A Housebound Life
The sisters’ bond was made tighter by the fact of Marguerite’s terrible illness. Rheumatic fever—an inflammation of the heart that often followed a respiratory ailment—was one of the leading causes of death in young people around the turn of the twentieth century. Two of Marguerite’s older brothers died young; the first, Louis, in 1884, before Marguerite was born, and Lorenz the year after her birth—he was only seven years old; the cause of death was “measles and pneumonia.”
Under such circumstances it’s understandable that Marguerite’s mother wanted first and foremost to keep her youngest daughter safe. Since the only “cure” for Marguerite’s illness in those days was complete rest, her diagnosis led to six years of housebound life. This not only brought Gertrude and Marguerite closer but helped turn Marguerite into a reader and writer—as did the red writing table that her father gave her when she was nine or ten years old.
Stocked with her favorite gift of paper and pencils, the desk, which her father set up in a corner of the kitchen, was Marguerite’s own personal kingdom. She recalled the moment she first saw the desk in an edition of her newsletter: “What caught my eye first was my own cream pitcher, holding a bright bouquet of pencils…. Brand new, they were, with their erasers firm and unchewed, and all so freshly sharpened that to this day the memory of their cedarwood fragrance tickles my nose.” They would remain some of the very same tools that Marguerite would wield for the rest of her life. She wrote all her books—and their many, many revisions, along with her voluminous notes—with a pencil on paper before they were typed, either by herself, or more often, an assistant. It was a practice she maintained for almost eighty years.
Seated at her tiny kitchen desk under the watchful eye of her mother, Marguerite wrote stories that she later noted were “for adults” rather than children, although she offered no examples of her childhood work, alas. The close proximity of her mother while she wrote in those early years may have influenced Marguerite’s wish for company wherever she wrote later on—whether it was her siblings or later her husband Sid or one of her many dogs.
Marguerite also wrote under the watchful eye of countless librarians who were one of the greatest constants of Marguerite’s work and life. Librarians were dependable, quiet company, as well as reliable researchers to whom Marguerite could turn with one of her endless requests for more information. Marguerite owed a great deal of her work to their efforts, and she repaid their numerous favors by extolling the virtues of libraries and librarians in her interviews and making regular appearances at libraries and related conventions all over the country. Some of the librarians she worked with the most became such good friends that they even offered to help Marguerite with her research after they retired from their library posts. The devotion was clearly mutual.
Many years after she had become a successful children’s book author, Marguerite described her early childhood years with great nostalgia, imparting a warm glow to what surely must have been some lonely years, deprived of companions close to her own age. All her siblings, save for Gertrude, were much older than Marguerite. She referred to them as “grownups” and said they were less like having sisters and a brother than “a whole flock of mothers and fathers.”
First Publication
While Marguerite wrote stories for her own amusement and that of her family in the beginning, she soon decided she should try to get her work published. Marguerite had found a solicitation for short stories based on the four seasons in one of her mother’s magazines and decided to submit a story of her own. She wrote about visiting a friend in the country when she was well enough to venture out.
The art of Wesley Dennis, Marguerite’s long-time collaborative illustrator who created drawings for Misty, as well as The Red Pony, Black Beauty and other famed horse books.
The season she chose to focus on was the fall, and Marguerite described the experience of jumping into a pile of leaves during a game of hide and seek. It was the perfect hiding place, Marguerite thought, until her friend’s dog gave her location away. That story—“Hide and Seek Through the Autumn Leaves”—was published in The Woman’s Home Companion (or The Delineator—sources vary) and Marguerite was paid the quite-handsome sum of twelve dollars or nearly four hundred dollars in today’s money. (Oddly enough, in her Rand McNally author biography, the amount is noted as “the full sum of one dollar” or eleven dollars less than the number Marguerite herself cited as payment.)
Marguerite didn’t keep a copy of her very first work, and it’s proven impossible to track down, although her fans have tried to find it over the years. (The story was a Reddit forum topic for a while as fans searched for it in vain.) Marguerite wrote that she often wished that she had kept a copy of the story, and those first few dollars, too, since it was the first money she earned in her writing career.
Having her very first effort published so quickly and easily gave Marguerite an unreasonable idea as to how easy writing for money would be, and so she conceived a bold childhood plan to become a writer and “buy a whole ranchful of horses” with the earnings from her books. Marguerite did, of course, get a horse and more than one ranch house in her life, but it took some time—many more years and many more books than she might have expected to achieve such success.
Dreams of Horses…and Other Things
The “ranchful of horses” that Marguerite hoped to own one day was a wish she rarely dared express as a child. No one in her family had a horse, save for her older brother Fred, whose horse Bonnie was bad-tempered and inclined to bite. Even so, Marguerite envied her brother for having Bonnie. Marguerite told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, “I’m afraid I hated my brother because he used to smell so good. He smelled like horses.” She was so jealous in those early years that Marguerite made it a point to avoid all horses, although her passion did spill out in unexpected ways. In a speech at a 1979 reading conference in Indiana, Marguerite recalled how she would dash into telegraph offices and write “telegrams to the world” when she was a child. Her telegrams often as not included a sketch of a horse’s head and these words: “I look into your great brown eyes/and wonder where the difference lies/Between your soul and mine.”
There were quite a few horses around on the streets of Milwaukee in Marguerite’s early years. Horses were used not only for transportation but vital city work, especially sanitation. There were horses used for picking up garbage in Milwaukee as late as 1957 when the last so-called “garbage horse” Dolly finally retired. (Sadly, Dolly’s existence seems to have gone unremarked-upon by Marguerite, though the hard life of a city garbage horse seems like a very Marguerite sort of book.)
When her readers asked Marguerite to describe her childhood, and especially the horses of her youth, she told them about Bonnie (complete with the fact of Bonnie’s very bad temperament). “But what about your own horse?” her readers asked. This seemed to be a very important point for them. Marguerite explained (repeatedly) to this evergreen question that she’d had to wait until she was a grownup to get a horse, and if her readers had to wait too, they would probably appreciate their horses that much more, just as she did. Interestingly, Marguerite never mentioned the fact she’d had to spend much of her early life sequestered at home so that riding, let alone horse ownership, was out of the question. Perhaps she wanted to recast the story of her childhood in the same way she had recast parts of the stories of the boys and girls and horses of her books. Her renditions may not have been completely factual, but they were entirely true to how she felt.
Aside from horses, the other topic that young Marguerite wrote about quite often was clothes—specifically, the hand-me-down attire from her sisters. Marguerite recalled a particularly sad piece of clothing—a black astrakhan coat—that she despised. The long fleecy lambskin had become quite bedraggled by the time it reached Marguerite, its third and last owner, and it didn’t help that Marguerite was exceedingly thin. The effect was scarecrow-like and decidedly unflattering—a tattered garment draped on her thin frame, as she recalled.
Perhaps such sad childhood outfits helped to inform Marguerite’s impeccable grownup attire. Photographs of the adult Marguerite invariably show her quite fashionably dressed in form-fitting jodhpurs or a snappy two-piece suit and sometimes even a fur coat, with her hair always, always impeccably coiffed under a hat. Marguerite was mad for hats—some quite plain, some rather sophisticated, others downright wild.
While Marguerite could be self-conscious about her appearance, she was just as likely to forget herself—and the world around her— while composing a story in her head. Her sister Gertrude described Marguerite as impossibly dreamy, so dreamy that she could literally lose track of her feet. Gertrude, whom Marguerite called “mom sister,” had to watch out for her younger sister while she was doing something as simple as crossing the street.
There was one near-tragic instance of this dreaminess that Marguerite later described as a great opportunity. She had been roller-skating to the local library about a mile from her house, pretending that she was Hans Brinker, the hero of the book Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates that she’d recently checked out of the library. In Marguerite’s mind she wasn’t a girl on a street in a midwestern city but Hans Brinker, skating on the ice in the Netherlands. (Interestingly, Hans, first published in 1865, was written by an American who hadn’t visited the Netherlands until years after the book debuted.)
In this dreamlike state, young Marguerite skated off the street and into a passing motorcyclist. Fortunately, she received only minor injuries, but the book fared much worse. When Marguerite shamefacedly presented the damaged book to the librarian in charge, a young woman named Delia G. Ovitz, she was filled with trepidation, having read the notice in the book’s inner flap that warned borrowers who damaged a book might be disbarred from the library. Marguerite, distraught, took the threat to heart. (Library books were much more valuable years ago when few could afford to buy their own books.)
But instead of disbarring Marguerite, Ms. Ovitz brought her into the room where the library books were repaired to show Marguerite how the book that she had damaged might in fact be mended. The room looked “like a doctors’ office but much more exciting,” Marguerite recalled in Something About the Author: Autobiography Series (Volume 7). “There were rolls of buckram and cloth-tape in muted shades of green and brown and maroon. There was an enormous jar of delicious-smelling paste with a paintbrush for swabbing it on” she wrote. Marguerite was as entranced as she was relieved. The injured book could be repaired, and Marguerite could continue to borrow from the library.
In fact, Marguerite could be much more than a librarian patron. Ovitz offered the thoroughly repentant Marguerite a job mending books on weekday afternoons after school and on Saturdays too. (Marguerite’s declared goal of her book-mending job was to save enough money to buy a “ranchful of horses”—although she didn’t mention how much her book-mending paid.)
Marguerite took to the work with great alacrity and was well-suited to the job—until her dreaminess once more took hold. Marguerite began reading the books as often as she was mending them, and sometimes she read more books than she mended, which made Ovitz furious—so furious, in fact, she decided to fire Marguerite. But when Marguerite shared a passage from a book she was reading (Summit of the Years by John Burroughs) with Ovitz, all was forgiven. It seemed that Ovitz was a fan of the great naturalist too, so Marguerite was allowed to keep her job and she and the librarian often shared their thoughts on the Burroughs book.
Published in 1913, Summit of the Years is the author’s account of what he thought had been his greatest accomplishments in life. It’s a weighty tome for a young girl, but Burroughs’s emphasis on the importance of nature appealed to Marguerite. “… that which has interested me most in life, nature, can be seen from lanes and by-paths better even than the turnpike,” Burroughs wrote. It was just how Marguerite saw the world.
Marguerite later described her love of both libraries and Burroughs (to whom she remained devoted) in an article titled “Those Who Carry Umbrellas” for the Book Bulletin of the Chicago Public Library (September 1956), adapted from an earlier talk she had given. “In a library I have no feeling of solitariness. All about me other people are braiding together little strands of information, too…. In the words of my beloved John Burroughs: ‘We have come here to find ourselves. It is so easy to get lost in the world.’” The title of Marguerite’s essay came from a proverb that Marguerite said had informed her life, which read: “Those who carry umbrellas cannot see the rainbow.”
After graduating from high school, Marguerite remained close to home, enrolling at Milwaukee (Wisconsin) State Normal School (now University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) with the intention of becoming a teacher—a common ambition for young unmarried women of her generation. The college was conveniently close to her parents’ house on the city’s east side. Marguerite recalled walking the mile from home to her university classes, sometimes wearing two layers of stockings, not for the warmth but to “fatten” her legs, which she considered too thin to be attractive.
Marguerite described herself as “very skinny and very homely” as a teenager and young woman, and she wasn’t—by her own admission—particularly popular with boys, who referred to her as “that tall drink of water.” It seems like a tame sobriquet by today’s standards, but the words still stung. Nevertheless, by the time Marguerite was ready for college, she had become an attractive and poised young woman. In her yearbook photo she wears stylishly poofy bangs, a pearl necklace, and a confident smile. She was an active, engaged student. Marguerite aka “Marge” majored in journalism and was the vice president of the Dramatic Club, as well as a member of the French Club, and president of the Pythia Club. She wrote poetry and plays, and at one point entertained the idea of becoming an actress. Marguerite certainly never lacked dramatic flair, and she would put her talents to good use many years later in the sales and marketing of her books.
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Reprinted with permission of Trafalgar Square Books. For more information or to order a copy of the book, visit HERE.
