Featured Book: Harry the Dirty Dog

Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion 

HarperCollins, 1956

Illustrations by Margaret Bloy Graham

The title of Gene Zion's 1956 Harry the Dirty Dog says it all. Harry dislikes cleanliness. He hides the scrub brush whenever it's time to take a bath. To Harry, filthiness is next to dogliness.  So he runs away and indulges in joyous, untidy rebellion. His dirty doings are depicted in a series of short, simple sentences and corresponding drawings: playing in a street, at the railroad, with other dogs. Even in a coal chute! In a humorous twist, all of the grime transforms Harry from a white dog with black spots to a black dog with white spots. He looks so different that his family doesn’t recognize him when he returns home (one of several indications that Harry is brighter than his family--another being that he always outsmarts them with concealing the bath brush). Harry finally does the very last thing he ever expected to do in his entire life: beg his family for a bath.  But as the story comes to close, we’re not left feeling like Harry “gives in.”  No, Harry might be clean and safe at home, but the bath brush is still tucked safely beneath his pillow.  Only now, it seems, that instead of always refusing to be clean, he will be the judge of when he needs a bath (i.e. when his silly family doesn't recognize him through the filth!).

Featured Book: Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton
Houghton Mifflin, 1939

In Virginia Burton's Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, the reader learns, in a series of beautiful and detailed pictures, what a steam shovel can do: dig canals, cut through mountains, lower hills, straighten curves, smooth ground, fill in holes, create landing fields for planes, and dig holes for the cellars of skyscrapers. Mike Mulligan is proud of his steam shovel Mary Anne (apparently a reference to Marion Steam Shovels), and boasts that she could dig in one day what 100 men could do in one week, and the two always work faster and better when others are watching.   

But gas, electric, and diesel shovels are rapidly replacing steam shovels. Out with the old and in with the new. Mike knows that Mary Anne still has worth; so he goes to the small town of Popperville, which needs a basement dug for its new town hall. Mike is so confident that the work can be done in a day (remember his boast about the 100 men?) that he promises that the labor will be free if not completed by nightfall. 

At dawn the next day, they set out to work. The reader gets the sounds of the digging: BING! BANG! CRASH! SLAM! The people of Popperville (and neighboring Bangerville, Bopperville, Kipperville, and Kopperville) all come to watch, which makes Mike and Mary Anne work faster and better! The ending is exciting and unexpected: Mary Anne gets stuck in the basement! 

This dilemma encourages interaction with the reader, asking of him what should be done in this situation.  Ultimately, upon the suggestion of the little boy in the story (based on the suggestion given to Burton by a real-life 12-year-old), it is decided that Mary Anne will be used to heat the new town hall, and Mike is given a job there so that he may always be with her.  The technology in the book is deliberately outdated (and infinitely more outdated now). But the story still feels fresh. Ahead of it's time, even. At least for me.  I'm still young, but I can feel more and more each day just how quickly the world moves, and how easy it is to feel suddenly irrelevant. Especially as a writer. Mike Mulligan encourages salvage and reuse of valuable resources and finding value in things (and people!) that might otherwise be written off. Not preservation for preservation's sake, but creative and essential new uses for what we already have.