Lost Books: Loretta Mason Potts
I love ediscovering old favorites and finding the old magic still works, if not as intensely. One of these--I've never heard anyone mention it--is Mary Chase's Loretta Mason Potts. It was pubbed by Lippincott (how many of my generation's old favorites were put out by Lippincott?) in '58, and illustrated charmingly by Harold Berson. I do remember loving his illustrations--except when the text said the heroine had long hair, and he'd draw his pretty curls only down to the girl's shoulders. That was not long hair to me. Long hair was hair you could sit on. And so (yes, I was a rotten kid, I already know that) I used to get out a black pen from the parents' desk and carefully draw in the hair properly, trying to match the artist's style, so next time I checked out the book, everything would be right.
Anyway, Loretta Mason Potts hit all my kid buttons bigtime. Secret tunnel behind the kids' closet? Oooh. (This was before I read Narnia, so as far as I was concerned, Chase had it first.) The tunnel leads to a secret country? Where there are funny but dangerous grownups? And the kids can outsmart them?
Add to that a bratty daughter removed under mysterious circs, magic and mystery and humor, and I checked that book out so often that the check-out card pocket was punctuated with my rereads. When I was a kid I thought it would make a great movie, and I still do. So when I went spelunking for info on Mary Chase, and only found stuff in French, it didn't surprise me to find out that she was a playwright and a sometime movie scenarist. The French seem to like her Harvey, the big invisible rabbit story--one I always thought silly, but there it is. No accounting for taste. Anyway, I couldn't find out much more about her, but I still find the book enormously charming, and so did a couple of fourth grade classes and one sixth grade class, when I took it in for the read-aloud book.
Anyway, Loretta Mason Potts hit all my kid buttons bigtime. Secret tunnel behind the kids' closet? Oooh. (This was before I read Narnia, so as far as I was concerned, Chase had it first.) The tunnel leads to a secret country? Where there are funny but dangerous grownups? And the kids can outsmart them?
Add to that a bratty daughter removed under mysterious circs, magic and mystery and humor, and I checked that book out so often that the check-out card pocket was punctuated with my rereads. When I was a kid I thought it would make a great movie, and I still do. So when I went spelunking for info on Mary Chase, and only found stuff in French, it didn't surprise me to find out that she was a playwright and a sometime movie scenarist. The French seem to like her Harvey, the big invisible rabbit story--one I always thought silly, but there it is. No accounting for taste. Anyway, I couldn't find out much more about her, but I still find the book enormously charming, and so did a couple of fourth grade classes and one sixth grade class, when I took it in for the read-aloud book.