The Feedsack Dress

Remembering Nancy Drew at Malice Domestic

Each year approximately 700 mystery fans and writers gather at Malice Domestic in Crystal City, Virginia, to hear mystery writers talk about their own and others’ work. Most of the writers and many of the readers are members of Sisters in Crime, an organization founded by top women mystery writers to advocate on such issues as equal space for women on book review pages. They’re still working on it.

This year I’m part of a panel called What Would Nancy Do? Is Our Favorite Girl Detective Timeless? One key question that Nancy Means Wright, Susan Cummins Miller, Kathleen Ernst and I will try to answer is why the Nancy Drew series has found readers since1930.

As part of my preparation, I asked several friends (all lifelong readers and most now writers) why they read Nancy Drew. Most remembered what they felt rather than what they read. Here are some of the things they told me.

Maya Corrigan received a set from her fourth grade teacher and devoured them. Maya liked that Nancy solved mysteries using her brain. Maya didn’t like that the books contained no murders. They weren’t as scary as she wanted. One major thing for her as a mystery writer: “Reading those books got me used to the idea that an amateur sleuth could stumble on mysteries no matter where she went.”

Joyce Campbell said her father bought her a set at an auction, and she loved them. She doesn’t remember plots, but “I do remember the desire for independence that Nancy seemed to have. And, of course, she had a completely different lifestyle than I did. She hooked me on mysteries.”

Sylvia Straub recalled Nancy’s common sense and ability to mobilize kids to solve mysteries with logic and intelligence. She notes that girls were supposed to be docile and cute and grow up to be wives and mothers, and maybe teachers. “But Nancy, with her daring, intelligence and courage gave us another possibility—to do something outside the expected role.” Sylvia also said, “Reading Nancy Drew mysteries was the beginning of my love of mysteries and the intellectual challenge of figuring out a problem that involved some danger and adventure and certainly logical thinking.”

Judy Stock called Nancy “a liberated woman before anyone else knew what liberated women were. She had an autonomy that did not exist in the real world of most Nancy Drew readers.”

Is it any wonder adults remember Nancy Drew?

—Carolyn Mulford

Studying in a one-room school

With all eight grades in one room with one teacher, concentrating on your lessons can be a challenge.

In my one-room school, at least, the teacher started the day with the little ones and worked her way through each subject to the older ones. At 9 a.m. we would say the Pledge of Allegiance. Then the youngest students would leave their desks and go forward to the teacher’s desk to read aloud their reading lesson. Pupils read aloud through the fourth grade. By the fifth grade you were supposed to be a good reader.

The older students usually started their day with history, going forward to summarize what they’d read and answer the teacher’s questions.

Arithmetic followed the first recess, which came between 10:15 and 10:30. Pupils would go over the problems they’d solved and then work several new ones on the blackboard while the teacher watched.

It wasn’t feasible to teach four to five subjects (including spelling, science, and geography) to all eight grades every day. Schools alternated years of teaching fifth and sixth grade and also seventh and eighth. So fifth and sixth graders studied together—except for arithmetic. That had to come in order. If you were lucky enough to be born in the right year, you went straight through.

English replaced reading in the upper grades. My teacher from fourth through eighth grade loved grammar. I hated it. I constantly asked her to let me and my other classmate write instead of do grammar exercises. She rarely did. I learned more grammar in grade school than in high school or college. The only time I learned significantly more grammar after leaving grade school was when I taught eleventh-grade English in Ethiopia.

When I went to ninth grade in town, I worried that the town kids would be ahead of me. (Gail has similar worries in The Feedsack Dress.) They weren’t. My one-room school prepared me well.

The school also prepared me to concentrate in busy offices and noisy places.

—Carolyn Mulford

Correcting my mistake on Carolyn Keene

In a post in March I wrote about the people behind the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, the purported author of the Nancy Drew mystery series. Created in 1930 by Edward Stratemeyer, the series was shepherded for decades by his daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. As I said in a comment shortly after the post, I misremembered her last name, giving it as Evans rather than Adams. I’m posting the correction again because I detest such errors and want to emphasize the correct name.

The first writer of the series was Mildred Augustine Wirt, author of more than 130 children’s books. Early in her career she wrote as Mildred A. Wirt. Widowed, she married a man named Benson and wrote some books as Mildred Benson.

—Carolyn Mulford

Playing games at a one-room school

My sisters and I received our first eight years of education in a one-room school three-quarters of a mile from our farm. My father had attended that school, and my parents met when I mother taught there.

Well into the 1950s such schools were common in Missouri. They remained open in states farther west much longer, but few have them today.

School started at 9 a.m., but we usually arrived early so that we would have time to play before school.

With a dozen or so kids ranging in age from six to fourteen, we had to play games that children of all sizes and skills could play. One of the most popular was flag-pole tag. The cement landing, perhaps 7x7, in front of the school served as home base, a no-tag zone. If the kids who were it tagged someone off the base, the kid tagged had to stand touching the flag pole until tagged by a teammate. When every member of the team had been tagged, the game ended. A game that started before school might last through the fifteen-minute morning recess, the one-hour lunch period, and the fifteen-minute afternoon recess.

Another game we played a lot was andy-over. (That’s how we said it. I don’t know how it was spelled.) We chose sides, evening out the big kids and little kids. Each team took one side of the little white coalhouse behind the school. The best thrower on a team would yell, “Andy-over” and toss the ball over the roof. If someone on the other side caught it, that whole team would run around the coalhouse and the person with the ball would throw it at members of the opposing team as they ran for the other side. The game ended when everyone was on the same team. Those games could last a couple of days.

In the cold months we sometimes built snowmen and forts and had snowball fights. When we couldn’t play outside, we might play Bingo or individual games like checkers, but the game I remember most is jacks. The teacher cleaned off her desk for us to play on, and we had elimination tournaments. We’d start with ones through tens, go to taps (you have to tap the surface after you pick up the jack and before you catch the ball), baskets (you have to throw the jacks in your free hand and then catch the ball), and another variation or two. We got so good at all of these that we played with twenty rather than ten jacks. We had a few games with thirty and forty jacks, but the little kids couldn’t hold that many so the teacher discouraged those.

I’ve given up on tag and statue and andy-over, but I still enjoy a game of jacks.

—Carolyn Mulford

Hiding the secret of Carolyn Keene

In the 1940s, many girls would have listed their favorite writer as Carolyn Keene, author of the Nancy Drew mystery series.

What few people knew at that time was that Carolyn Keene never existed. The name is a pseudonym used by a succession of writers who collaborated with a book packager to produce the books.

The identity of the writers was a better guarded secret than any in the books for 50 years, from the first one in 1930 until 1980. The use of a pseudonym had leaked out before that, but the truth emerged as the original publisher, Grosset & Dunlap, sued over copyright infringement when the Stratemeyer Syndicate made a deal with Simon & Schuster.

For many years the head of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, Harriet Stratemeyer Evans, maintained that Carolyn Keene was a real person. Supposedly she refused interviews and photos because of her desire for privacy. Later Harriet claimed to be the author of all the books, giving credit for originating the character and first outlines to her father, who died shortly before the first book came out.

Edward Stratemeyer wrote numerous books for children, but he became a huge success by creating characters for book series, outlining plots, selling the ideas to publishers, hiring writers to write the books, and editing the books before sending them on to the publishers. Among his successes were the Bobbsey Twins, the Motor Boys, Ruth Fielding, and the Hardy Boys. Each series was written under a pseudonym, with the real writers signing a contract saying they would remain anonymous.

When he sold the idea for the Nancy Drew series to Grosset and Dunlap on the basis of brief outlines for the first five books, he hired a young short story writer and newspaper reporter, Mildred Augustine, to initiate the series. An adventurous, athletic young woman from a small town in Iowa, Mildred combined his instructions with her own creativity. She felt that she created Nancy Drew.

Mildred continued to write the books after Stratemeyer’s death, following (and veering from) outlines provided by Harriet and her sister Edna. Mildred wrote the first seven books, refused a pay cut during the depression, and came back to write books 11 to 25 and 30. Harriet wrote many of the later books herself and outlined and edited most of them. She felt they were her own creations.

An incredibly prolific writer, Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson wrote numerous other books, some under her own name, and she wrote a newspaper column until the day she died.

In the last 25 years several writers have written under the name Carolyn Keene. I’ve met two or three of them at writers’ conferences. Writers don’t like to be anonymous, but they take pride in having written as Carolyn Keene.

You can find more about the writers of Nancy Drew on the Web, but for a full account of the early decades of Carolyn Keene, read Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, by Melanie Rehak.

Reading Nancy Drew

I’ve been reading Nancy Drew books to refresh my memory and figure out why this 18-year-old heroine has thrived since 1930.

Four generations have read the series of mystery books, which now number more than 200. When I looked up Nancy Drew in the local library’s catalog, 246 titles came up.

I read about five of the books as a kid, and all I could remember was that Nancy had a snazzy convertible (thanks to a wealthy, indulgent father), no mother or siblings, some adoring girl friends, a boyfriend who came at her request and never tried to kiss her, and an incredible knack for finding a mystery to solve.

I started with the first book, The Secret of the Old Clock. The library offered an updated edition published in 1959. I couldn’t figure out what had been updated. Nancy drove around on mud roads, saw little traffic anywhere, and went to visit people because they didn’t have telephones.

Here are some of the things I noticed in this book and found again in later ones.
• She had no job, no chores, no lessons, no regular activities, no pets, and little contact with friends. No wonder she solved mysteries. She was bored silly.
• All the good people were handsome or pretty or talented or smart or all of those. None of the bad people were any of those. Her world held no shades of gray.
• All the people she helped were poor. In 1930, that was realistic.
• She was a committed do-gooder, going far out of her way to help needy strangers and slight acquaintances, and modestly accepting their effusive thanks for her efforts while declining substantive rewards.
• She found clues everywhere she went. Most were things any eager amateur detective (or mystery reader) would notice. The most scientific crime-solving tool mentioned was the fingerprint.
• She took chances, rather foolish ones at times, and suffered physically as a result. The bad guys harmed her but didn’t threaten her life.
• The police came into the picture late, after Nancy had solved the mystery.
• She did what she wanted to do despite obstacles and discouragement, she undertook her sleuthing to help others rather than herself, and she triumphed in the end.

All those are important elements, but I suspect the key to her long life was this:
No one solved the mystery for her. While she occasionally needed a little help to bring the miscreants to justice, she didn’t depend on the kindness—or bravery or strength or intelligence—of others.

—Carolyn Mulford

Raising peanuts

Driving through Tifton, Georgia, recently, I stopped at the National Peanut Museum.

Although I’m fond of peanuts and a great admirer of George Washington Carver (the Missouri-born scientist who found numerous uses for peanuts), I knew little about peanuts as a crop. My parents planted some in the garden one year when I was a small child, but so few grew that they never tried it again. No one in northeast Missouri planted peanut crops.

Georgia farmers, including James Earl Carter’s father, turned to peanuts as a cash crop when cotton failed. Americans had been raising peanuts since Europeans introduced them in colonial times. The Europeans had brought them in from South Anerica.

One reason Georgians and their neighboring states succeeded in switching to peanuts in the late 1940s was that in 1948 someone invented a combine for harvesting peanuts. It greatly increased productivity and made peanuts, raised primarily for hog pasture until the 1930s, a viable crop.

Meanwhile in the Midwest, farmers were turning soy beans into a major crop, tractors were replacing horses, and combines were replacing threshers.

The United States was becoming one of the world’s major food producers.

Carolyn Mulford

Valentines for all

Valentine’s Day hasn’t changed a lot since the 1940s. Then as now kids wonder if the person they like will show it through the choice of a card or a small gift.

In the grade schools, teachers and parents often mandated that every student give a valentine to every student in the room. The day before Valentine’s Day the teacher usually provided art materials so students could make cards for family members. A lot of mothers received red hearts with a simple “Be my valentine” or a variation of “Roses are red” written in crayon.

A friend of mine recalls decorating a brown paper lunch bags or a shoebox to put on the desk to receive cards. That helped those who wished to remain anonymous. You see, you had to give a card, but you didn’t have to sign your name. Students sometimes preferred “Guess who.” Some cards, often one-sided with poorly printed colors, contained humorous messages that weren’t particularly flattering. You could buy a pack of 10 or so mixed cards for about a dollar and match the message (sweet, sour, snide, cute, funny) to the classmate. Funny valentines were by far the most popular in my one-room school.

Perhaps the biggest difference today is that boys and girls become serious about each other at an earlier age. And the cards are fancier and the gifts more expensive.

Those yucky little heart-shaped candies with the short messages were big then, and they still seem to be around.

Roses are red …

Carolyn Mulford

Happy birthday, honest Abe

If Abraham Lincoln had been born in a different month, he might have had his own national holiday.

Several states named February 12 as a holiday shortly after his assassination in 1865, but the celebration of George Washington’s Birthday on February 22 had a head start of about 75 years. Our Revolutionary War hero and first president became the first American to be honored with an official national holiday.

Americans celebrated the holiday by eating cherry pie because little George couldn’t tell a lie about cutting down the cherry tree. Little Abe didn’t tell lies either, but he didn’t have a special dish connected to him.

In the 1940s rural Missouri schools recognized few holidays. Students could count on getting out of school only for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and sometimes Good Friday and Washington’s Birthday. The compensation: Schools dismissed for the summer in April, in time for spring planting.

Lincoln usually received equal time from students and teachers, but it was George Washington’s grim-faced portrait that hung on the wall in almost every classroom.

In 1968, Congress decided that Americans should celebrate most holidays on Mondays, giving everyone long weekends. The better to shop or go on vacation and to ignore the reason for the holiday. In a few years people started referring to Washington’s Birthday as Presidents’ Day and saying it honored Washington and Lincoln, and maybe all the other presidents, too.

Celebrating everyone, we honor no one.

Three cheers for President Lincoln. Three cheers for President Washington.

Pass the cherry pie.

Carolyn Mulford

Where did the groundhogs go

As I child, I found Groundhog Days intriguing but puzzling. Why? Because I never saw a groundhog in winter.

Rabbits raced around the yard and pastures all year. Squirrels didn’t live in our yard, probably because my father could bring one down with one shot and liked fried squirrel occasionally, but they chattered in the treetops out in our stand of timber. Skunks came around occasionally, which is too often for comfort, and coons sometimes raided the brooder house. One winter foxes were so thick that farmers organized a fox drive, moving through fields in long lines with their rifles ready.

About the only other wild things you could count on seeing were field mice and snakes. Snakes slithered around the fields and occasionally the yard from spring until fall. I’ll never forget stepping on a garter snake as I was running barefoot through the pasture to bring in the cows for the evening milking. And one summer day my father and I were on our knees mending a wire fence when a spreading viper reared its head out of the grass some six feet away, hissing and spreading. My father turned slightly and threw his hammer at the head. He nailed it.

Speaking of fences, the only time I ever saw a groundhog was along a fence row on a summer day.