The Manley Arts: Pictures and Words.

Manley, Will (author).

In the 1950s, a summer vacation meant piling the kids into the back of the family station wagon and heading out on the open road for two weeks of automotive adventure. Gasoline was less than a quarter a gallon, and the interstate highway system was in its infancy, which meant that most of the automotive adventuring was done on two-lane, dipsy-doodle roads in the middle of no place. As was the social hierarchy of the day, the father was the pilot, the mother was the navigator, and the kids were third-class passengers, whose input was neither sought nor valued.

Perhaps that social hierarchy was not as functional as everyone assumed it to be because today it’s the norm for members of my generation to blame all the failures of their adult lives on unhappy childhoods. You can’t turn on Oprah, Dr. Phil, or Jerry Springer without some depressed boomer bemoaning a barren home life or abusive parents. I feel almost guilty saying this, but I absolutely loved my childhood. I was blessed with two loving parents who never stopped loving me despite the fact that I caved in the roof of the neighbor’s car with snow boulders and got kicked out of the downtown movie theater for shooting spitballs through a straw from the balcony.

Actually, that’s not completely true. My childhood wasn’t all rosy. There were those two weeks of automotive adventure every summer. I suffered from acute motion sickness. Still do. You don’t want to travel with me without wearing protective clothing, maybe a rain poncho. For my mother, however, those two weeks were important. She was a wanderer intent on seeing every scenic view and point of interest highlighted by tour book author Duncan Hines, the Baedeker of the 1950s. We ranged from the cranberry bogs of Maine to the Dismal Swamp of Georgia. Oh, how I hated Duncan Hines! His guidebooks were the road map to my intestinal dismal swamp.

But then, voila, in the midst of our travels, we wandered into Cooperstown, New York, and my whole life changed. We were on the way back from the Maine bogs when Mom, the navigator, felt sorry for me. She knew that Cooperstown was probably the only destination in North America that I considered worthy of a bout of motion sickness. It is the mythical birthplace of baseball and the site of its holy shrine, the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Surprisingly, I wasn’t impressed with the hall and all of its statues and museum displays. For such a grand game, the place seemed stilted and lifeless. Baseball, I decided, belongs in a park, not a museum. What a disappointment! But then Mom, quoting from the gospel according to Duncan, quickly shifted gears and guided us across town to the Fenimore Art Museum. I didn’t follow her into the picture galleries but was attracted to a display of books by the great author, James Fenimore Cooper, the man the town was named after. I didn’t know anything about Cooper, but I did know that two of his books, The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer, on display that day, had the most exciting illustrations I had ever seen. The illustrator was N. C. Wyeth.

The colors were vivid, the action vibrant, and the characters full of life. What excitement: red-coated soldiers shooting muskets, noble savages wielding tomahawks, buckskin-clad pioneers paddling birch-bark canoes, and young maidens being rescued in the wilds. All of this action was set against the rugged background of woods, mountains, lakes, rivers, and waterfalls. Wyeth made all of this come alive, more alive, it seemed to me, than the Disney movies we would see every Saturday in our downtown theater, the one I got kicked out of. I couldn’t wait to get home and get to the library.

In those days when television was still in its infancy, The Leatherstocking Tales were shelved in the children’s department, along with other revered classics such as Treasure Island, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Robinson Crusoe, and Oliver Twist. It was my good fortune that my little hometown library carried the N. C. Wyeth editions of The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans. Who could ever have predicted that by the end of that fateful summer, my beloved baseball books would end up in the closet and my favorite author would become the formidable James Fenimore Cooper?

Was it Cooper or was it Wyeth who changed my life by giving me a love of literature that would eventually lead to a life in librarianship? I think it was Wyeth. Cooper never seemed as vibrant without Wyeth’s help. The Pilot, The Spy, and The Pathfinder were all good adventure books, but without the Wyeth paintings, they seemed just a tad lackluster.

I chuckled in library school when one of my teachers professed that book illustrators were not real artists because they were dependent upon the work of the author. Think back to all the books that moved you as a child. Was A. A. Milne really that great a writer, or was he lucky to have E. H. Shepard as his illustrator? What made Alice in Wonderland so captivating, the prose of Lewis Carroll or the drawings of John Tenniel? What do you remember more, the Little House stories by Laura Ingalls Wilder or the homespun illustrations by Garth Williams?

Here’s a tough one: who was better, Beatrix Potter the writer or Beatrix Potter the artist?

Will Manley has been writing The Manley Arts since 1991.