Cargoes for Crusoes

by Grant M. Overton

iii

You are old enough to be thinking about going away to school. You can’t get too many school stories. In particular, you are keen for a new book by Ralph Henry Barbour. Nobody writes better school sport books! The Fighting Scrub, Mr. Barbour’s latest, is a picture of life at a famous New England school; and the fellows and the incidents of the tale are just as actual as the setting. Clif Bingham and Tom Kemble are boys everyone can recognize among his friends, and while Loring Dean, a cripple confined to a wheel-chair, is a new character in a story of boys, his splendid head-work in planning a forward pass play that makes the winning touchdown for the school is proof that a boy need not be an athlete to count.

There are some very pretty points about The Fighting Scrub. It has been usual to write only about a fellow who “made the team.” The scrub team has been an unsung, unhonored aggregation on which the first team sharpened its teeth. Mr. Barbour’s hero is only a scrub; but even a scrub has been known to play in the big game and with crucial results. Here’s another thing: people have begun to recognize the fact that we are in danger of losing sight of football and other games as sport, and of thinking only of winning. Nothing could show better than the history of Clif Bingham and Tom Kemble in The Fighting Scrub that the real joy of football lies in the spirit in which you play. Every fellow can see himself in Clif or Tom or Loring Dean.

Again, there are thousands of boys who will be able to see themselves in Joe Kenton, the hero of Mr. Barbour’s Follow the Ball. Joe is a fellow who is far from having things all his own way, but he is a sticker. He has to earn the money to get through school, and that never made it easier to make a record in athletics. But he shows up well, and Follow the Ball has baseball, skating, hockey and camping in its pages as well as football.

The proved classics in the way of school stories are assuredly Owen Johnson’s. It is sixteen years since the first publication of his first book of Lawrenceville stories, but Hickey Hicks, Dink Stover, Doc Macnooder, Hungry Smeed, the Gutter Pup, the Tennessee Shad and Lovely Mead are as “generally and specifically bully” as when Booth Tarkington hailed them. Mr. Johnson’s success in The Prodigious Hickey, The Varmint and The Tennessee Shad is as great as Mr. Tarkington’s own in Penrod; immeasurably greater than Kipling’s effort in Stalky & Co. It is true to say that the Lawrenceville stories blend speed, surprise, mischief and humor with a smoothness and a perfection untouched by anything else of their sort. They avoid the utter priggishness and complacency of Tom Brown’s School Days, while having the same positive value of a real school, under its own name and with its own tradition, as their background. “The only real prep school story ever written,” said George Ade, crisply, after reading The Varmint. Why? No doubt the fact that the Lawrenceville stories are semi-autobiographical has much to do with it. For Johnson was a Lawrenceville boy in the 1890s; there is extant a picture showing him with the original (but somewhat older) Brian de Boru Finnegan, Turkey Reiter, the Old Roman, and the Prodigious Hickey. Johnson himself it was who held the skeleton while Hickey attached it to a rope hung from a ventilator. Johnson sat on the roof when Old Ironsides—afterward a New York real estate broker—slid off and got filled with gravel. It was Johnson who experienced the agony of muffing a ball and being attacked by the whole baseball team, which he has described as the Varmint’s first discouraging experience with Lawrenceville athletics.

And after a dozen years, Mr. Johnson recently returned to the Lawrenceville scene in Skippy Bedelle, which tells how Skippy planned to invent a foot regulator for bathtubs and of certain deplorable experiments which were to produce mosquito-proof socks. Skippy Bedelle is largely the story of a sentimental progression and includes the first dress suit and Skippy’s first girl.

In the days when professional ballplayers still had mustaches and you could give people a thrill by riding down the post-office steps on a high-wheel bicycle, Irvin S. Cobb was goin’ on fourteen. And in Goin’ on Fourteen, his new book with pictures by Worth Brehm, the artist for Tarkington’s Penrod stories, Cobb has cut a few cross-sections out of a year in the life of an average boy. Now without in any respect being literal reminiscences, these chapters accurately and joyously reflect a scene and a period and a boy most unmistakably American. For Johnny Custer, otherwise John C. Calhoun Custer, Jr., is neither Tom Sawyer nor Penrod Schofield—though perhaps more like Tom and Huck Finn than Penrod—but he is as instantly recognizable and as entirely “boy” as either. And Johnny Custer was his own trained investigator; he did not depend upon others to tell him what would happen in untried circumstances, no, sir! The account of how he and Mr. Simons short-circuited the fowls of a chicken fancier should be read with caution; it is likely to leave you in the same condition of happy helplessness in which it left Johnny.

Albert Payson Terhune, like John Taintor Foote,[33] writes a capital dog story, and Mr. Terhune’s stories of collies, Buff and Lad and the others, are known wherever the dog has his due. In The Heart of a Dog, Terhune’s new book, there are one or two tales in which a collie is not the hero, but Lad and Buff and Treve and Lochinvar Bobby are familiar friends of the breed which Mr. Terhune himself raises and takes prizes with. Marguerite Kirmse has made the eight pictures in color and others in black and white. This is another book that grown-ups will borrow and neglect to return, if you don’t watch out.

Every boy and girl knows how hard it is to find a good, readable history. The difficulty was pointed out to Sidney Dark, who set to work at once to do something about it. And so far he has done magnificently, producing, in The Book of Scotland for Young People, The Book of England for Young People, and The Book of France for Young People, three histories more clear and interesting to boys and girls of ten to sixteen than any similar accounts. (I do not even except Charles Dickens’s A Child’s History of England, which is one-sided in spots.) Each of Mr. Dark’s books has sixteen illustrations from famous paintings of historic scenes.