March 12, 2025 • 39 mins
Gertrude Chandler Warner's most well known writing is "The Boxcar Children." But that series is far from the only professional writing Chandler did – she made a career as a writer while also teaching elementary school for decades.
Research:
- Abate, M.A. Not Hoovervilles, But Hooch: Gertrude Chandler Warner’s The Boxcar Childrenand The Roaring Twenties. Child Lit Educ 47, 257–266 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9275-5
- Braccidiferro, Gail. “The Boxcar Children: A Museum Caper.” New York Times. June 20, 2004. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/nyregion/the-boxcar-children-a-museum-caper.html
- Crowe, Chris. “Young Adult Literature: Rescuing Reluctant Readers.” The English Journal, vol. 88, no. 5, 1999, pp. 113–16. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/821799
- Ellsworth, Mary Ellen. “Gertrude Chandler Warner and the Boxcar Children.” Albert Whitman & Company. Morton Grove, Illinois. 1997.
- Lindberg, Mary Anne. “Survival Literature in Children’s Fiction.” Elementary English, vol. 51, no. 3, 1974, pp. 329–35. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41387166
- Meese, Ruth Lyn. “MODERN FAMILY: Adoption and Foster Care in Children’s Literature.” The Reading Teacher, vol. 66, no. 2, 2012, pp. 129–37. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23322722
- Tolentino, Jia. “’The Boxcar Children and the Spirit of Capitalism.” The New Yorker. June 2, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-boxcar-children-and-the-spirit-of-capitalism#:~:text=The%20second%20time%20that%20Gertrude,and%20family%20and%20life's%20rewards.
- Warner, Gertrude Chandler. “The Box-Car Children.” Rand McNally. Chicago/New York. 1924. Accessed online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42796/42796-h/42796-h.htm
- Warner, Gertrude Chandler. “Good Americans: First Lessons for the Littlest Ones.” Educational Publishing Company. Boston. New York. London. 1926. Accessed online: https://books.google.com/books?id=gONow7KFCB0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
- Warner, Gertrude Chandler. “The House of Delight.” Pilgrim Press. 1916. Accessed online: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/62714/pg62714-images.html
- Warner, Gertrude Chandler. “Star Stories for Little Folks.” Pilgrim Press. Boston, Chicago. 1918. Accessed online: https://archive.org/details/starstoriesforli00warn/page/8/mode/2up
- Warner, Frances and Gertrude. “Life’s Minor Collisions.” Houghton Mifflin. Boston and New York. 1921. Accessed online: https://archive.org/details/lifesminorcollis00warnrich/page/n9/mode/2up
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Okay, So The box
Car Children was one of my absolute favorite book series
as a kid. Yeah, obsessed. I just like a lot
(00:26):
of other kids, got completely fished in by the very
adventurous idea of living without adults in an abandoned box car.
It's the opposite of Lord of the Flies. Everybody gets along,
It's really cool. It seems like a lot of fun.
And so I wanted to talk a little bit about
Gertrude Chandler Warner. And it's interesting because her work has
(00:49):
landed on a number of best books lists for kids
over the years, although apparently when it was very first released,
which even if you grew up reading them is probably
not the version read, there were people who allegedly wanted
to put it on a band book list. It's quite
quaint to think about that today because it's really very wholesome.
(01:11):
But the box Car Children series is the thing she's
known for, but it is far from the only professional
writing that Warner did. She made a career as a
writer while she was also teaching elementary school full time
for decades, so I thought she would be an interesting
person to talk about as well as why The Box
Car Children is so appealing. I'll go ahead and confess
(01:35):
I don't think I ever read these. I'm sure we
can talk about it more on Friday. I have a
theory that will tie into you not reading it, okay,
that I don't know if it holds any weight. But yes,
we'll discuss it on Friday. Cool. Gertrude Chandler Warner was
born April sixteenth, eighteen ninety in Putnam, Connecticut. Her parents
(01:56):
were Edgar and Jane Carpenter Warner. Edgar was a Harvard
educated lawyer, and Jane was active on the Putnam School Committee.
Both of them came from families that had lived in
Connecticut for a long time. Jane could trace her family
in Connecticut back to sixteen eighty six. The Warners had
three children. Gertrude had an older sister named Francis, born
(02:19):
in eighteen eighty eight, and in eighteen ninety two, her
younger brother, John was born. The family lived in a
house built by the children's maternal grandfather for the family
at forty two South Main Street. There are really only
two what I would categorize as easily accessible biographies of Warner.
Both of them are written by the same person, that's
(02:41):
Mary Ellen Ellsworth. When I say easily accessible, I will
say I got mine's secondhand. But I think you can
find them online at most of the big bookstores. One
you definitely can. It's very very easily available right now.
So one is it like a biography that's a young
reader's book that's just about her, that was published in
(03:02):
nineteen ninety seven, and the other is a shorter like
an amended version of that which appeared in a recent
anniversary edition of The Box Car Children. And the approach
in both of these definitely draws parallels between the author's
childhood and the experiences of the children in her famous stories.
So just keep all of that in mind as we
(03:24):
talk through this, because the Warner Home sounds almost surreally idyllic.
The Warner children seem to even acknowledge this as adults.
There is a comment that Francis once noted that they
didn't really have much to complain about. The worst story
that she could conjure about their youth was their mother
fussing at them once for sliding down the back porch
(03:44):
roof when it had iced over. And if that's the
worst thing that happens in your family, that's a sunny
place to live. This sounds like something that my spouse's
brothers would have coerced them into doing. When he was
a child to cross the street from a train station,
and the children loved to watch the trains go by.
(04:05):
They learned the schedules so that they could identify which
train they were watching at any given time. The kids
put on plays and the attic and the family started
its own orchestra when the kids were in their teens.
All of the ladies in the house played string instruments.
Francis and her mother Jane, both played the violin, while
Gertrude played the cello. Cellos are expensive, and that cello
(04:29):
had been a special gift for Gertrude from her father.
Their father played piano and John played coronet. Gertrude was
fond of reading from an early age, and she and
her sister both loved to write. She wrote her first
story at the age of nine, titled Golliwog at the Zoo,
which he also illustrated with watercolors that book was actually
(04:52):
something of a rush job. Initially, according to the story,
Gertrude had come home late from school several days in
a row because she had lost track of time playing
tea party with friends, but she fibbed and told her
mother she had been working on a book. Jane eventually
wanted to see this book, so Gertrude just kind of
(05:13):
churned it out super fast so that she had something
to show her mother. She had based it on another
popular book from the time called Golliwog at the Seaside.
I sort of love that she at least still she
would rather than admit that she lied, she delivered on it.
I'm like this is I understand this. Jane bought notebooks
(05:34):
to encourage both of her daughter's creative writing. Presumably she
would have bought them for John as well, but he
was not focused on that. Gertrude refined her slap dash
Golliwog book, made it a little more, a little more cohesive,
added the illustrations, and then she gave that completed manuscript
(05:54):
of Golliwog at the Zoo to her grandfather as his
Christmas gift that year, And that actually started a tradition
because each year thereafter she made a new book with
a new story for another family member. Francis would also
join in on these projects. From time to time, she
would bind the books, and she sometimes contributed illustrations, and
(06:14):
sometimes they were narratives like Golliwog, but sometimes they were
sets of short stories that were combined into one project,
like a little anthology for the year. And as Gertrude
got older, of course, these stories became longer and more complex. Francis, Gertrude,
and John also spent time with their nearby relatives and
frequently explored the woods. They learned about the plants and
(06:37):
animals in the area from their grandfather and great uncle,
and they also spent time in nature on their own.
These three siblings were very close. We'll talk about some
of their relationship leader in a book that Gertrude writes.
High school, though, did not go well for Gertrude Warner,
not because she wasn't interested or a good student, but
(06:58):
because she had ongoing health issues. She had a number
of illnesses since childhood, including measles and mumps, and she's
often described as having sort of a chronic sore throat.
I don't that seems like it's probably indicative of something else,
but what that's something else is is never really pinpointed.
And because of this chronic ill health, she had to
(07:18):
stay home from school so often during high school that
even though she had a tutor, she was just unable
to keep up and unable to finish and get her diploma.
As her siblings finished school and went on to careers,
Francis is a teacher and writer, and John as an engineer,
Gertrude stayed home, but she did start writing, first for
(07:39):
a Sunday school newspaper, and she wrote her first novel,
The House of Delight, which was published in nineteen sixteen.
The House of Delight is a novel for kids. Project
Gutenberg puts it at a sixth grade reading level. It's
about a girl and her dolls and their dollhouse. Warner
dedicated it to her grandfather, who she calls my best
(07:59):
f playmate. Her brother John photographed dolls that she had
arranged for the book's illustrations. Overall, it's pretty charming. There's
one primary issue that we'll talk about in a second,
but there are two persons listed in the book. Quote
William Delight, a bisk doll just as long as Betsy's hand,
(08:20):
and the other one is quote Betsy a real girl
who takes the part of and then it lists all
of the other characters underneath it, so William seems like
a real entity, almost even though he's a doll. The
preface sets up the concept of the book. Quote Betsy
was a curly headed little girl nine years old who
played with her dolls in the most interesting way you
(08:42):
ever saw. Little Missus Delight, with her soft brown hair
and beautiful brown eyes, was Betsy's very dearest doll, and
she played most of the time with her and her
charming little husband, Mister Delight. But Betsy's sister Anne, who
was away at school and who was much too old
to play with dolls any, had given mister and Missus
Delight to Betsy, for it did seem too bad to
(09:04):
keep them packed away in their dark, stuffy box. Now,
Betsy didn't call herself the doll's mother, for they were
all grown up and much older than she was already,
and they seemed to need a new chair or new
beds so very often that a carpenter was necessary most
of the time. So whenever mister Delight wished to order
new furniture, Betsy called herself mister betts and talked exactly
(09:26):
like a carpenter. When Missus Delight needed new dresses or
new curtains, Betsy called herself Madam Bettina and talked as
nearly as she could, like mother's French dressmaker. And when
any of the dolls were sick, Betsy at once took
the part of old doctor Betson and talked gruffly with
them about tonics and pills. She talked for each of
the dolls too, and if you had listened in the
(09:48):
next room, you would have said that at least three
or four people were talking. So the book unfolds almost
like a play, and Betsy's world and the dolls world
is one and the same. When the do talking or
having any kind of business, they're written about as active characters,
not something a little girl is playing with. For example,
(10:08):
when Betsy is given her dollhouse as a gift for
her ninth birthday, Betsy's play and the doll's reactions are
integrated together this way. Little mister Delight was sitting in
his law office behind the radiator. Betsy picked him up,
put on his great Derby hat, and walked him rapidly
across the room to the Morris chair. Edith, Oh, Edith,
(10:29):
He cried excitedly, my salary has been raised to a
million dollars a year. Now we can move into a
new house. How perfectly lovely, cried missus delight. Can't we
buy one directly? A million dollars a year? A million?
That is so? It was very charming. H A lot
(10:49):
of the book really is about ingenuity and problem solving
through play, as Betsy sees to the needs of her
dolls lives and figures out ways to make the furniture
close and other accessories they require. This is kind of
a theme that appears throughout a lot of her books
that she writes for kids. But there is a problematic
element to it that we mentioned earlier in the form
(11:12):
of the Delights Cook, who is a rag doll that
Betsy made to look like a black woman, and her
dialogue is written in an outdated and borderline racist way.
I will say it is not nearly as bad as
some of the other things like it I have read,
but it definitely like sets her apart as being uneducated
and you know, from a completely different social class. It
(11:34):
seemed like Warner was poised to start a career as
a writer, but that was not a direct line thanks
to world events. We will talk about how she fell
into another career after we pause or a sponsor break.
(11:56):
Twenty seven year old Warner was incredibly ex to have
her first book published. The House of Delight, had a
run of one thousand copies, and after it was published,
she continued to pursue a writing career by following in
her sister Francis's example and writing for magazines. But the
United States entry into World War One in nineteen seventeen
(12:18):
shifted the course of Gertrude's life, as their town of
Putnam lost some of their working age young men to
the war. It also lost many of the women who
had been working as teachers to mill jobs that provided
necessary materials for the war effort, and that meant that
there was a real need for teachers. Although she hadn't
finished high school, Gertrude had continued her own self directed study,
(12:43):
and she was deemed fit enough to help teach first grade.
She worked as an assistant to another teacher for several months,
but this was also at the time when the flu
pandemic was starting and the teacher she was working with
died after contracting it. At that point, Warner took over
the class entirely. The idea was that she just needed
(13:03):
to do it as long as the war continued to
keep the career teachers occupied elsewhere, but that wasn't how
things played out. Warner was really good at teaching, and
the school kept her on. Teaching became her permanent career,
and she taught first and third grade for the next
thirty two years. She also continued to write and publish.
(13:25):
She worded with a magazine called Little Folks, writing stories
about nature and astronomy. In nineteen eighteen, her astronomy pieces
for the magazine were collected and published in a book
titled Star Stories for Little Folks. And this book has
the conceit that a student named Helen is relaying her
experiences in learning about the stars from a doctor Lorie,
(13:47):
And it opens with a letter from Helen to the
reader which includes quote before you read this little book,
doctor Lourie says, I must tell you that the stars
are not always in the same place in the sky.
If you are not acquainted with them, it is easier
to find them when they are just coming up in
the east. So under the name of each group of stars,
you will find the best time of year to look
(14:08):
for it. As soon as you find a constellation, write
the date on the dotted line under the picture. Then
you will know when you have earned your diploma. I
hope you will have as good a time as I
did finding the fifteen constellations. And then this cute letter
is signed your little friend Helen. The book gives instructions
(14:28):
with rudimentary drawings on how to find various constellations, and
the narrative of Helen's experience of learning them is told
along with it. She begins the story sick in some
way that's not detailed, and doctor Lorie promises he will
teach her about stars when she's well enough to go outside.
From there, her learning and health progress in tandem as
(14:51):
she has various adventures. At the end is a diploma
that the reader can fill out with their name. Another
book of collected writing was published in nineteen twenty one,
and this is titled Life's Minor Collisions. And this is
a book that Gertrude co authored with her sister Francis,
pulling from writings that they had each done for the
Atlantic Monthly and Ladies Home Journal, and unlike Gertrude's previously
(15:15):
published works, this book was written for adults, and it
featured essays about the various challenges each of the Warner
daughters had experienced in life. The preface to this book
is also quite charming. It reads quote, collisions are measured
by what they will smash. Potentially all collisions are major.
A slight blow will explode a bomb. But since most
(15:38):
of us do not commonly carry dynamite through the busy
sections of this life, we can take a good many
brisk knocks and still survive. The collisions, though dealt with
in separate chapters by two of us, are seldom between
two people alone. They are collisions mostly minor, between the
individual and the group the individual and circumstances, the individual
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and the horror he rides on. All the chapters are
for those kindred spirits who try to be easy to
live with and find it difficult. The chapters each cover
different kinds of collisions. The first, for example, is about
the way it can be easy to hurt the people
we're closest to, particularly family. The second is about a
(16:20):
brother and sister arguing over the sister's inherent difficulty with
learning directions to get places. It includes this description of
the brother's inherent ability to find his way quote, he
branches from one street into another with as sure an
instinct as a cat who retraces on foot a journey
once traversed in a bag. This is not because he
(16:43):
knows Boston, but because he has a capacity for Boston.
There's also an essay titled More to It Than You'd
Think that examines the fact that people don't really understand
another person's job unless they've actually worked in that field.
Warner shares her experiences as a teacher to illustrate that fact.
(17:04):
She shares a rather lovely approach to teaching in this
passage quote, it is true that children with the best
intentions sometimes bring inappropriate busy work to school. But teaching
them has not dowered me with any disdain for my students.
They are beneath me only in years. In fact, I
raise my hat to some of them in spirit, as
(17:25):
I teach them to raise theirs to me in truth.
Here and there I calmly recognize a superior She also
shares how she's able to envision the great future lives
and achievements of her students, and how she's careful in
scenarios where she has to discipline them to not break
their spirits. It is apparent in reading her writing about
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teaching that this was a profession that Warner really loved
and was probably great at, and that is also supported
by things that her former students said. One of her
former students, Ruth Flagg, told The New York Times in
two thousand and four, quote, when she read to us,
she made me her page turner. She was aware that
(18:07):
not all children learned in the same way. Each child
was meant to feel special. She just had that gift. Flag,
for example, had been incredibly shy, and that page turning
job was a way to involve and encourage her. Flag
also said quote, she always encouraged our imaginations. It was
an adventure to come to her class each day. That
(18:29):
is so sweet. It is very sweet. But Warner's ongoing
health issues meant that just as she'd missed a lot
of school when she was a child, she sometimes had
to take leaves of absences from teaching due to her health.
But she wasn't idle during those times. She would take
advantage of the downtime to write. It was during one
(18:50):
of these leaves from work in the early nineteen twenties
that she penned The Box Car Children. Rand McNally published
the book in nineteen twenty four. It featured the tale
of four orphan children, Henry, Jess, Violet, and Benny Alden.
There isn't in the book a lot of information about
what happened to these children before the narrative starts, and
(19:12):
even some of the plot points that drive the character's
behavior never really gets an explanation. We'll talk a little
bit about that more in just a moment, but it
shares the story of how these children survive on their own.
They're a very plucky quartet. All of them are pretty
upbeat despite their circumstances, and they managed to get along
just fine for a while, until Violet gets sick and
(19:35):
they have to ask an adult for help. The Danu
mom is very happy. Spoiler alert in case you haven't
read them, I guess skip ahead, but these books are
one hundred years old. They end up living in a
lavish house with their wealthy grandfather, and even the one
happy ending detour that pops up that they might not
get to keep. The dog they found in the woods
(19:56):
actually has a very positive resolution. Though that book would
become the writing that Warner is most known for. When
it was first released, it was just sort of a blip.
The nineteen twenty four version was popular with kids, and
although we couldn't find any references to this fact outside
of Warner's account, she noted that librarians didn't seem to
(20:17):
care for it. According to Warner, the protestations were because
the children were just far too happy without any kind
of adult supervision. But Warner always said of this complaint quote,
that is exactly why children like it. This is funny
to me because children without parents is like a very
common theme in fairy tales and children's stories. But I
(20:42):
think the fact that they were getting along just fine
is like, no, no, we need to teach them that
they need those missing parents. And it's like, well, you know,
other than that illness, they were doing a okay, but
not knowing that this story of four orphans who live
in a box car would become a classic. We'll talk
about that book in just a bit. Gertrude went on
with her life. She kept teaching, writing and playing music.
(21:06):
She learned to play the pipe organs so she could
substitute for the organist at church, and she published another
book in nineteen twenty six called Good Americans First Lessons
for the littlest Ones. Good Americans is an update to
an existing set of lessons that were popular in the
United States at the time to teach children about morality
(21:28):
and citizenship. We are going to have an upcoming episode
about this morality code for kids. Warner notes that the
system as it exists is great, but some of the
content is quote rather vague for six year olds, so
her book addresses the same ideas in a way that's
simplified for younger students. Warner notes in the introduction that
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she found these sorts of lessons turned out to be
the favorites of the children she taught, in part because
they feature the use of paper dolls in stories that
give the lesson. It's a complete program for teachers that
focuses on five subjects, health, self control, reliability, good workmanship,
and kindness. The health story, for example, uses the paper
(22:14):
doll character Billy Bumps and points out that he maintains
good hygiene, gets enough sleep, drinks enough water, etc. To
keep himself healthy. The point is that if Billy isn't
taking care of himself. He won't be in any kind
of shape to be a good American. There was a
lot of concern at this time about whether kids in
the post World War One United States would grow up
(22:37):
into adults that could properly uphold the Republic. Yeah, we'll
talk more about all of that in that upcoming episode
on the Children's Morality Code. This is getting back to
Warner though. Warner's father, Edgar, died in nineteen twenty eight,
and at that point Gertrude still lived at home with
her parents, and this death actually led Gertrude and her mother, Jane,
(22:59):
to move, but they didn't go far. They just moved
down the street to live with Jane's mother, Marcia. That
would have been Gertrude's grandmother. She needed some help and
care in her advancing age. Marcia died the year after Edgar,
and Gertrude and her mother stayed on in the house.
But in nineteen thirty two, Jane also died at the
(23:20):
age of sixty six, and that meant that Gertrude, then
aged forty two, lived alone for the first time in
her life. We'll talk about this new phase of Warner's
life after we hear from the sponsors that keep stuffy
miss in history class. Gulling through all of the losses
(23:46):
that Warner experienced. In that brief period of time, she
had continued to write, and once she was the only
person in the house, her focus on her writing intensified.
The year before her father died, Warner had published the
first book in a four volume series designed to teach
children about other cultures, and these are, like her other
(24:06):
books for kids, laid out in a narrative where the
main character encounters other people and learns about them as
a sort of stand in for the reader. In the
beginnings of these books, she often thanked the various people
who had advised her in the writing, so while none
of them are called out with specificity in terms of
what they contributed, it seems that she was talking to
(24:26):
people who were knowledgeable about the cultures that Warner didn't
have familiarity with. This series was collected into an educational
course called The Friendly Farmers, a course for primary boys
and girls on rural life around the world. Okay, confession,
I didn't read all of these partially because the first
one is a little hard to find on its own,
(24:48):
and then it's just like you're tracing down, you know,
various scans from different sources. What I did read seemed
pretty respectful, but one that I was not able to
get a hold of that I really want I wanted
to look at was called Children of the Harvest, and
in it, Warner teaches kids about migrant workers and how
some children are part of that system, and she encourages
(25:09):
readers to get in touch with the Home Mission Council,
which was a religious organization, so that they could send
aid in the forms of gifts to those children. So,
having not read it, it's impossible to know if this
well intentioned idea comes off as dicey in any way,
or how accurate her portrayal of any of these cultures are.
The year that Gertrude lost her mother, she also was
(25:31):
seriously injured in a car accident. She was a passenger
in her aunt's car when her aunt had to swerve
to avoid a truck that was backing into the road.
The car ran into a fence, and Gertrude, who was
the only person injured in the crash, ended up in
the hospital for several months with a broken back. During
(25:51):
her convalescence, she wrote because she and her sister Francis
had another collaborative project in process for adult readers, and
she didn't want to derail it. Even in her compromise state,
she was really, really intent that they were not going
to slip their deadline. That book, Pleasures in Palaces, was
published in nineteen thirty three, and this, like their first
(26:12):
book together, was a compilation of essays that had mostly
been previously published in magazines, and the stories in it
are from their real lives, mostly related to travel. Despite
having gone through so much loss in the years leading
up to this book, Warner exhibits an attitude of total positivity,
noting regarding her change in status to being by herself
(26:35):
most of the time that in traveling alone, she's really
likely to make good friends. She also did not sit
idle or even seemed to ease back into her life.
Once she had recovered from her injuries, she knew that
she wanted to focus even more on writing for children,
so she did two things. One is that she took
a summer job working in publishing in Chicago. That was
(26:57):
in nineteen thirty six. Then from nine teen thirty seven
to nineteen thirty nine, she spent her summers attending teacher
training classes at Yale. At this point she had been
teaching for almost twenty years, so she kind of breathed
through this work and allegedly shocked one of her professors
when she confessed that she had never finished high school.
But she came out of this training really focused on
(27:19):
her path as a writer, which was an area she
had already been working in. She wanted to write books
that were accessible to young readers, or readers for whom
English was not their first language. She first looked at
the stories that were already popular with kids to see
if she could simplify any of them for her target
audience without losing the energy or excitement of the original narrative.
(27:43):
And after she produced a number of these, she turned
back to her own work, and in nineteen forty two,
Warner published a new version of The Box Car Children.
This new version isn't to rewrite in terms of the narrative.
The story still moves along with the same beats, the
caric are the same, but the language is simplified. Sentences
(28:04):
are shorter and easier to parse for younger readers, and
the vocabulary was less challenging. Warner made herself a rule
that the rewrite could only use six hundred different words.
The one big change is that the children's backstory did
get a makeover in the later version of the book.
It's one that's still tragic. They were orphaned, after all,
(28:24):
but in a more palatable way. This only takes up
the first few pages of the book, so it's not
a huge change. But the opening paragraph of the original
nineteen twenty four version reads quote about seven o'clock one
hot summer evening, a strange family moved into the little
village of Middlesex. Nobody knew where they came from or
(28:45):
who they were, but the neighbors soon made up their
minds what they thought of the strangers. For the father
was very drunk. He could hardly walk up the rickety
front steps of the old tumble down house, and his
thirteen year old son had to help him. Towards eight o'clock,
a pretty capable looking girl of twelve came out of
the house and bought a loaf of bread at the baker's,
(29:06):
and that was all the villagers learned about the newcomers
that night. And in that nineteen twenty four version, things
progress very quickly from there. Their father actually dies the
next day, and the bakeshop woman and her husband, the baker,
intend to send the children to their grandfather, so the
children run away. The nineteen forty two version, in comparison,
(29:27):
starts like this quote. One warm night, four children stood
in front of a bakery. No one knew them, no
one knew where they had come from. In this version,
the baker's wife, who does not like children, sells them
three loaves of bread, and then the children ask if
they can sleep in the bakery that night and wash
dishes for them in the morning. In this version, the
(29:49):
baker woman intends to keep the three older children for
a while to work in the bakery, but she and
her husband planned to send Benny, the youngest, to the
children's home and then ship the older children to their
grandfather when they get tired of them. That catalyzes the
children's exit. Incidentally, the one hundredth anniversary edition of the book,
(30:11):
published by Random House in twenty twenty four, does not
use the one hundred year old book. It uses the
nineteen forty two edition. Yeah, they leave out the drunk
dad and the baker woman, who is kind of like
the equivalent of a wicked witch character in a fairy tale.
Is very minimized. There are some head scratchy elements for
(30:33):
both books. The main reason that the children run away
despite knowing that they have a grandfather who wants to
take them in, they spend time evading him because they
know he is like posting, you know, signs up around
town that he's looking for these kids is that they
are convinced that that grandfather disliked their mother and thus
(30:53):
wanted nothing to do with their father once he had
married her and had a family. This issue never gets
addressed again, even once the wealthy grandfather turns out to
be very kind and loving, and there's a whole set
of events that happen where they learn that this nice
man is their grandfather. No one stops to go, hey,
why did you think you hated your mom? It never
(31:15):
comes up, and they just kind of accept everything at
face value. Modern criticisms of The Box Car Children also
note some other issues. Writing for The New Yorker in
twenty sixteen, Giatolentino notes, quote The Box Car Children, one realizes,
upon rereading it is an odd sort of capitalist parable
in which children without parents recreate the division of labor
(31:38):
that in the nineteen forties would become increasingly associated with
a popular vision of the American nuclear family, and it
does shake out that way. Jess and Henry take on
the parental roles and Violet and Benny fall more into
the role of children. Although Violet does a lot of
childcare and domestic chores like sewing, she's often noted for
(32:00):
how smart she is and how often she sees solutions
to their challenges. Once they find the box car in
the woods, Henry goes out and find ways to make money,
while the girls stay in the box car, caring for
Benny and literally homemaking by creating curtains, making a shelf
to hold the dishes that they've managed to forage, cooking
(32:21):
all of that. Tolantino also makes the point that while
the children are orphaned, they focus entirely on their future,
and they just don't get bogged down in their grief
or talk about their past and their tragedy. This lets
readers focus on the story, the adventure and the children's
resilience without the emotional baggage that would normally come with
(32:41):
such a scenario. None of the children even cry. There
is never a sentence about I miss mom and Dad.
The only crying that happens is when Violet gets really,
really ill, she starts to cry uncontrollably, and that's what
makes Jess and Henry realize that she's sick. It's not
very emotional, it's just like being physically weak crying. This
(33:05):
may make it easier for kids to read, but it
also feels sort of surreal to read about four kids
happily housekeeping and problem solving immediately after such a huge loss. Still,
the book was wildly popular, and because of the simplified language,
it got kids who thought they weren't interested in reading
really invested in it. They saw sort of an escape
(33:28):
fantasy in the story of the Aldens. Warner herself frequently
said that she wrote it because she thought it would
be fun to run away and live in an abandoned boxcar.
Between the updated version of the book and the end
of the nineteen forties, Warner went back to teaching and
also other writing projects. She ashally wrote several reference books
(33:49):
during this time and some biographies. But then in nineteen
forty nine, The box Car Children got a sequel, Surprise Island.
In this book, written by one the children, who now
live in a mansion, spend a summer on their grandfather's
private island, so pretty significantly different circumstances. But they soon
(34:09):
realized that the friendly handyman on the island, Joe, has
a secret, and they set out to discover it, and
this kicks off the box Car Children's series as a
batch of mystery books. The year after Surprise Island was published,
Warner retired from teaching at the age of sixty so
she could focus on her volunteer work with the Red
(34:29):
Cross and the Connecticut Cancer Society, and on writing more
children's books. In nineteen fifty three, she published the third
Boxcar children book, The Yellow House Mystery, but her next
book wasn't another box Car book. It was a children's
adaptation of One thousand and one Nights. She soon turned
back to her own series and published Mystery Ranch in
(34:52):
nineteen fifty eight. From there, she continued to churn out
Boxcar children's stories, eventually writing nineteen of them, including while
she was hospitalized for a broken hip at the end
of the nineteen fifties. Warner continued to teach even though
she was retired, but in a very informal way. In
nineteen sixty two, she moved from the home that she
(35:13):
had lived in with her mother and grandmother to a
home that she shared with her friend Esther Wells, and
her house was sort of open to the kids of
the neighborhood, and she would have them over for nighttime
constellation spotting or to talk about books that they had read.
She stayed very active in her community until nineteen seventy four,
when she shattered her hip. She was eighty four at
(35:36):
this point, and this injury severely limited her mobility even
after she had healed. So that is her second broken hip,
just in case you're curious if we accidentally repeated Nope,
second second time. Her vision at this point had also declined,
so she couldn't read as much as she had throughout
her life, but she did find ways to continue her
interests in her work. She listened to a lot of
(35:58):
audio recordings of books and to the television, and she
still had visitors. Then in nineteen seventy nine, she had
a long illness and she died on August thirtieth. She
had lived long enough to see a new elementary school
built in Putnam the year before, and the library in
that school was named the Gertrude See Warner Library. Gertrude's
(36:18):
Church was the Congregational Church of Putnam and posthumously published
two chapters of her last project in their newsletter. It
was titled Sunday School Lessons for shut Ins. Since Warner's death,
there have been other writers that have penned Box Car
Children books, and the first and second books have been
made into animated movies. In two thousand and four, Putnam
(36:41):
established the Gertrude Chandler Warner Boxcar Museum, which includes artifacts
from the author's life, including the desk where she wrote
that first rushed Golliwog story at the age of nine.
It also has a replica of the Alden Children set
up in their box car, and all of this is
housed in a vintage Depression era bo box car that
was donated by the Connecticut Trolley Museum. That museum is
(37:05):
still open. It's open seasonally to visitors. It's usually like
in the warmer months of the year, and I think
it has kind of limited hours, so if you're there
and you want to check it out, make sure you
check their open hours. But that is Gertie Chandler Warner
and the box Car Children much beloved by me. Do
you have some beloved listener mail? I do this one
(37:29):
just tickled me to pieces for two reasons, one of
which is actually in the content of the email, and
one of which is in the photograph. This is from
our listener Wendy, who writes, Hello, ladies, I just listened
to the podcast about Charles Nessler's Permanent Waves. Yes I'm
a bit behind, but I binge listen, so it's fine.
(37:50):
I have quite the coincidence that I think you'll enjoy.
Last Saturday, my mom, me and my sisters all went
to my cousin's salon to get our hair done and
the conversation turned to per and my cousin mentioned that
our grandma used to get perms that were plugged into
the wall. She described it as this big apparatus that
hung from the ceiling that plugged into the wall. We
(38:10):
all thought she was crazy. Even my mom, who is
in her seventies, thought my cousin was up in the
night as well. Then I ended up coming upon that episode.
We laughed at the thought of our grandma hooked up.
But glad our cousin is not as crazy as we
thought that It tickles me a little bit. I'm telling you,
go to Magic Kingdom and ride the people mover and
(38:31):
you'll see one of these sort of anyway, Wendy attached
to pet tax of her standard poodle Brownie, who she
says can be a drama queen when she wants to be.
I mean, come on, everybody knows I love poodles, and
I love a poodle and a puppy clip, which this
dog is. It's the cutest thing on the planet. But
here's what tickled me. Double the dog is on what
(38:52):
looks like a bed with comforter and some afghans, but
in the background is a BB eight plush and I
have the same one, and it just made me. You know,
Star Wars in your dog picture. Come on, that's an
a plus. Thank you Wendy for writing us. I'm glad
that we were able to corroborate your cousin's story and
(39:15):
make you realize she, in fact is knowledgeable and not
talking nonsense. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio
app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff
(39:36):
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Okay, So The box
Car Children was one of my absolute favorite book series
as a kid. Yeah, obsessed. I just like a lot
(00:26):
of other kids, got completely fished in by the very
adventurous idea of living without adults in an abandoned box car.
It's the opposite of Lord of the Flies. Everybody gets along,
It's really cool. It seems like a lot of fun.
And so I wanted to talk a little bit about
Gertrude Chandler Warner. And it's interesting because her work has
(00:49):
landed on a number of best books lists for kids
over the years, although apparently when it was very first released,
which even if you grew up reading them is probably
not the version read, there were people who allegedly wanted
to put it on a band book list. It's quite
quaint to think about that today because it's really very wholesome.
(01:11):
But the box Car Children series is the thing she's
known for, but it is far from the only professional
writing that Warner did. She made a career as a
writer while she was also teaching elementary school full time
for decades, so I thought she would be an interesting
person to talk about as well as why The Box
Car Children is so appealing. I'll go ahead and confess
(01:35):
I don't think I ever read these. I'm sure we
can talk about it more on Friday. I have a
theory that will tie into you not reading it, okay,
that I don't know if it holds any weight. But yes,
we'll discuss it on Friday. Cool. Gertrude Chandler Warner was
born April sixteenth, eighteen ninety in Putnam, Connecticut. Her parents
(01:56):
were Edgar and Jane Carpenter Warner. Edgar was a Harvard
educated lawyer, and Jane was active on the Putnam School Committee.
Both of them came from families that had lived in
Connecticut for a long time. Jane could trace her family
in Connecticut back to sixteen eighty six. The Warners had
three children. Gertrude had an older sister named Francis, born
(02:19):
in eighteen eighty eight, and in eighteen ninety two, her
younger brother, John was born. The family lived in a
house built by the children's maternal grandfather for the family
at forty two South Main Street. There are really only
two what I would categorize as easily accessible biographies of Warner.
Both of them are written by the same person, that's
(02:41):
Mary Ellen Ellsworth. When I say easily accessible, I will
say I got mine's secondhand. But I think you can
find them online at most of the big bookstores. One
you definitely can. It's very very easily available right now.
So one is it like a biography that's a young
reader's book that's just about her, that was published in
(03:02):
nineteen ninety seven, and the other is a shorter like
an amended version of that which appeared in a recent
anniversary edition of The Box Car Children. And the approach
in both of these definitely draws parallels between the author's
childhood and the experiences of the children in her famous stories.
So just keep all of that in mind as we
(03:24):
talk through this, because the Warner Home sounds almost surreally idyllic.
The Warner children seem to even acknowledge this as adults.
There is a comment that Francis once noted that they
didn't really have much to complain about. The worst story
that she could conjure about their youth was their mother
fussing at them once for sliding down the back porch
(03:44):
roof when it had iced over. And if that's the
worst thing that happens in your family, that's a sunny
place to live. This sounds like something that my spouse's
brothers would have coerced them into doing. When he was
a child to cross the street from a train station,
and the children loved to watch the trains go by.
(04:05):
They learned the schedules so that they could identify which
train they were watching at any given time. The kids
put on plays and the attic and the family started
its own orchestra when the kids were in their teens.
All of the ladies in the house played string instruments.
Francis and her mother Jane, both played the violin, while
Gertrude played the cello. Cellos are expensive, and that cello
(04:29):
had been a special gift for Gertrude from her father.
Their father played piano and John played coronet. Gertrude was
fond of reading from an early age, and she and
her sister both loved to write. She wrote her first
story at the age of nine, titled Golliwog at the Zoo,
which he also illustrated with watercolors that book was actually
(04:52):
something of a rush job. Initially, according to the story,
Gertrude had come home late from school several days in
a row because she had lost track of time playing
tea party with friends, but she fibbed and told her
mother she had been working on a book. Jane eventually
wanted to see this book, so Gertrude just kind of
(05:13):
churned it out super fast so that she had something
to show her mother. She had based it on another
popular book from the time called Golliwog at the Seaside.
I sort of love that she at least still she
would rather than admit that she lied, she delivered on it.
I'm like this is I understand this. Jane bought notebooks
(05:34):
to encourage both of her daughter's creative writing. Presumably she
would have bought them for John as well, but he
was not focused on that. Gertrude refined her slap dash
Golliwog book, made it a little more, a little more cohesive,
added the illustrations, and then she gave that completed manuscript
(05:54):
of Golliwog at the Zoo to her grandfather as his
Christmas gift that year, And that actually started a tradition
because each year thereafter she made a new book with
a new story for another family member. Francis would also
join in on these projects. From time to time, she
would bind the books, and she sometimes contributed illustrations, and
(06:14):
sometimes they were narratives like Golliwog, but sometimes they were
sets of short stories that were combined into one project,
like a little anthology for the year. And as Gertrude
got older, of course, these stories became longer and more complex. Francis, Gertrude,
and John also spent time with their nearby relatives and
frequently explored the woods. They learned about the plants and
(06:37):
animals in the area from their grandfather and great uncle,
and they also spent time in nature on their own.
These three siblings were very close. We'll talk about some
of their relationship leader in a book that Gertrude writes.
High school, though, did not go well for Gertrude Warner,
not because she wasn't interested or a good student, but
(06:58):
because she had ongoing health issues. She had a number
of illnesses since childhood, including measles and mumps, and she's
often described as having sort of a chronic sore throat.
I don't that seems like it's probably indicative of something else,
but what that's something else is is never really pinpointed.
And because of this chronic ill health, she had to
(07:18):
stay home from school so often during high school that
even though she had a tutor, she was just unable
to keep up and unable to finish and get her diploma.
As her siblings finished school and went on to careers,
Francis is a teacher and writer, and John as an engineer,
Gertrude stayed home, but she did start writing, first for
(07:39):
a Sunday school newspaper, and she wrote her first novel,
The House of Delight, which was published in nineteen sixteen.
The House of Delight is a novel for kids. Project
Gutenberg puts it at a sixth grade reading level. It's
about a girl and her dolls and their dollhouse. Warner
dedicated it to her grandfather, who she calls my best
(07:59):
f playmate. Her brother John photographed dolls that she had
arranged for the book's illustrations. Overall, it's pretty charming. There's
one primary issue that we'll talk about in a second,
but there are two persons listed in the book. Quote
William Delight, a bisk doll just as long as Betsy's hand,
(08:20):
and the other one is quote Betsy a real girl
who takes the part of and then it lists all
of the other characters underneath it, so William seems like
a real entity, almost even though he's a doll. The
preface sets up the concept of the book. Quote Betsy
was a curly headed little girl nine years old who
played with her dolls in the most interesting way you
(08:42):
ever saw. Little Missus Delight, with her soft brown hair
and beautiful brown eyes, was Betsy's very dearest doll, and
she played most of the time with her and her
charming little husband, Mister Delight. But Betsy's sister Anne, who
was away at school and who was much too old
to play with dolls any, had given mister and Missus
Delight to Betsy, for it did seem too bad to
(09:04):
keep them packed away in their dark, stuffy box. Now,
Betsy didn't call herself the doll's mother, for they were
all grown up and much older than she was already,
and they seemed to need a new chair or new
beds so very often that a carpenter was necessary most
of the time. So whenever mister Delight wished to order
new furniture, Betsy called herself mister betts and talked exactly
(09:26):
like a carpenter. When Missus Delight needed new dresses or
new curtains, Betsy called herself Madam Bettina and talked as
nearly as she could, like mother's French dressmaker. And when
any of the dolls were sick, Betsy at once took
the part of old doctor Betson and talked gruffly with
them about tonics and pills. She talked for each of
the dolls too, and if you had listened in the
(09:48):
next room, you would have said that at least three
or four people were talking. So the book unfolds almost
like a play, and Betsy's world and the dolls world
is one and the same. When the do talking or
having any kind of business, they're written about as active characters,
not something a little girl is playing with. For example,
(10:08):
when Betsy is given her dollhouse as a gift for
her ninth birthday, Betsy's play and the doll's reactions are
integrated together this way. Little mister Delight was sitting in
his law office behind the radiator. Betsy picked him up,
put on his great Derby hat, and walked him rapidly
across the room to the Morris chair. Edith, Oh, Edith,
(10:29):
He cried excitedly, my salary has been raised to a
million dollars a year. Now we can move into a
new house. How perfectly lovely, cried missus delight. Can't we
buy one directly? A million dollars a year? A million?
That is so? It was very charming. H A lot
(10:49):
of the book really is about ingenuity and problem solving
through play, as Betsy sees to the needs of her
dolls lives and figures out ways to make the furniture
close and other accessories they require. This is kind of
a theme that appears throughout a lot of her books
that she writes for kids. But there is a problematic
element to it that we mentioned earlier in the form
(11:12):
of the Delights Cook, who is a rag doll that
Betsy made to look like a black woman, and her
dialogue is written in an outdated and borderline racist way.
I will say it is not nearly as bad as
some of the other things like it I have read,
but it definitely like sets her apart as being uneducated
and you know, from a completely different social class. It
(11:34):
seemed like Warner was poised to start a career as
a writer, but that was not a direct line thanks
to world events. We will talk about how she fell
into another career after we pause or a sponsor break.
(11:56):
Twenty seven year old Warner was incredibly ex to have
her first book published. The House of Delight, had a
run of one thousand copies, and after it was published,
she continued to pursue a writing career by following in
her sister Francis's example and writing for magazines. But the
United States entry into World War One in nineteen seventeen
(12:18):
shifted the course of Gertrude's life, as their town of
Putnam lost some of their working age young men to
the war. It also lost many of the women who
had been working as teachers to mill jobs that provided
necessary materials for the war effort, and that meant that
there was a real need for teachers. Although she hadn't
finished high school, Gertrude had continued her own self directed study,
(12:43):
and she was deemed fit enough to help teach first grade.
She worked as an assistant to another teacher for several months,
but this was also at the time when the flu
pandemic was starting and the teacher she was working with
died after contracting it. At that point, Warner took over
the class entirely. The idea was that she just needed
(13:03):
to do it as long as the war continued to
keep the career teachers occupied elsewhere, but that wasn't how
things played out. Warner was really good at teaching, and
the school kept her on. Teaching became her permanent career,
and she taught first and third grade for the next
thirty two years. She also continued to write and publish.
(13:25):
She worded with a magazine called Little Folks, writing stories
about nature and astronomy. In nineteen eighteen, her astronomy pieces
for the magazine were collected and published in a book
titled Star Stories for Little Folks. And this book has
the conceit that a student named Helen is relaying her
experiences in learning about the stars from a doctor Lorie,
(13:47):
And it opens with a letter from Helen to the
reader which includes quote before you read this little book,
doctor Lourie says, I must tell you that the stars
are not always in the same place in the sky.
If you are not acquainted with them, it is easier
to find them when they are just coming up in
the east. So under the name of each group of stars,
you will find the best time of year to look
(14:08):
for it. As soon as you find a constellation, write
the date on the dotted line under the picture. Then
you will know when you have earned your diploma. I
hope you will have as good a time as I
did finding the fifteen constellations. And then this cute letter
is signed your little friend Helen. The book gives instructions
(14:28):
with rudimentary drawings on how to find various constellations, and
the narrative of Helen's experience of learning them is told
along with it. She begins the story sick in some
way that's not detailed, and doctor Lorie promises he will
teach her about stars when she's well enough to go outside.
From there, her learning and health progress in tandem as
(14:51):
she has various adventures. At the end is a diploma
that the reader can fill out with their name. Another
book of collected writing was published in nineteen twenty one,
and this is titled Life's Minor Collisions. And this is
a book that Gertrude co authored with her sister Francis,
pulling from writings that they had each done for the
Atlantic Monthly and Ladies Home Journal, and unlike Gertrude's previously
(15:15):
published works, this book was written for adults, and it
featured essays about the various challenges each of the Warner
daughters had experienced in life. The preface to this book
is also quite charming. It reads quote, collisions are measured
by what they will smash. Potentially all collisions are major.
A slight blow will explode a bomb. But since most
(15:38):
of us do not commonly carry dynamite through the busy
sections of this life, we can take a good many
brisk knocks and still survive. The collisions, though dealt with
in separate chapters by two of us, are seldom between
two people alone. They are collisions mostly minor, between the
individual and the group the individual and circumstances, the individual
(15:59):
and the horror he rides on. All the chapters are
for those kindred spirits who try to be easy to
live with and find it difficult. The chapters each cover
different kinds of collisions. The first, for example, is about
the way it can be easy to hurt the people
we're closest to, particularly family. The second is about a
(16:20):
brother and sister arguing over the sister's inherent difficulty with
learning directions to get places. It includes this description of
the brother's inherent ability to find his way quote, he
branches from one street into another with as sure an
instinct as a cat who retraces on foot a journey
once traversed in a bag. This is not because he
(16:43):
knows Boston, but because he has a capacity for Boston.
There's also an essay titled More to It Than You'd
Think that examines the fact that people don't really understand
another person's job unless they've actually worked in that field.
Warner shares her experiences as a teacher to illustrate that fact.
(17:04):
She shares a rather lovely approach to teaching in this
passage quote, it is true that children with the best
intentions sometimes bring inappropriate busy work to school. But teaching
them has not dowered me with any disdain for my students.
They are beneath me only in years. In fact, I
raise my hat to some of them in spirit, as
(17:25):
I teach them to raise theirs to me in truth.
Here and there I calmly recognize a superior She also
shares how she's able to envision the great future lives
and achievements of her students, and how she's careful in
scenarios where she has to discipline them to not break
their spirits. It is apparent in reading her writing about
(17:47):
teaching that this was a profession that Warner really loved
and was probably great at, and that is also supported
by things that her former students said. One of her
former students, Ruth Flagg, told The New York Times in
two thousand and four, quote, when she read to us,
she made me her page turner. She was aware that
(18:07):
not all children learned in the same way. Each child
was meant to feel special. She just had that gift. Flag,
for example, had been incredibly shy, and that page turning
job was a way to involve and encourage her. Flag
also said quote, she always encouraged our imaginations. It was
an adventure to come to her class each day. That
(18:29):
is so sweet. It is very sweet. But Warner's ongoing
health issues meant that just as she'd missed a lot
of school when she was a child, she sometimes had
to take leaves of absences from teaching due to her health.
But she wasn't idle during those times. She would take
advantage of the downtime to write. It was during one
(18:50):
of these leaves from work in the early nineteen twenties
that she penned The Box Car Children. Rand McNally published
the book in nineteen twenty four. It featured the tale
of four orphan children, Henry, Jess, Violet, and Benny Alden.
There isn't in the book a lot of information about
what happened to these children before the narrative starts, and
(19:12):
even some of the plot points that drive the character's
behavior never really gets an explanation. We'll talk a little
bit about that more in just a moment, but it
shares the story of how these children survive on their own.
They're a very plucky quartet. All of them are pretty
upbeat despite their circumstances, and they managed to get along
just fine for a while, until Violet gets sick and
(19:35):
they have to ask an adult for help. The Danu
mom is very happy. Spoiler alert in case you haven't
read them, I guess skip ahead, but these books are
one hundred years old. They end up living in a
lavish house with their wealthy grandfather, and even the one
happy ending detour that pops up that they might not
get to keep. The dog they found in the woods
(19:56):
actually has a very positive resolution. Though that book would
become the writing that Warner is most known for. When
it was first released, it was just sort of a blip.
The nineteen twenty four version was popular with kids, and
although we couldn't find any references to this fact outside
of Warner's account, she noted that librarians didn't seem to
(20:17):
care for it. According to Warner, the protestations were because
the children were just far too happy without any kind
of adult supervision. But Warner always said of this complaint quote,
that is exactly why children like it. This is funny
to me because children without parents is like a very
common theme in fairy tales and children's stories. But I
(20:42):
think the fact that they were getting along just fine
is like, no, no, we need to teach them that
they need those missing parents. And it's like, well, you know,
other than that illness, they were doing a okay, but
not knowing that this story of four orphans who live
in a box car would become a classic. We'll talk
about that book in just a bit. Gertrude went on
with her life. She kept teaching, writing and playing music.
(21:06):
She learned to play the pipe organs so she could
substitute for the organist at church, and she published another
book in nineteen twenty six called Good Americans First Lessons
for the littlest Ones. Good Americans is an update to
an existing set of lessons that were popular in the
United States at the time to teach children about morality
(21:28):
and citizenship. We are going to have an upcoming episode
about this morality code for kids. Warner notes that the
system as it exists is great, but some of the
content is quote rather vague for six year olds, so
her book addresses the same ideas in a way that's
simplified for younger students. Warner notes in the introduction that
(21:50):
she found these sorts of lessons turned out to be
the favorites of the children she taught, in part because
they feature the use of paper dolls in stories that
give the lesson. It's a complete program for teachers that
focuses on five subjects, health, self control, reliability, good workmanship,
and kindness. The health story, for example, uses the paper
(22:14):
doll character Billy Bumps and points out that he maintains
good hygiene, gets enough sleep, drinks enough water, etc. To
keep himself healthy. The point is that if Billy isn't
taking care of himself. He won't be in any kind
of shape to be a good American. There was a
lot of concern at this time about whether kids in
the post World War One United States would grow up
(22:37):
into adults that could properly uphold the Republic. Yeah, we'll
talk more about all of that in that upcoming episode
on the Children's Morality Code. This is getting back to
Warner though. Warner's father, Edgar, died in nineteen twenty eight,
and at that point Gertrude still lived at home with
her parents, and this death actually led Gertrude and her mother, Jane,
(22:59):
to move, but they didn't go far. They just moved
down the street to live with Jane's mother, Marcia. That
would have been Gertrude's grandmother. She needed some help and
care in her advancing age. Marcia died the year after Edgar,
and Gertrude and her mother stayed on in the house.
But in nineteen thirty two, Jane also died at the
(23:20):
age of sixty six, and that meant that Gertrude, then
aged forty two, lived alone for the first time in
her life. We'll talk about this new phase of Warner's
life after we hear from the sponsors that keep stuffy
miss in history class. Gulling through all of the losses
(23:46):
that Warner experienced. In that brief period of time, she
had continued to write, and once she was the only
person in the house, her focus on her writing intensified.
The year before her father died, Warner had published the
first book in a four volume series designed to teach
children about other cultures, and these are, like her other
(24:06):
books for kids, laid out in a narrative where the
main character encounters other people and learns about them as
a sort of stand in for the reader. In the
beginnings of these books, she often thanked the various people
who had advised her in the writing, so while none
of them are called out with specificity in terms of
what they contributed, it seems that she was talking to
(24:26):
people who were knowledgeable about the cultures that Warner didn't
have familiarity with. This series was collected into an educational
course called The Friendly Farmers, a course for primary boys
and girls on rural life around the world. Okay, confession,
I didn't read all of these partially because the first
one is a little hard to find on its own,
(24:48):
and then it's just like you're tracing down, you know,
various scans from different sources. What I did read seemed
pretty respectful, but one that I was not able to
get a hold of that I really want I wanted
to look at was called Children of the Harvest, and
in it, Warner teaches kids about migrant workers and how
some children are part of that system, and she encourages
(25:09):
readers to get in touch with the Home Mission Council,
which was a religious organization, so that they could send
aid in the forms of gifts to those children. So,
having not read it, it's impossible to know if this
well intentioned idea comes off as dicey in any way,
or how accurate her portrayal of any of these cultures are.
The year that Gertrude lost her mother, she also was
(25:31):
seriously injured in a car accident. She was a passenger
in her aunt's car when her aunt had to swerve
to avoid a truck that was backing into the road.
The car ran into a fence, and Gertrude, who was
the only person injured in the crash, ended up in
the hospital for several months with a broken back. During
(25:51):
her convalescence, she wrote because she and her sister Francis
had another collaborative project in process for adult readers, and
she didn't want to derail it. Even in her compromise state,
she was really, really intent that they were not going
to slip their deadline. That book, Pleasures in Palaces, was
published in nineteen thirty three, and this, like their first
(26:12):
book together, was a compilation of essays that had mostly
been previously published in magazines, and the stories in it
are from their real lives, mostly related to travel. Despite
having gone through so much loss in the years leading
up to this book, Warner exhibits an attitude of total positivity,
noting regarding her change in status to being by herself
(26:35):
most of the time that in traveling alone, she's really
likely to make good friends. She also did not sit
idle or even seemed to ease back into her life.
Once she had recovered from her injuries, she knew that
she wanted to focus even more on writing for children,
so she did two things. One is that she took
a summer job working in publishing in Chicago. That was
(26:57):
in nineteen thirty six. Then from nine teen thirty seven
to nineteen thirty nine, she spent her summers attending teacher
training classes at Yale. At this point she had been
teaching for almost twenty years, so she kind of breathed
through this work and allegedly shocked one of her professors
when she confessed that she had never finished high school.
But she came out of this training really focused on
(27:19):
her path as a writer, which was an area she
had already been working in. She wanted to write books
that were accessible to young readers, or readers for whom
English was not their first language. She first looked at
the stories that were already popular with kids to see
if she could simplify any of them for her target
audience without losing the energy or excitement of the original narrative.
(27:43):
And after she produced a number of these, she turned
back to her own work, and in nineteen forty two,
Warner published a new version of The Box Car Children.
This new version isn't to rewrite in terms of the narrative.
The story still moves along with the same beats, the
caric are the same, but the language is simplified. Sentences
(28:04):
are shorter and easier to parse for younger readers, and
the vocabulary was less challenging. Warner made herself a rule
that the rewrite could only use six hundred different words.
The one big change is that the children's backstory did
get a makeover in the later version of the book.
It's one that's still tragic. They were orphaned, after all,
(28:24):
but in a more palatable way. This only takes up
the first few pages of the book, so it's not
a huge change. But the opening paragraph of the original
nineteen twenty four version reads quote about seven o'clock one
hot summer evening, a strange family moved into the little
village of Middlesex. Nobody knew where they came from or
(28:45):
who they were, but the neighbors soon made up their
minds what they thought of the strangers. For the father
was very drunk. He could hardly walk up the rickety
front steps of the old tumble down house, and his
thirteen year old son had to help him. Towards eight o'clock,
a pretty capable looking girl of twelve came out of
the house and bought a loaf of bread at the baker's,
(29:06):
and that was all the villagers learned about the newcomers
that night. And in that nineteen twenty four version, things
progress very quickly from there. Their father actually dies the
next day, and the bakeshop woman and her husband, the baker,
intend to send the children to their grandfather, so the
children run away. The nineteen forty two version, in comparison,
(29:27):
starts like this quote. One warm night, four children stood
in front of a bakery. No one knew them, no
one knew where they had come from. In this version,
the baker's wife, who does not like children, sells them
three loaves of bread, and then the children ask if
they can sleep in the bakery that night and wash
dishes for them in the morning. In this version, the
(29:49):
baker woman intends to keep the three older children for
a while to work in the bakery, but she and
her husband planned to send Benny, the youngest, to the
children's home and then ship the older children to their
grandfather when they get tired of them. That catalyzes the
children's exit. Incidentally, the one hundredth anniversary edition of the book,
(30:11):
published by Random House in twenty twenty four, does not
use the one hundred year old book. It uses the
nineteen forty two edition. Yeah, they leave out the drunk
dad and the baker woman, who is kind of like
the equivalent of a wicked witch character in a fairy tale.
Is very minimized. There are some head scratchy elements for
(30:33):
both books. The main reason that the children run away
despite knowing that they have a grandfather who wants to
take them in, they spend time evading him because they
know he is like posting, you know, signs up around
town that he's looking for these kids is that they
are convinced that that grandfather disliked their mother and thus
(30:53):
wanted nothing to do with their father once he had
married her and had a family. This issue never gets
addressed again, even once the wealthy grandfather turns out to
be very kind and loving, and there's a whole set
of events that happen where they learn that this nice
man is their grandfather. No one stops to go, hey,
why did you think you hated your mom? It never
(31:15):
comes up, and they just kind of accept everything at
face value. Modern criticisms of The Box Car Children also
note some other issues. Writing for The New Yorker in
twenty sixteen, Giatolentino notes, quote The Box Car Children, one realizes,
upon rereading it is an odd sort of capitalist parable
in which children without parents recreate the division of labor
(31:38):
that in the nineteen forties would become increasingly associated with
a popular vision of the American nuclear family, and it
does shake out that way. Jess and Henry take on
the parental roles and Violet and Benny fall more into
the role of children. Although Violet does a lot of
childcare and domestic chores like sewing, she's often noted for
(32:00):
how smart she is and how often she sees solutions
to their challenges. Once they find the box car in
the woods, Henry goes out and find ways to make money,
while the girls stay in the box car, caring for
Benny and literally homemaking by creating curtains, making a shelf
to hold the dishes that they've managed to forage, cooking
(32:21):
all of that. Tolantino also makes the point that while
the children are orphaned, they focus entirely on their future,
and they just don't get bogged down in their grief
or talk about their past and their tragedy. This lets
readers focus on the story, the adventure and the children's
resilience without the emotional baggage that would normally come with
(32:41):
such a scenario. None of the children even cry. There
is never a sentence about I miss mom and Dad.
The only crying that happens is when Violet gets really,
really ill, she starts to cry uncontrollably, and that's what
makes Jess and Henry realize that she's sick. It's not
very emotional, it's just like being physically weak crying. This
(33:05):
may make it easier for kids to read, but it
also feels sort of surreal to read about four kids
happily housekeeping and problem solving immediately after such a huge loss. Still,
the book was wildly popular, and because of the simplified language,
it got kids who thought they weren't interested in reading
really invested in it. They saw sort of an escape
(33:28):
fantasy in the story of the Aldens. Warner herself frequently
said that she wrote it because she thought it would
be fun to run away and live in an abandoned boxcar.
Between the updated version of the book and the end
of the nineteen forties, Warner went back to teaching and
also other writing projects. She ashally wrote several reference books
(33:49):
during this time and some biographies. But then in nineteen
forty nine, The box Car Children got a sequel, Surprise Island.
In this book, written by one the children, who now
live in a mansion, spend a summer on their grandfather's
private island, so pretty significantly different circumstances. But they soon
(34:09):
realized that the friendly handyman on the island, Joe, has
a secret, and they set out to discover it, and
this kicks off the box Car Children's series as a
batch of mystery books. The year after Surprise Island was published,
Warner retired from teaching at the age of sixty so
she could focus on her volunteer work with the Red
(34:29):
Cross and the Connecticut Cancer Society, and on writing more
children's books. In nineteen fifty three, she published the third
Boxcar children book, The Yellow House Mystery, but her next
book wasn't another box Car book. It was a children's
adaptation of One thousand and one Nights. She soon turned
back to her own series and published Mystery Ranch in
(34:52):
nineteen fifty eight. From there, she continued to churn out
Boxcar children's stories, eventually writing nineteen of them, including while
she was hospitalized for a broken hip at the end
of the nineteen fifties. Warner continued to teach even though
she was retired, but in a very informal way. In
nineteen sixty two, she moved from the home that she
(35:13):
had lived in with her mother and grandmother to a
home that she shared with her friend Esther Wells, and
her house was sort of open to the kids of
the neighborhood, and she would have them over for nighttime
constellation spotting or to talk about books that they had read.
She stayed very active in her community until nineteen seventy four,
when she shattered her hip. She was eighty four at
(35:36):
this point, and this injury severely limited her mobility even
after she had healed. So that is her second broken hip,
just in case you're curious if we accidentally repeated Nope,
second second time. Her vision at this point had also declined,
so she couldn't read as much as she had throughout
her life, but she did find ways to continue her
interests in her work. She listened to a lot of
(35:58):
audio recordings of books and to the television, and she
still had visitors. Then in nineteen seventy nine, she had
a long illness and she died on August thirtieth. She
had lived long enough to see a new elementary school
built in Putnam the year before, and the library in
that school was named the Gertrude See Warner Library. Gertrude's
(36:18):
Church was the Congregational Church of Putnam and posthumously published
two chapters of her last project in their newsletter. It
was titled Sunday School Lessons for shut Ins. Since Warner's death,
there have been other writers that have penned Box Car
Children books, and the first and second books have been
made into animated movies. In two thousand and four, Putnam
(36:41):
established the Gertrude Chandler Warner Boxcar Museum, which includes artifacts
from the author's life, including the desk where she wrote
that first rushed Golliwog story at the age of nine.
It also has a replica of the Alden Children set
up in their box car, and all of this is
housed in a vintage Depression era bo box car that
was donated by the Connecticut Trolley Museum. That museum is
(37:05):
still open. It's open seasonally to visitors. It's usually like
in the warmer months of the year, and I think
it has kind of limited hours, so if you're there
and you want to check it out, make sure you
check their open hours. But that is Gertie Chandler Warner
and the box Car Children much beloved by me. Do
you have some beloved listener mail? I do this one
(37:29):
just tickled me to pieces for two reasons, one of
which is actually in the content of the email, and
one of which is in the photograph. This is from
our listener Wendy, who writes, Hello, ladies, I just listened
to the podcast about Charles Nessler's Permanent Waves. Yes I'm
a bit behind, but I binge listen, so it's fine.
(37:50):
I have quite the coincidence that I think you'll enjoy.
Last Saturday, my mom, me and my sisters all went
to my cousin's salon to get our hair done and
the conversation turned to per and my cousin mentioned that
our grandma used to get perms that were plugged into
the wall. She described it as this big apparatus that
hung from the ceiling that plugged into the wall. We
(38:10):
all thought she was crazy. Even my mom, who is
in her seventies, thought my cousin was up in the
night as well. Then I ended up coming upon that episode.
We laughed at the thought of our grandma hooked up.
But glad our cousin is not as crazy as we
thought that It tickles me a little bit. I'm telling you,
go to Magic Kingdom and ride the people mover and
(38:31):
you'll see one of these sort of anyway, Wendy attached
to pet tax of her standard poodle Brownie, who she
says can be a drama queen when she wants to be.
I mean, come on, everybody knows I love poodles, and
I love a poodle and a puppy clip, which this
dog is. It's the cutest thing on the planet. But
here's what tickled me. Double the dog is on what
(38:52):
looks like a bed with comforter and some afghans, but
in the background is a BB eight plush and I
have the same one, and it just made me. You know,
Star Wars in your dog picture. Come on, that's an
a plus. Thank you Wendy for writing us. I'm glad
that we were able to corroborate your cousin's story and
(39:15):
make you realize she, in fact is knowledgeable and not
talking nonsense. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio
app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff
(39:36):
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Tracy Wilson
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