Kids' Books Have Changed

Birds haven't changed; people have. 

Armchair Adventures

for June 3, 2012

by Paul Sullivan

 

Old Book Opens Window to a Past Long Gone

            I closed my laptop and struggled to tie together what I had seen.

            The last thing on the screen had been a satellite view of St. Petersburg, Fla., where Edna H. Evans had been a newspaper reporter, before World War II.

            At the time her first book rolled off the presses, March, 1940, she would not have recognized my view of that city.

            It was a boys' book, beautifully illustrated with her husband, Bill's photographs. She was a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times; he took pictures for the paper.

            Her story was a fictionalized account based on Bill's summer trips to Florida as a boy. An ornithologist rents the house next door; the elder mentors the junior as they work together on field research of Gulf Coast Florida's teeming birdlife.

            Not only did the couple share an interest in their journalism, but also in birds, which they had studied extensively along Gulf Coast and island keys.

            Last week, when I wrote this column about bird banding, I had mentioned my own early interest in birds and how it had been stoked by Edna Evans' book, "Bill and the Bird Bander."

            As much as it meant to me when I had read it-probably about age 6-8, this was not classic childrens' fare, destined to last for generations. (Although I've been surprised to see there are plenty of copies for sale online.)

            I was sure that my own copy of the book, which helped spark a lifelong interest in birds (together with my mother's keen interest in all things natural) had long since disappeared, in the 72 years' since it came out, and I wrote as much last week.

            But I had a shock in store the day after I turned in last week's column. Imagine the surprise when my son, Patrick, called to say he had found that old volume, and that it was in pretty good condition!

            (To understand this, you have to know that in our family, books are a passion. We never throw away books, storing them, instead, in places where we never more will find them and they might as well have been thrown away. But once in awhile, mind you, one of these old books returns from the shadowy cubbyholes of our past.)

            I sat down to reacquaint myself with Edna Evans book, the first of at least four she apparently wrote, by the way.

            It was, and yet was not the same as I remembered it. Remember, she did her research and wrote that book in the 1930s. Not only was it during the Great Depression, it was long before a number of major cultural earthquakes shook this country.

            Birds, and the study of them, were the subject of Edna Evans first book, but, I found that the basics of bird banding have not changed as much as I would have thought. Sure, computers have replaced 3x5 file cards and other technologies have made the work faster and easier, but the primary tasks are pretty much the same.

            The big surprise was cultural. Casually, without realizing it, Evans makes references to black people that are quite racist-no other word for it. When she mentions a black man helping the Bill's ornithologist-mentor, for instance, his reply is quoted in dialect.

            This kind of thing just doesn't go in books anymore, thank goodness, especially not in a book from a major publishing house.

            There wasn't much material like that in "Bill and the Bird Bander," but it was there, and it stopped me in its tracks.

            As my own, Buena Vista, Virginia, born mom, speaking of race relations in her childhood, told me in the 1970s: "We didn't know any better. It was the way we were raised. And it was wrong."