapping turtle who journeys the length of the Mississippi, Minn takes place under water much of the time. And so Holling’s lush, full-page watercolor illustrations run the spectrum from teal to emerald to rich gold and olive, fading into brown. His black-and-white margin illustrations of hatching turtle eggs and mighty watersheds are lush and wet even without color.
Minn was one of five well-known books that Holling wrote over a 15 year period that successfully combined natural history, geography, geopolitical history and and engaging fiction: Paddle to the Sea, The Tree in the Trail, Seabird and Pagoo. The best known books of his career, they won numerous awards and were touted in the elementary schools of the fifties and sixties. They’re all still in print, fueled by their popularity in home school curricula.
All of these wonderful books have in common a natural blend of fiction and nonfiction, art and narrative, reality and imagination. In Minn of the Mississippi, Holling found a way to create a current of history, geology, hydrology, geography, and nature that flowed with the main character on her life’s journey from Minnesota to New Orleans. To capture young imaginations, Holling used a legacy of nature writing by authors like Ernest Thomson Seton and others, who could personify, without anthropomorphizing, an animal like a grizzly bear or a snapping turtle. Holling maneuvers deftly from snapper to human perspective and back to suit his narrative and educational goals. His margin drawings compare the geographic shapes carved by the great river system to animals, people and objects in a way that forever changes the way you look at a map of the country. And his lush watercolors of everything from pirate treasure to pre-Columbian Indian mounds and riverine nightmares paint Minn’s world in vivid layers soaked in color. Caught in this enchanting stream, a nine-year-old boy would hardly know he was learning about the commerce and natural history of one of the world’s great watersheds.
Minn was the penultimate book in Holling’s series. It was not the most famous. That claim went to Paddle-to-the-Sea, which won a Caldecott Honor Book award, was made into a movie, and now claims its own amusement park in Canada. Minn, like its stolid, ungainly, under-the-surface heroine, left the limelight to others.
But you don’t want to underestimate the grip of an alligator snapping turtle. Minn hibernated under the surface of my childhood memories, staying buried until my own children reached the age of fascination with small creatures. We bought dozens of books to read to them, selecting from what was current at the time. Then one day, on a trip to the local library of our hometown in suburban Pittsburgh, Minn stirred in my imagination. This was the early nineties, so they still had a card catalog, and sure enough, the book was there. Perfect for a read to my young kids.
But not.
My eight-year-old son fell asleep. My five-year-old daughter wrinkled up her nose and demanded something different. Something with ponies. Not great.
I persisted for a few months, dragging out a paperbound copy that I’d bought. But at some point it became obvious that Holling’s lush art and equally vivid narrative would be lost on this generation, to judge by my kids, at least. My persistence became a family joke, an indication of how out of touch Dad was. And so I let Minn slip away.
Pity. Because, living in Pittsburgh, we might as well be in Minn’s back yard. After fifty years of our own peregrinations, my wife and I have spawned and raised our own brood of little snappers in the Ohio River watershed, in the heart of the great American network of Mississippi headwaters. (Coincidence? Perhaps.) The birthplace of environmentalist Rachel Carson, this is habitat for snappers like Minn, as well as great river catfish, muskellunge, steelhead, hellbenders and other primitive murky creatures ... different and perhaps more essentially American than the tree frogs and newts of my rain-washed childhood home in the Pacific Northwest. It’s also a combination of industrial and post-industrial watershed ... something Holling described without bias or romance in Minn of the Mississippi.
But times change. There are no hayfields or blueberry farms where we live, and water creatures are more likely to be something you encounter in a book than a mud puddle.
If you pick up the book, that is.
But there may be hope. I’ve been reading articles about the “Common Core” curriculum being proposed for public schools. There’s a fierce debate over how much fiction kids should read, and how much nonfiction — nonfiction being seen as important to the kind of analytical reading kids will have to do in the real world of desks and computers. I have no dog in that fight, although my daughter, who’s grown up and now preparing to be a high school English teacher, does. She’s the one who wrinkled up her nose at Minn and its gripping blend of fiction and nonfiction back in 1992.
Maybe I’ll get her to read it this time around.
Brad Fisher is a principal in the Pennsylvania public relations and advertising firm, B.R. Fisher. He’s a follower of this Holling blog, and we’re happy he offered us this charming memoir.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Holling for the Humanities in Schooling
All well and good if you want to catch the overnighter to Buffalo or bake a pie, but aren’t there more exciting, charming or inviting subjects? It’s easier to impart knowledge in a congenial, inviting manner than by force feeding children with turgid texts.
In researching the effect Holling has had I’ve been struck by the many recommendations for using his books for home schooling. Somewhat more than 2 percent of school-age children K-12 are home schooled. Their parents’ reasons are objections to school environment, desire for religious instruction and hopes for better education. Perhaps they also want to choose texts that are more enriching than this “Common Core.”
Beautiful Feet Books (at http://bfbooks.com/) believes that “the best children’s literature can both educate and inspire.” One of the popular products of this bookseller is its Geography Through Literature study guide and map set. It accompanies Holling’s Paddle-to-the-Sea, Tree in the Trail, Seabird and Minn of the Mississippi.
Literature is a significant part of home schooling. It’s obvious to even the casual reader that Holling’s story lines and splendid art and illustrations are guides that can introduce elementary students to a world of naturalism, the geography of America and the cultures that formed our country.
Another often-overlooked reason why Holling’s work succeeds in attracting children is its reading index. His Flesch Reading Index score is 75.2, meaning that 90% of other vocabulary is harder. Similarly, only 5% of Holling’s words are “complex. His vocabulary choices have just 1.4 syllables per word. (Difficult or foreign words are spelled phonetically.) And, there are an average of just 12.3 words per sentence.
Education fads swing into and out of favor, but currently there is great stress on the scientific and technical at the expense of the humanities. While we need mathematically adept professionals, it would be wonderful if there were an equal number of children who grow up making the liberal arts and literature a cornerstone of their lives.
Holling’s sidebar illustration from Tree in the Trail can’t help but capture a young student’s imagination.
The field of education is going through a massive reassessment, and students are being barraged with tests, studying for tests, and remedial reading to pass those tests. For good or ill, there’s a growing concentration on having students read non-fiction. Sara Moshe writes in this week’s New York Times that educators are foisting “historical documents, scientific tracts, maps, and other ‘informational texts’ like recipes and train schedules” onto beleaguered students.
All well and good if you want to catch the overnighter to Buffalo or bake a pie, but aren’t there more exciting, charming or inviting subjects? It’s easier to impart knowledge in a congenial, inviting manner than by force feeding children with turgid texts.
In researching the effect Holling has had I’ve been struck by the many recommendations for using his books for home schooling. Somewhat more than 2 percent of school-age children K-12 are home schooled. Their parents’ reasons are objections to school environment, desire for religious instruction and hopes for better education. Perhaps they also want to choose texts that are more enriching than this “Common Core.”
Beautiful Feet Books (at http://bfbooks.com/) believes that “the best children’s literature can both educate and inspire.” One of the popular products of this bookseller is its Geography Through Literature study guide and map set. It accompanies Holling’s Paddle-to-the-Sea, Tree in the Trail, Seabird and Minn of the Mississippi.
Home School Discount Products (at http://www.homeschooldiscountproducts.com/) also recommends four of those books plus Pagoo. Its employees are all home-schooled or are parents who home-school their children.
Literature is a significant part of home schooling. It’s obvious to even the casual reader that Holling’s story lines and splendid art and illustrations are guides that can introduce elementary students to a world of naturalism, the geography of America and the cultures that formed our country.
Education fads swing into and out of favor, but currently there is great stress on the scientific and technical at the expense of the humanities. While we need mathematically adept professionals, it would be wonderful if there were an equal number of children who grow up making the liberal arts and literature a cornerstone of their lives.
Holling’s sidebar illustration from Tree in the Trail can’t help but capture a young student’s imagination.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
New Release Published
A new book has just been published that includes Holling Clancy Holling. Ink Trails, Michigan’s Famous and Forgotten Authors has been written by Dave and Jack Dempsey, brothers who are both established authors. Sixteen other authors are profiled.
Joan Hoffman mentioned this to me, and recalls, “I met Jack two years ago as he was looking for Holling Corners [where HCH was raised]. It is not a place you would easily find because that’s one of the local names long since discards.”
You can find the book at Amazon.com and other retailers ($14.41, available also for Kindle). Jack Lessenberry, senior political analyst at Michigan Radio, said, this is “a book that belongs on every Michigander’s shelf — after it has been devoured. I learned a great deal about several authors I’d long long admired…and more about fascinating people I have yet to discover.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
