My default baby gift is books. And my default baby gift book is Make Way for Ducklings. After all, the action takes place in my neighborhood, and there are statues of Mrs. Mallard and her brood right across the street from where I live.
If I throw in an extra book or two into the gift bag, it's usually Good Night Moon and/or Runaway Bunny. And once in a while, I've added The Very Hungry Caterpillar or Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See to mix. Both are illustrated by Eric Carle, and Caterpillar is written by him as well.
Carle died last week, a few weeks short of his 92nd birthday.
His are not the children's books of my early (pre-reader) childhood. They didn't exist.
My iconic pre-reads are The Child's Garden of Verses (Big Golden Book Edition) - the illustrations still make me swoon - and myriad smaller Golden Books - they were inexpensive and my parents bought us a ton of them.
I have a few around, and when I open them up and see the pictures, I'm back sitting on the bedroom floor in our flat on Winchester Ave, pretending I can read because, at age 4, I can already recognize a few words. Some of the stories I still know by heart, but it's the illustrations that are so evocative, even though I am a complete word person. (Generally, I'm in the one word is worth a thousand pictures camp.) The Taxi that Hurried. The Sailor Dog. The Color Kittens. Etc. (And I have a ton of etceteras.) These are all brilliantly illustrated.
I know they're no longer PC, but I adored all the Babar books, especially Babar and Father Christmas. And while the colors were pretty lacking - was there a war on or something? - as a child, I also loved Robert McCloskey's Blueberries for Sal and, of course, Ducklings.
Soon enough, I graduated from picture books to chapter books. I didn't miss the pictures. Good enough that there was a picture of the Bobbsey twins or Nancy Drew on the cover, so I knew what they looked like. It was the stories I was after.
But the pictures from those early books are just so evocative. Madeleines, all.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar was published in 1969, so there are now generations who likely feel the same way about anything illustrated by Eric Carle.
He was a genius. His work is just brilliant, the colors more than gorgeous. But what I also found interesting, in reading about his life, was just how interesting that life was.
Carle was born in Syracuse in 1929. His parents were German immigrants. His mother was homesick, and in the mid-1930's, the family moved back to Germany. Not such a great time to make that particular move, that's for sure. It just seems weird. Were his parents Nazi sympathizers? Did they admire Der Fuhrer? The obituaries I read don't say, but you have to wonder. (At least I do.)
Seriously, by the mid-1930's, I don't care how homesick you were, there were plenty of clues that all wasn't well back in the old country. The ship they sailed back on must have been virtually empty. Everyone who could was hopping on boats at Bremehaven and heading in the opposite direction. It is said that his parents regretted their decision to return to Germany shortly after their arrival. So maybe they were just homesick schnooks, or really thought that they'd never see their extended families again if they didn't get to Germany before "it" happened.
Anyway, the Carles made their way back to Stuttgart (where my German ancestral roots are buried deep; maybe we're related), and Carle's life became hell.
The schools were rigid, the discipline harsh, and much of the education was propaganda. The children would all have pretty much been forced to join the Hitler Jugend. As a youth he began studying at a local art school where he was exposed to modern artists like Picasso and Matisse, but he had to keep the exposure secret. Modern art was considered decadent, Jewish. A teacher who taught about it was at risk.
Carle's much beloved father was drafted early on in the War, and by the time he got home - after a stint in a Soviet POW camp - he weighed 85 pounds and was, in Carle's words, a "sick man. Psychologically, phystically devastated."
The family's neighborhood in Stuttgart was mostly leveled. His house withstood the bombing in that the walls remained standing, but that was about it. He was sent for safety to a small town, but when he was 15, the war caught up with him. Like all boys his age, at the tail end of the war, Carle was conscripted to dig trenches just behind the front lines. His group was shelled, and people near him were killed just feet from where he was working. (Earlier, playing near a river, he'd been strafed, but the bullets missed him.)
Just as his foolish mother had been homesick for Germany, Carle was always homesick for the United States, and in his early twenties, he made his way back to New York City with forty bucks in his pocket. He scored a job as an illustrator for The New York Times, was drafted into the army (and stationed in Germany), and eventually found work in an ad agency.
His creative world opened up when a children's book writer - Bill Martin, author of Brown Bear - having seen one of Carle's illustrations in an ad, asked him to illustrate his new book. And Carle was off.
Carle later spoke of an absence of color when he was growing up. Everything was camouflaged: grey, green, brown. Then everything was rubble.
He made up for lost time and lost colors in his work. I've seen his colors described as "radiant." A good word. And his books are so simple, so joyful.
Eric Carle played no part in my childhood, but there are generations of "children" who did grow up with him. I'm sure they've been getting out their dog-eared Caterpillars, their worn Brown Bears, and mourning his loss.
What a devastating childhood he suffered through. And coming out of it to bring such delight to so many.
Thank you, Eric Carle, for all that you've given the world.
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