Category Archives: 1970s

240C: A family of animals underground (Solved)

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I was born in the late 1960’s. There was a children’s book that had to have been published before 1973 that I remember that had these illustrations it in about either a mole, a rabbit or a mouse whose family lived underground. The book had illustrated cut-aways that showed the ground above, the tunnels going down and their little house down in the earth (like a little kitchen, bed, etc.). For years it has been driving me nuts trying to find this book. So if you have any information please let me know.

Thank you!

239I: Photos of frolicking kittens (Solved)

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This book would have been published before 1978 but probably after 1960 or 1965. It was a children’s book with photos (probably black and white) of a pair of frolicking kittens. The kittens had black and grey stripes. There may have been short captions of the pictures. The pictures were of the kittens leaping and jumping in funny ways.

239H: Animal steals a cherry pie from window sill (Solved!)

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I was read this book by my mom when I was about 7 years old. It was probably published before 1995. It’s part of a collection of stories, possibly with the word “treasury” or “collection” in the title. The book was hardcover, a royal blue color, maybe a little bigger than a standard piece of computer paper, and about an inch thick. It may have been designed to be a bedtime book, but I don’t remember anything about sleeping.

I don’t remember anything other than a bit about one of the stories. I think they may have all been about animals, though. The one story I do remember involved a raccoon or black and white animal (but not a skunk) that steals a pie that was set to cool on a different animal’s window sill. I think the pie was cherry and had a lattice top crust.

Please help me find this book. I’d love to read it to my son.

239F: Fuzzy Shoulder Friends (Solved)

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I need help finding a children’s book, I can’t remember what it’s called!

It’s about a little village where all the people have little fuzzy creatures that sit on their shoulders. They look like fuzzy balls with eyes, and come in all different colors. These creatures make the people happy and build their self esteem. Then the people get greedy and start taking each other’s creatures to the point where the whole village is unhappy. They realize this and begin to share the creatures, the village is happy again. Moral of the story: when you take someone else’s confidence, you feel worse too. Published in 1960’s – 1980’s, perhaps.

Any help would be appreciated! Thank you!

239C: Family gets rich but then they get fed up with the money

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Me and my brothers were read this when we were growing up in the 1980s and none of us can remember the title. It is a children’s picture book with great graphics. The parents became wealthy being rock stars (or famous at least, if not rock stars) and they moved to a house with a gold bath plug in it and had an ice cream machine that made rainbow coloured ice-cream but then they got bored of the money. I remember that the mother complained about the bath plug being scratchy. The mother had a really cool hairstyle which came forward in a point on her forehead. It wasn’t a long book – for bed time reading- but we all think about it a lot and would love to find it.

239B: Mirror World (Solved)

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I am trying to remember a book that I read in elementary school in the mid to late 80s. I don’t remember the title but it was about being trapped inside another world inside a mirror and anytime they showed mirrors they used holographic stickers. I remember it being a large picture book with great (Victorian style?) artwork.

237D: Aliens with moss-like reproduction

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This was a novella contained in a large edited volume of Sci Fi short works. Since I read it in the mid 1960’s to 1971 time period and it had a library binding, it probably dates from early 1960’s.
The plot is as follows:
Humans underwent a diaspora throughout the local galaxy; then at some point colonies lost contact with each other and with Earth and cultures evolved on their own pathways. At the point in time when the story takes place, an interplanetary Human government is trying to locate old Earth colonies to bring them back into the fold. This is apparently a very desirable event for the other cultures, as they get all sorts of economic benefits by being in the human club. Thus, many civilizations of near-human look-alikes also try to get into the human federation (Yes I know, what are the chances? Convergent evolution can only do so much. )

So inspectors investigate new applications to the federation to determine if the people really are descended from ancient earth colonists. The lead character in the story is an inspector/investigator. He is following up on the investigation and mysterious disappearance of an earlier investigator. He has a copy of the previous investigator’s rather cryptic journal, which mentions “Musci” in relation to the people of the planet. Musci? Is he talking about houseflies (Muscidae)?

Turns out, the people look much like humans, but clearly are not; they reproduce by alternation of generation, like mosses and all other land plants (though it’s only really obvious to the naked eye in mosses and ferns). “Aha! Not houseflies, but mosses!” the narrator of the story thinks. (“Muscinae” is an outdated name for the mosses, now called Bryophyta.) There is a diploid generation that gives birth to a batch of haploid babies (plants do it with spores). These babies are spirited away (out of sight of nosy humans), and grow up to be either pure haploid males (one set of chromosomes plus a Y-chromosome) or pure haploid females (one set of chromosomes, one X-Chromosome). The author describes them as very handsome/beautiful, the essence of the ideal male or female. These people have sexual reproduction, give birth to diploid babies, and die. The diploid adults raise the diploid babies (if I remember correctly) and the haploid people raise the haploid offspring of the diploids.

I really would like to locate this work, to use as a side note in teaching introductory biology lectures on plant reproduction and how strikingly different it is from animal reproduction.