Another article by my friend Jim Baird. This one is worth reading for many reasons, fun being just one. Then again, it’s also informative and educational, for those trying to improve your writing skills, a good example of something to shoot for. In my humble opinion, any one of these ‒ entertain, educate, inform ‒ is a “must do” if an article is to be of any use, and here Jim manages to do all three. In any case, you be the judge.
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By James Baird:
My grandmother taught me to read when I was very small using the comic books my mother brought home from downtown Dallas after work. We had a big wicker chair in the back bedroom. I sat on the arm of this chair while my grandmother pointed at the comic panels and explained them.
Since children are usually visually oriented, years later I asked my grandmother about how she did this. “I looked at the pictures and then you told me what was in the balloons, huh?”
“No,” she replied, “you always wanted to know about the words and what they meant.”
Hmm. I thought that unusual, but the story of why I chose words as more interesting than pictures is for another time, boys and girls, if I can figure it out myself. That fondness for words precedes any childhood memories. I can’t remember sitting on the chair or any of the rest of the procedure, although my grandmother told me about it many times, and it was certainly one of the great achievements of her triumphant life. I also can’t imagine teaching a 3-year-old to read, but she did it, with the help of my own curiosity.
Another product of learning to read was that all the memories I have of that period began to pile up after I acquired that skill and began reading on my own. Why grasping written language also stimulated my memory is another puzzler.
I gobbled up every children’s book in the house and moved on to the Winnie the Pooh series and other kiddie faves. In addition to using my imagination to get into the stories with the characters, which must be what most kids do when they begin to read, I had another odd reaction. Right away, I wanted to be a writer and use this powerful tool to reach others as had the authors of the books I read. Obviously I succeeded.
I started before I could physically write, dictating a short story to my mother. The main character had a series of weird adventures he couldn’t understand; at the end, he woke up and found that the story was a dream. I’m glad I got this ancient wheeze of a plot device out of the way with my first effort.
When I started school, I got another unexpected thrill. An author of children’s books, Siddie Joe Johnson, would go from school to school and read to us.
When she visited Winnetka Elementary School, I was amazed. Miss Johnson, who also ran the Children’s Department of the downtown Dallas Public Library, was the first person I met who had actually written a book — in fact, several of them. Unlike say, Madonna or Terrell Owens, who wrote 500 nonthreatening words, had somebody do some illustrations, and called that a children’s book, Miss Johnson wrote books the length of short novels and which involved children who had to face difficult problems.
Recently, remembering the big push Siddie Joe gave to my desire to write, I began collecting as many of her books as I could find. I’ve got 10 books, some thrown out of libraries when they reached a certain age, still with the card in them.
Explanation for those under 40 — in the old days, each book had a pocket in it with a lined card with the name of the book on it. To check out a book, you signed the card, and the librarian stamped the due date on the card and a sheet in the book as we still do for a physical book today. The librarian put the card in the “checked-out” box and knew that you had it.
How crude, says the suave computer user; today we do that with a keystroke. Yeah, but it’s fun to look at the name they actually signed and wonder who they were and why they read the book and if they liked it — I know, we don’t have time for that now. Faster, faster.
Miss Johnson’s books varied a lot but usually were about Texas, where she spent her childhood. One, Texas: The Land of the Tejas, is a large book with old colonial maps as endpapers and using the “six flags” motif as a way of telling the history of the state.
New Town in Texas is about her family’s involvement in the building of Denison, which happened when the railroad stopped there on its way into the state from Oklahoma. Cat Hotel honors her favorite animal. A Month of Christmases tells the history of Fredericksburg through the adventures of two children who visit there.
She wrote a book of poetry for children, Feather in My Hand, as did Robert Louis Stevenson, whose A Child’s Garden of Verses is still in my heart. She also wrote books of adult poetry that were quite good.
Siddie Joe Johnson’s childhood was varied. She grew up on a farm near Corpus Christi. She learned about farming and animals and got a glimpse of other cultures from the Hispanic families who lived and worked there too. The sea was also part of her daily life. One of her best books, Debby, is about her own life there as seen through the title character.
Rereading these books has been more than a nostalgic visit to a time and culture long gone. Some passages still resonate as strongly as they did when I was a child. Debby rode her horse, Captain, to a pond for a drink: “He went at a pretty good gait now, and Debby had only time for the quickest of glances over her shoulder at the pretty pond. It was her pond, now, she thought, for she had found it at night all by herself. It was hers, and the frogs were hers, and the tall dark bird flying away over the mesquite trees. When a thing was beautiful, you loved it. And when you loved it, you could keep it in your mind for always.”
Thank you, Siddie Joe, then and now.
I added the following bio from the Texas State Historical Association
JOHNSON, SIDDIE JOE (1905–1977). Siddie Joe Johnson, author and librarian, was born in Dallas, Texas, on August 20, 1905. In her childhood her family moved to Corpus Christi, where she attended Incarnate Word Academy. In 1932 she earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Texas Christian University. She returned to South Texas and taught for a year in the public schools of Refugio before beginning her career as a librarian in 1934. She worked for three years at La Retama Public Library in Corpus Christi. She left this position to attend Louisiana State University, where she earned a degree in library science in 1938. The Dallas Public Library hired her that same year, and she remained with that institution until her retirement. In Dallas she served as head of the children’s department and, later, coordinator of children’s services. Johnson won the first Grolier Award for outstanding contributions to children’s library work from the American Librarian Association in 1954 and the Texas Librarian of the Year Award from the Texas Library Association in 1964. She also was recognized for her assistance to public school librarians in Dallas, whom she assisted in an effort to motivate children’s reading and to keep the art of storytelling alive.
Johnson had a prolific writing career in conjunction with her work as a librarian. She began writing as a child and by age twelve had composed a book of poems for her mother. She wrote short stories in high school and continued her literary interests as a young adult, becoming a frequent contributor to numerous literary periodicals. She wrote book reviews for newspapers in both Corpus Christi and Dallas and served as children’s book editor for the Dallas Morning News for more than thirty years. She also published several collections of poems, including Agarita Berry (1933) and Feather in My Hand (1967). Most of her published writing, however, was children’s fiction. Her first book, Debby, appeared in 1940 and used the Texas of her youth for its setting. Her subsequent juvenile books included New Town in Texas (1942), set in Denison; Texas, the Land of the Tejas (1943); Cathy (1945); and Month of Christmases (1952), which won the Texas Institute of Letters award for the best juvenile book of the year. Her 1955 book, Cat Hotel, told the story of a woman in East Dallas who kept felines for vacationing families.
After retiring from the Dallas Public Library in 1965, Johnson continued her newspaper writing and taught children’s literature and creative writing at Southern Methodist University, the University of Texas, Texas Woman’s University, and the University of Arizona. She maintained her membership in numerous organizations, including the American Library Association, the Poetry Society of Texas (from which she won several awards early in her career), and the Texas Library Association, which established an award for children’s literature in her name in 1976. In the mid-1970s she left Dallas and returned to Corpus Christi. She died there on July 27, 1977, and was survived by a brother. After her funeral at All Saints Episcopal Church in Corpus Christi, she was buried in that city.