I read this book when I was in high school(1964-1967). It was about a boy who worked at a boat moorage/marina on Lake Okeechobee. I don’t recall it being a very thick book. I’m pretty sure it was a fiction book. I can’t seem to find it. Thanks
Category Archives: 1960s
266A: Boy shares his cookies
This book (which seemed old when my grandmother read it to me in the 1960’s) was about a little boy who had a bag of cookies that he gave away one-by-one on his walk home leaving one for himself when he arrived home. I’m confident the postman got one.
265G: This Room Is Mine (Solved)
A 1960’s-early 70’s color (I think) children’s picture book about a girl who is forced to share her bedroom with a sibling. She copes by drawing a line down the middle of the room to stake out her territory.
265D: Waiting for love
I’m looking for a book I started to read in the late 70’s about a girl (maybe called Margaret) and an older boy. He writes her a letter saying that he cares for her, but will wait until she grows up. She may be in high school and he’s in college?
265A: A boy lives in the rural south after WWII
It was a young person’s book which I read when I was 10 or 12 years old in Canada. It would have been in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s when I found it in our school library. It was set in the Southern USA and I think that the period was shortly after WWII. The book was the story of a boy that was staying with a family in a big old rural home. There was something about hunting raccoons at night with dogs. I think there was actually quite a bit about the dogs and something sad happened to one of them. There was something about hearing trains running in the distance at night. There was something sad associated with this (maybe to do with the dogs?). The family had a black (I think) cook with whom the boy spent considerable time. She was rather nurturing. And a WWII vet who was rather troubled would come to the back/kitchen door and she would give him food. I think that the boy was afraid of him. My recollection is that it was a rather haunting, sentimental, sad and yet hopeful story. I think that the boy was trying to determine how he fit into the world.
264C: Boy Inventor solves mysteries through creativity (Solved)
From the early 1960’s, a young boy invents various devices in his home to solve mysteries. He can’t wake up, so he invents an alarm clock with string attached to his toe – alarm goes off, string winds up and tugs his toe. Does he invent a periscope to spy on a suspicious neighbor?
Name might have been Henry (perhaps with alliterative last name). Several books were published with his adventures, thin young (young?) adult fiction.
264B: 60’s Two Girls Living on Opposite sides of a River
I had a book when I was a young person (10 to 12 year old maybe) in the 60’s, where there were two girls living with their respective families on either side of a river. It was written from the perspective of one of the girls, whom I think was poorer than the family on the other side, and she always looked on the other girl’s life with envy. I cannot remember the event that led to her ending up on the other side of the river and living with the other family but when this happened she was then in a position of looking across the river at her own family, missing them and realising the folly of her original yearnings. I have a feeling it may have been a Christian book – maybe Sunday school prize but I’m not certain about that. Any light shed on the name of the book would be appreciated.
PS, someone elsewhere suggested “We Live by the River” by Lois Lenski but this is not it.
263I: Poems and Imaginary Creatures (Solved)
Before 1973, poems and pics of imaginary creatures. Two I remember: “What the heck is a bottleneck, I can’t give you a hint to it, but grownups run right into it” and “A frightening beast is the raging inferno, for lunch he eats matches, at suppertime Sterno.”
263H: A puppy waits for the perfect owner (Solved)
Probably considered a “first reader” though might qualify as a picture book. Read to me in the late 70’s but could be as early as late 60’s. The book is about puppies in a pet store window waiting for their owners to choose them. The cover (or an illustration inside if not the cover) is a view of the pet store storefront with two windows on either side of the door. Puppies on both sides. In the book people keep coming in and choosing dogs and they all resemble the person choosing them. A take on the dogs look like their owner concept. Tall skinny people with tall skinny dogs…etc. The beagle puppy is waiting and waiting until a boy in a baseball hat (red?) comes in for him. I think the boy had previously seen the dog and had been told he had to save his money.
The illustrations might be mainly line draws and are in yellow/brown/red tones as far as I remember. My mother belonged to a book club that automatically sent books so this may have been a book club selection. It’s so frustrating to be able to remember it so clearly but not be able to find it. Hopefully someone can help!
Thanks!
263C: Fairy fantasy from the 60’s or 70’s (Solved)
I read the book around 1978-1983. It was a fantasy with a child who stayed with family and went into the woods and found a passage to a fantasy world of fairies which she ended up traveling to. The book had a title that was a play on Maestro or some other musical name. The cover of the book was brownish red with the face of one of the fairies. The face was very large and very round(side-wise oval) and with a very wide mouth. I was between 9-12 yo when I read it but this is what I remember.