Tuesday, June 11, 2024

Uncle Wiggily Hops into the Archive


The Uncle Wiggily Book, by Howard R. Garis (Grosset & Dunlap; text copyright 1927, 1955; Illustrations by Carl and Mary Hauge copyright 1961; this edition 1975) 

When I said I had no more books coming in this month I had forgotten this one. It is a copy of an identical volume that was in Mrs. Davenport’s fabled Third Grade library. The McQueeney School library was in its own way a repository of rather old-fashioned literature; it included multiple ‘book books’ (rather than this large anthology) of Howard R. Garis' Uncle Wiggily (not Wiggly) and Thornton Burgess' Old Mother West-Wind style books, which saw their origin and heyday in the 1910’s – 1940’s.

Between 1910 and 1947 Garis had written an Uncle Wiggily story every day except Sundays; when he quit, he had over 11,000 Uncle Wiggily stories to his name.  Selections of these became chapters in his books. Their classic illustrator was Lansing Campbell. The Wiggily books were just the tip of the iceberg of his writing. Together with his wife, Lilian, they may have been the most prolific authors of the 20th Century. 

 

Uncle Wiggily Longears is an elderly rabbit gentleman who walks with the aid of a candy-striped crutch and lives in a house made out of a stump, where he is cared for by Nurse Jane Fuzzy-Wuzzy, a muskrat. He is plagued by a number of animal foes and is the hero to several small animal children. In some stories (but not the ones in this book) he drives a car with sausage “tyres,” that he peppers to make go faster, and is bothered by a pair of fantastical creatures, the Skeezicks and the Pipsisewah, who are always up to mischief.

Uncle Wiggily, though classic, was already starting to fade from the literary scene when I was a kid. It still kept (keeps?) a foot in popular culture by the ubiquitous Uncle Wiggily board game.

I used to have a copy of
Uncle Wiggily’s Story Book, but I never much cared for its Michael Hague-like knockoff illustration.

This book, though no Lansing Campbell, still has the right nostalgic vibes for me. Carl and Mary Hauge were illustrators of many young children’s books; their style reminds me of early Richard Scarry.


 

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