Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children's Literature

10. The Athens of South Norwalk

81 10 The Athens of South Norwalk I’ll admit, Barnaby, at times I nourish misgivings about the entire venture. —Mr. O’Malley, in Crockett Johnson, Barnaby, 9 April 1945 Crockett Johnson’s success brought financial security—and more work. People wrote to request original strips, ask him to donate artwork to various causes, and inquire if they might reprint Barnaby comics. Editors found Barnaby very useful for illustrating concepts. To highlight the need to educate the public about statistics, the American Statistical Association Bulletin chose a Barnaby in which O’Malley misuses statistical methods,“fitting the data to the curve” instead of using the data to plot the curve. For a report on the wartime scarcity of cigarettes, a December 1944 Advertising Age uses a strip in which O’Malley suggests that “advertising writers”are responsible for the tobacco shortage:“They never write about anything but the FINEST tobaccos. And the superlatives can be applied to only about one percent of the crop,” leaving “ninety-nine percent of the tobacco . . . utterly wasted!” To accompany an article on daytime radio serials illustrated by Saul Steinberg, the March 1946 Fortune ran Dave’s 30 January 1945 comic, in which Barnaby points to a radio broadcasting the words“Sob. Sob. Sob.”He observes,“This lady sounds just like the ones on all the other programs, Mr. O’Malley.” His godfather explains that this is“a very stylized art form,” but the “tiny nuances writers and actors are permitted to inject” serve as “the basis of the devotee’s esthetic enjoyment.” To display the best of the nation’s popular culture, the U.S. Office of War Information asked for six Barnaby cartoons to feature in a spring 1945 exhibition of American cartoons in Paris. Johnson sent six original strips.1 Adapting Barnaby for the stage was proving trickier than anticipated, and changes in script, writers, and cast threatened to delay production. Barnaby did, however, make its radio debut on 12 June 1945. On the second half of that day’s Frank Morgan Show, Morgan (best known for portraying the title character in MGM’s Wizard of Oz) played O’Malley, and seven-year-old Norma 82 The Athens of South Norwalk Jean Nilsson played Barnaby. No further episodes aired. At the same time, Johnson was cranking out six Barnaby strips each week, imprisoned by his own perfectionism:“I never feel that I can let down. If I did, the stuff wouldn’t get to be just mediocre; it would be terrible.”Thinking that quarterly deadlines might allow him to take some time off, he sought “to do strips that were syndicated only in quarterlies.” The first issue of the Barnaby Quarterly made its debut in July 1945, reprinting Barnaby’s adventures from the first five months of the year.2 Ruth Krauss had more time to think but was out of ideas. Even before The Carrot Seed was published, she had begun contemplating next her book but found herself uninspired. She rummaged through “some cartons full of old manuscripts” that she kept “in honor of an occasion like this” and pulled out on story about a boy who imagines that he’s a superhero. But “the story was around ten thousand words long,” far too long for a picture book, and although “the idea seemed clear, . . . it needed a lot of rewriting.”3 Krauss rewrote the story over and over but was not satisfied. She noticed that when she told the story to friends, they laughed. To try to capture that Crockett Johnson posing with the Barnaby strip of 22 April 1944. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved. 83 The Athens of South Norwalk comic tone, she decided to write the story the same way that she spoke it. Pleased with her inspiration, she took the manuscript to Ursula Nordstrom at Harper, who laughed and immediately said,“I’ll take it.” She wanted some changes, though. She thought it should be “built up” here and there, and although it was now only fifteen hundred words, Nordstrom thought it was still too long.4 For assistance in revising the story, Krauss brought the manuscript to the Bank Street Writers Laboratory in July 1945. Established by Lucy Sprague Mitchell in 1938, the laboratory helped authors create books that recognized that young children’s speech reflects...