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

3. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

25 3 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman Hands are to make things. —Ruth Krauss, A Hole Is to Dig (1952) In the summer of 1919, eighteen-year-old Ruth Krauss was one of Camp Walden’s oldest campers. Founded three years earlier by New York City principal Blanche Hirsch and teacher Clara Altschul, Camp Walden sought to promote democratic cooperation, to foster a love of nature, and to give girls “a happy and vigorous summer, and ample opportunity for all forms of athletic activity,”including archery, swimming, diving, hiking, basketball, baseball, and tennis.1 Ruth took part, displaying more exuberance than skill and earning the nickname Doggie. In an account of “The First Counselor-Girl Basket-Ball Game”in the summer of 1920,fellow camper Ruth Loebenstein wrote,“Doggie got her periods mixed up, and thought she was in dancing class. She did the wilted flower stunt several times, and Miss King even had to blow the whistle to remind her that she was one of the guards and not one of the garden.” That same summer, Ruth captained one of the teams in a friendly weekend camp sports tournament, leading her team to victory. Though they did keep score, Walden was careful to make its competition as noncompetitive as possible: The teams had to cheer for each other. As Ruth would write in Open House for Butterflies (1960),“I think a race looks prettier when everybody comes in even.”2 Walden’s noncompetitive approach derived from Hirsch and Altschul’s allegiance to the principles of Ethical Culture, a movement that sought to create a more humane society by recognizing that each person is unique and by trying to nurture the development of each person’s talents. Parodying the camp’s ethical philosophy, however, Ruth and her best friend invented a “‘lie cheat and steal’society based on a whole new set of morals.”The young women also resisted their counselor’s insistence that the campers speak only French in 26 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman their bunks, and the campers combined care packages from home into secret midnight feasts.3 At three hundred dollars for five weeks, the camp attracted girls from wellto -do families, mostly of German-Jewish backgrounds. Walden offered Ruth many outlets for her creativity. Campers took art classes and wrote and staged plays.At a 1920 Backward Party, participants wore their camp uniforms backward . The 1919 issue of the camp yearbook, Splash, contains the earliest surviving piece of Ruth’s creative work, “The Climb up Washington as Told to Me by Ham.” In it, she relates her conversation with a fellow camper who describes the dangers of climbing Mount Washington while Ruth serves as an attentive audience: Ham:And,Ruth,if you made one mistake you would have gone over.Imagine!! And every second we saw a sign saying This man died here. Oh, it was terrible!! They say the scenery was marvelous, but if I had looked down, I would’ve gone right over. And then we’d see another sign saying: This girl died here. Oh, it was terrible! You would have died!! Me: Ye Gods! Ham: I wish you could have been there. It was a wonderful experience. Look at my shoes.—and Mr. Hale slipped once on Suicide Path.We had to crawl along on our hands and knees there and test every stone before we tread on it.And you should have seen the falls. Ruth’s narrative finds the comedy in ordinary language, picking up on Ham’s frequent repetition of “You would have died” and tendency to describe the experience as simultaneously terrifying and wonderful.4 The following summer, Ruth served as entertainment editor for Splash, which featured a chart offering a glimpse of her personality: In the fall of 1919, after her first summer at Walden, Ruth decided to return to the violin. Her Western High violin teacher, Franz Bornschein, taught at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory of Music, which was located only two miles from her home—and she applied to study there. Peabody informed her that she was not yet advanced enough to enroll but was welcome to join the Name Nickname Favorite Expressions Ambition Ultimate Result R. Krauss Doggie I don’ wan’ to Be a fortune teller Wears a shoe lace for a tie.5 27 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman conservatory’s Preparatory...