Summer Reading Club Post Number One

Below is my first post for the Tacoma Public Library Adult Summer Reading Club.  Probably I was influenced to write about a children's book by the fact that Tacoma Reads Together this year read a Young Adult Book. 

I have a record of having read a book in 1959, the summer before I went in to Fifth Grade.  In Mystery of the Pirate Oak a sister and brother who play in a huge oak tree in the vacant lot next to their house, meet a new neighbor who used to play in the same tree sixty years before.   Helen Fuller Orton, the author of Mystery of the Pirate Oak, was a children’s writer of the past.  Below I include some of her biography from the internet:

(1872–1955). U.S. author Helen Fuller Orton began her career in children's literature writing nature stories for small children. Later she turned to historical stories and mysteries for juveniles.

Helen Fuller was born on Nov. 1, 1872, on her family's farm, between Sanborn and Pekin, N.Y. Both of her parents were teachers, and she taught elementary school herself before marrying Jesse F. Orton.  This is some of the biography of Helen Fuller Orton from the internet.

Social change as well as cultural change since the nineteen-fifties make it necessary that new books reflect the experience new children have. There  are new authors as well,  so  new books are a natural change.  To read an old children’s book can be a useful reminiscence.  We can reflect on the social change, the cultural change, the demographic change. 

The house is apart from the town, a few miles outside of town.  Although probably some houses are like that in our time, in the nineteen sixties American demographics changed from a rural and small town country to a predominantly urban country.  In order of reflect the more commonplace urban experience of new children,  more authors have sought to reflect the kind of urban experience so many children have and would recognize.