Category Archives: 1950s

227G: A book with an alternate ending

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It is middle school aged, maybe 5th and 6th grade, and very much like a Beverly Cleary book, and it was in the mid to late 60’s that I read it. You flipped it upside down to read the alternate ending, which had a different cover. I loved it back then because it showed that bullies and the bullied are not so much different. The boy had a major challenge…to play in a school concert, it was either a bugle or a trumpet, and that was the end of both versions of the story.

I’ve looked all over and it seems not to be Beverly Cleary. I know I read it about the same time I was reading Beezus and Ramona.

227C: Duck Decoy with a Heart

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The story of a carver who made a duck decoy with a heart anchor held by a string. When he’s in the water a fish, or crab or something snips the string and his heart falls to the bottom of the lake. I read it in about the late 1950s. I remember the hunter using the decoy part was disturbing.

Thank you. I hope someone else remembers this book.

226E: Adventures in science (description updated)

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My husband is always talking about a series of books he read as a boy (born 1957), probably from school or city library. He remembers them being called “Adventures in…” followed by some sort of science title. The protagonists were two boys, one or both pre-teens. They would travel with their father and have what I guess were all science adventures (there could have been others, like mathematics, but my husband remembers only the two that were science oriented). The two he always talks about are the chemistry book (perhaps Adventures in Chemistry?) where the boys went to a laboratory and made toothpaste (he remembers the younger boy tasting the toothpaste and liking it) and a book about model rockets (Adventures in Rocketry, perhaps?). The boys and their dad are driving to a deserted place where they can shoot off their rockets and are stopped by the police who see all the rockets and the rocket motors in the car and are upset; maybe the dad shows them a permit to shoot off rockets or something to let the police know they are no threat. It’s our 25th anniversary coming up and I’d love to dig up one of these books, but I’ve never found them searching online.

224G: MAX a chubby cat

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My wife’s father read this book with her when she was little, so it must have been published before 1964. Here is what she could recall when I asked her for more details:

“The book title was MAX. But anyways there are no photos of the book covers here so hard to say. This book is an over sized hard cover book (like the I Spy kids books). I remember the cover being yellow and turquoise – the illustrations are hand drawn (the cat is black line drawn) – he is a chubby cat. In one sequence he grabs the hair dryer and is looking at it inquisitively – it turns on accidentally and it blows his hair every which way as he tries to figure out how to turn it off.”

218B: Church Sexton Saves Jewish Boy

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In grade four, possibly grade five, I found a fascinating book in the school library–which means that it was probably published in the early 1950s. I loved this particular book and have been trying to find it for many years. If this isn’t a stumper, I don’t know what would be.

I don’t remember the title or the author or even the names of characters. All I remember is that the story takes place in Norway during World War II and that the protagonist’s father is the village church’s sexton. (That word, “sexton,” was a new one for me.) I think that this boy saves a Jewish boy from the Nazi invaders (and can’t imagine why else the library of a Jewish school would have a book about Christians in its library).
This book has some illustrations. I remember black-and-white ones.