Pining for Klickitat Street

Annabella has been obsessed with Beverly Cleary's books for several months now. It started with Henry Huggins and now we're working through the Beezus and Ramona books and the Ralph Mouse books.

I love these books.

I love them because I read them as a child and it's wonderful to be reading them to Annabella. Some of the books we've read are my own copies that my parents saved. I watch as Annabella traces her finger over where I scrawled my name and address thirty years ago.

It's easy to say that these books are timeless. How else would they still be so popular after some of them have been in print for over 50 years? But I also love them for how dated they are. What book for young readers today would feature this scene between a father and his young daughter:

"Mr. Quimby blew a puff of smoke toward the ceiling. 'I expect to be one of those old men with a long gray beard who has his picture in the paper on his hundredth birthday and who tells reporters he owes his long life to cigarettes and whiskey.'" - Ramona and Her Father (1977)

What's even more amusing is how the childhoods of the kids on Klickitat street span decades. The books were written over many years, but the kids age only a year per book. Most of the Henry Huggins books were written in the fifties and it shows. The kids roam the neighborhood with almost no parental supervision and their lives seem relatively simple compared to the Ramona books where fathers lose jobs and mothers are forced to become "liberated" and go back to work.

Even the early Ramona books seem strange to our modern parenting sensibilities. In Ramona the Pest (1968) Ramona is in kindergarten and her mother leaves her at home in the morning to walk to school by herself. In kindergarten! Skip ahead a few books to Ramona Forever (1984) and her parents struggle with the decision to leave Ramona and her teenage sister alone together after school.

Parenting styles change fast. I look at the things on my pregnant friends' baby registries and find myself spouting off like an old lady. "Back in my day there was no such thing as breast pumps that fit in backpacks or organic baby clothes!" And every parent I know wishes their own kids could have childhoods like they did, without the Internet or Bratz Dolls or DVRs or whatever evil (necessary or not) that is unique to the new millennium.

I know there's the temptation to lament about the good old days when things were simpler, especially when it comes to parenting. The truth is that every generation of parents had their MySpace problem. Perhaps Beverly Cleary herself said it best. In an interview on NPR on the occasion of her 90th birthday in 2006 Cleary was asked if Ramona changed over the decades. "I don't think children themselves have changed that much," she said. "It's the world that's changed."

Comments

[Faith]

I absolutely adored the Ramona books! That kinda cheers me up to see pictures of the book. Thanks for posting that :)

[Lynn]

I am also a huge fan of Beverly Cleary. I have so enjoyed reading her books to my son (we've read all of Ramona and Henry Huggins), and he's loved them as well. I don't think there any books quite this good that are written for children today, but perhaps I'm biased. I do remember when Ramona went to kindergarten, there were a couple of scenarios that just could not happen today. Romana hid behind some garbage cans and did not go into her kindergarten class for a few hours. Can you imagine the uproar that would cause today? It is in some ways a time capsule of children's lives just a generation or two ago, even though it was fiction. I think my son is quite happy with his DS and Tivo but to me the Klikatat Street childhood is so much more appealing than the world my children are growing up in.

[K]

I think that is my all time favorite thing of our current stage of parenting - re-reading classic books with my daughter. Ramona/Narnia/Laura Ingalls/Wrinkle in Time...and so on. I love it.

But she did finally introduce me to a book from "her" generation. I finally started my first Harry Potter book. (She's almost done with book 4 and is trying very hard not to tell me what happens...)

[David Wells]

One of the things I like about the Ramona stories is the accountability. I remember a scene where a young Ramona squirted all of the toothpaste out on the sink. Her mother had her scoop up the toothpaste and she needed to use it up. That was a basic lesson, not to waste things that the family needed.