Linked Together: Notes of Interest

The First
“One day last March, Bridget Flynn, a school librarian who lives in Philadelphia, was searching for an old family drawing to print on the invitations to her daughter Rebecca’s bridal shower. As she and Rebecca rummaged through the several generations of family artifacts—letters, photographs, an envelope of hair cuttings—she keeps in plastic bins in her basement, they found a stack of small envelopes tied together with a black shoelace.

“ ‘Oh, honey, these are love letters,’ Flynn said.”

But they weren’t love letters. They were ransom notes. Read the whole story—or as much as can be pieced together—of the first ransom notes sent in America (Past Imperfect). 

From 3 of 5
“If this letter changes the course of events for these newborns, then perhaps our lives will have served a higher purpose.”—From a warning letter the three surviving Dionne quintuplets sent to the parents of the McCaughey septuplets (Letters of Note).

Harmless Baby

I’ve posted a poem by Christina Rossetti at Out of the Ordinary. 

Ezra Jack Keats, No Starving Artist

A couple of weeks ago I took a week off regular blogging and reposted edited pieces from an old series of posts on author/illustrators of classic children’s literature. There’s one more, and it didn’t seem right to leave it languishing alone in the archives, so I’m reposting it today. 

Ezra Jack Keats was the first author, some say, to write children’s picture books that take place in an urban setting. I don’t know if he was the first one to give us picture books featuring African-American children as main characters, but he would certainly be one of the first. Do you know Peter, the little boy of The Snow Day and other Ezra Jack Keats stories?

To us, Keats’ Caldecott Award winning The Snowy Day seems like the most uncontroversial of children’s stories, but it wasn’t without critics when it was first published in the early 1960s. The primary complaint was that the book contained stereotypical black characters. I don’t see it. Yes, little Peter’s family lives in the inner city, but Ezra Jack Keats was born and raised in Brooklyn, and lived there almost his whole life. He was simply using the setting he knew best.

Ezra Jack Keats was born to Polish Jewish immigrants on March 11, 1916. His name at birth was Jacob Ezra Katz, but he changed it after WWII because he was afraid anti-Semitism would keep him from succeeding as an artist.

Young Jack was always drawing and his parents were very proud of his artwork, but his father was also concerned that he would need to learn another skill in order to earn an income. So Mr. Katz bought tubes of paint to bring home for his son, but told him he had received them from a starving artist in exchange for a bowl of soup in the coffee shop where he worked. Later, Jack Keats said his father had been “[m]y silent admirer and supplier. He had been torn between his dread of my leading a life of hardship and his real pride in my work.”

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