The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren

She became one of the first student Pages in Mom's library. His farmland would become the community of Meadowlands (appropriate name!) directly behind our post-war bungalow. Why not? - he was now very rich by old-time standards. Canter had realized, when a rich land developer approached him with an offer he couldn't refuse, that his time was best spent in a less demanding way. She even had a protruding set of front teeth to match her name (braces were not yet fashionable).īut Mr. She was rangy and raucous and we all loved her. The farm perched on the hill overlooking the library. Marilyn pitched hay and fed the animals - she loved horses especially - at old Mr. Until I met Marilyn Buck - a real-life Pippi - in 1958. So Pippi bored me more than the books I could dream to. I did, but it was all about a tom-girl - and back then I was already introverted, and preferred tales of adventure like Robin Hood, or Classics Illustrated Comics. Mom was every bit as headstrong and self-willed as Pippi, and she urged me to read it. Salaries were low after the War, so good libraries were a MUST.Īfter the supermarkets, banks and liquor stores, new libraries ranked high in those burgeoning burbs - along with new churches (we still believed back then!) - on the priority list of must-have new buildings.Īnd the summer before the library opened, Mom was a one-woman army of industry, cataloguing new books on our kitchen table. As the birth rate increased, so did the need for entertainment to keep the kids happy, and few of us had a TV in the mid fifties. Kids were everywhere, even though our typical town's size at first was small. One of my Mom's favourite strategies (probably at the direction of her Library Board, though at that time it was her own pet project too) was to provide our town with a plethora of kid's books. Back in 1957, my Mom's village library opened to a steady stream of visitors.

The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren