Wendy Wanted A Pony (1951)

Wendy Wanted A Pony
Eleanor Frances Brown, il. Pers Crowell
1951, Julian Messner, Inc.

 If only there were some way to wave a magic wand and transport the whole Farwell family from the dirty, smoke-filled city to quiet green fields, peaceful living and clean fresh air for mother!

10-year-old Wendy Farwell longs to leave Chicago and live on a farm, where her father can farm, her mother (who suffers from some lung ailment) can get strong and she can have a horse.  She's prime horse girl material; a random encounter with a loose cow on a city street leads to a friendship with the local mounted police and a spotted Shetland named Polka Dot. 

"Getting you a pony was not our main reason for going," he called reprovingly.  "Our main reason still stands.  We need farm life for your mother's sake."

The Farwell family find it difficult to finance their move, though.  Hopes rise and fall, opportunities come and then fall through, and through the misadventures and uncertainty, Wendy clings to her hopes of a pony.  The family finally moves west, to join Jim's brother in Oregon, but their plans of a farm fall through and they end up back in apartments.  Along the way, she falls in love with her cousin's pony, White Sox, and acquires a beautiful dog -

Although very much like a purebred collie, she was much smaller and had a slightly different type of muzzle.  Her artistocratic head, with alert, cocked ears falling forward at the tips, held deep-set dark eyes with a look of unusual sweetness and intelligence.

who nearly makes up for the lack of equine opportunity.  And she befriends a cranky rich man. 

Wait.  A cranky rich man?  You know that's a good sign. 

This is a solid older children's book.  The plot has a slow but satisfying pace and a realistically difficult path to sucess for the heroes.  It also features the classis sickly mother, morally overbearing father, sulky male child who must be understood and, late in the game, a slightly creepy level of guilt from the heroine when she bends some rules to get her pony.

There isn't much in the way of horse scenes, oddly.  It's a book more about longing for a horse than about actually owning/riding/fussing over one.


Other books by Author
A Horse For Peter
The Colt From Horse Heaven Hills
Mountain Palomino
Golden Lady: The Story of an American Show Horse

The Proudest Horse On The Prairie (1971)

 

The Proudest Horse On The Prairie
Beatrice S. Smith, il. Laurel Horvat
1971, Lerner Publications Company

Every day it is like meeting a locomotive head on," Fred complained.

A bay colt born on a South Dakota ranch grows into the headstrong, unbreakable Tipperary.  Sold from owner to owner, experiencing bad and good people, he eventually becomes a superlative bucking horse in the rodeos.

A short fictionalized version of a real horse and rodeo star, this book features basic but attractive illustrations and a limited, somewhat sentimental text.  The bio in the back of the book says this was the author's first published book. 

The author
Beatrice S. Smith wrote a variety of children's fiction and nonfiction.  A teacher, she lived in Middleton, Wisconsin, and owned a farm with her husband and children.

The illustrator
Laurel Horvat worked for Hallmark and for the Augsburg Publishing House before becoming a freelancer.  She lived in Providence, Rhode Island, and rode horses.

Tipperary's background
The real horse was possibly a Thoroughbred, who began to attract attention at South Dakota auctions where European buyers were shopping for cavalry mounts*. 

The only one to successfully ride the horse was Hollywood stuntman Yakima Canutt, and he did it twice.  If you've never watched the 1939 film Stagecoach, in which Canutt did amazing stunts as a stand-in for fledgling star John Wayne, then go watch it now.  Wayne wasn't a rider and famously enters his film career walking, but it's an excellent film.  And you can watch if free on YouTube.

*I was taken aback by this, thinking that South Dakota to Europe seems a heck of a long way to ship a horse back in 1914, but according to Wikipedia, equines were in short supply and nearly 1 million were shipped to Europe between 1914 and 1918. It was expensive and dangerous; horses took up far more space than men or supplies, and perished when the ships were shelled en route. 

Links
Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame
National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum (scroll to bottom of page)
Monument
Wikipedia - Horse in WWI

Halloween hurricane

If it's around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bed sheets around corners. But one strange wild dark long year, Halloween came early.
Something Wicked This Way Comes  by Ray Bradbury (1962)

Mother Nature's massive trick has gone, blasting west in a hurry after a leisurely approach.  A long, warm autumn closed suddenly in downpour and wind, uprooted trees and snapped fence posts.  That was if you were lucky.  The storm also killed dozens of people, crushed and burned and flooded homes, and simply minced the plans of millions, from the commuters struggling to reach Lower Manhattan to the workers left without a job in damaged businesses.  Not to mention the uneasily watching candidates.  A mix of powerful mythmaking and brutal destruction, the hurricane was a true Halloween story, which makes it all the more bittersweet that the affected areas have mostly postponed the traditional holiday until at least the weekend, citing the substantial cleanup of broken trees and downed wires.  No trick-or-treaters came to the door tonight; there was no town-wide festival of children in costumes, no elaborate home decorations, no hovering parents trying to take photos in the twilight.  Halloween night passed quietly, in the new cold temperatures, in darkness.**      

I wrote a post in 2010 about the barrier islands of the East Coast. This week, Sandy pelted those vulnerable sandbars with wind and rain and waves, cut them off from the mainland,  drowned their streets and smashed anything in reach of the tide. In New Jersey, where Sandy made landfall on Monday evening, oceans and back bays met in the center of Long Beach Island, long sections of the Atlantic City boardwalk were ripped off their moorings and flung blocks away, and Seaside Park lost a chunk of its amusement pier. The storm had lost its hurricane status by the time it hit the shore, but the waves its low pressure pushed onto land have swamped both the shore towns and the southern tip of Manhattan.  

He opened the door, and the old man and the boy stepped out into a terrifying seventy-five-mile-an-hour gale. The sudden pressure half-knocked Paul's breath out. The rain blew into his eyes faster than he could blink it away. He felt Grandpa thrust a strong arm through his, and linked tight together they flung themselves against the wind, floundering ankle-deep in the choppy water. Paul's heart hammered in his chest and he cried inside, "Please, God, take the sea back where it belongs. Please take it back."
Stormy, Misty's Foal (1963)

Marguerite Henry's sequel to Misty of Chincoteague chronicled the Ash Wednesday Storm, a massive nor'easter* that stalled over the East Coast for three long days in March of 1962.  Like Sandy,it came about through the actions of three colliding weather systems.  Like Sandy, it was a freak storm for the Northeast. 
     

Lone horsey note:

My 2010 post was about the feral equine herds that inhabit some of these islands.  The early word is that the Chincoteague ponies have likely survived.  There's no news, as far as I can find, on the Banker Ponies.
 

*A nor'easter is a low pressure system with a cold core that forms over the East Coast in the winter; a hurricane is a low pressure system with a warm core that forms over the Atlantic Ocean in the summer.  I think. 

** Realizing I should clarify, given the huge number of people without power.  We were lucky - no power outage, no trees fell, no damage done.

Upcoming books

So after a weekend spent dutifully stocking up on bottled water, refilling prescriptions and battening down all the outdoor flotsam, we're just waiting.  Hurricane Sandy, the largest part of what the thrilled-to-their-toes weather media has dubbed Frankenstorm, is churning steadily north and is still, the last I heard, on course to make a sharp left at New Jersey and head inland, drawn in by a low-pressure system, where it will move straight into a winter storm from the north.  At which point, I believe, we all die horribly.  I may be wrong about that, but it's the definite impression left by the news.

In the event we do not all die, there are some interesting new horse books coming out this winter.


Books

Darcy, the 10th installment of the Horse Diaries series will be released on January 8, 2013.  This one stars a grey Connemara mare.  In other words, the childhood fantasy horse of everyone who wasn't in love with the The Black.  The last installment was Tennessee Rose.

A new edition of the Narnia ponybook installment, The Horse And His Boy, is due out December 4, with the Kindle edition released the same day.

A horsey installment of the Rainbow Street Shelter series, Stolen! A Pony Called Pebbles, is released November 13.

Another of the teen A Circuit series, Off Course, is out November 13.

A New Friend and A Special Wish, the first two books of an English series for a younger crowd, Magic Pony, are being released in the US on January 10, 2012. 

Canterwood Crest 17th installment Jealousy is due out February 19.  I've never read these books, but I kind of love the website .


New in paperback

The nonfiction Eclipse: The Horse That Changed Racing History Forever by Nicholas Clee, is out in paperback on December 24.

Re-issued

Many of Jean Slaughter Doty's books have just been re-issued in paperback.  Titles include The Valley Of The Ponies, If Wishes Were Horses, Can I Get There By Candlelight, and the dog story Gabriel.  It appears they stayed with the original covers.  No news about what is arguably her best and best-loved book, The Monday Horses.

(And as a little extra, here's a scifi/fantasy blog that does a short (and spoiler) review of Can I Get There By Candlelight.

Another version of Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, this time by Oxford University Press


And (sigh) ebooks

I don't own an e-reader.  They're cute, they're handy in certain circumstances, but I don't like them.  I suspect that they will, as technology tends to, eradicate their predecessor.  And since I love books, the physical reality as well as the content, that's going to annoy me.  However, it may be nice for some to hear of new ebooks.  So here are some of the more interesting ones I've come across recently.

C.W. Anderson's Billy and Blaze series went into e-editions over the summer.

Marguerite Henry is getting a mass Kindle/Nook release.  Her 1945 fictionalized bio of the foundation sire for the Morgan, Justin Morgan Had A Horse, will be released as an e-reader edition on December 11, 2012.  Misty of Chincoteague will be out in that format on December 11 also, as will King Of The Wind, Brighty, and Stormy, Misty's Foal.  Sea Star is out December 18, as is Misty's Twilight , Black Gold, Mustang, Brown Sunshine Of Sawdust Valley, Born To Trot, San Domingo.

Pam Munoz Ryan's 2007 Paint The Wind, is due as a Kindle edition on November 1.

Books from Bonnie Bryant's Saddle Club series are also making e-reader appearances on December 19.  These include: Sea Horse, Team Play, Horse Games, Snow Ride, Ghost Rider, The Fox Hunt, Horsenapped, Racehorse Horse Trouble, Starlight Christmas, and Pack Trip.




Audio

R.A. Macavoy's 1987 fantasy novel The Grey Horse is being released as an audio book on October 21, 2012.

Old Tangle Eye (1954)

Old Tangle Eye
Ralph E. Johnston, il. William Moyers
1954, The Junior Literary Guild and Houghton Mifflin


John Merrill was an Illinois farmer bound for Colorado, where there was fair, fertile country lying at the eastern foot of the Rocky Mountains.  The grass gew tall and thick and there his plow would turn up, for the first time, the heavy black soil to the warming sunshine.

John's 12-year-old nephew, Steven, is along for the ride.  His father, George, had gone west a year earlier and written home that he now had a ranch and had even found gold.  Steven's mother died years earlier, so he and his father had lived with John and his family - wife Cynthia and daughters Mary and Margaret - and now it's natural that everyone should follow George west.

But when the family arrives in Cheyenne, the end of their train ride from Illinois, George Merrill is nowhere to be found.  They set out alone for Colorado only to be waylaid by Musgrove, who tries to strongarm them into selling the ranch for far more than it's worth.  He's driven off by Dan Curtis, a young man who lives near Merrill's ranch.  He helps them travel there, and re-establish themselves when they discover that the ranch buildings have been burned.  His friendship consoles Steven somewhat for the mysterious absence of his father.

The title comes from the name locals have for one of the few remaining buffalo in the area, a man-killer whose shaggy forelock has grown so tangled it obscures his vision.  Tangle Eye will leave a man alone if he's mounted on a horse, but will chase down and try to trample a man afoot. The pioneers tolerate him largely because his presence is good luck to the local Ute tribe. 

At any rate, Steven is given a pony, the roan mare Strawberry.

No matter how many tasks he had, Steven found time each day for a long gallop upon Strawberry.  The better he became acquainted with the gentle little mare, the more he loved her.  He brushed her until her coat glistened, he combed her mane and tail until they hung in a glossy, rippling splendor.  Strawberry returned his affection; she would come trotting up to him when he called to her from the corral fence.

In time, Musgrove is explained, as is the mystery of George Merrill's disappearance.  Written capably and with good pace, this book also has a more even treatment of female characters than many Westerns, and maintains a more realistic view of the young hero.  It's really a western with a few specific horse scenes rather than a full-out horsey book. 


About the Author
I found almost nothing about Johnston.  He appears to have written a few other Western/cowboy books, but that's it.

About the Artist
Moyers, like Steven, moved west to Colorado as a kid.  He worked at Disney, illustrated hundreds of books and ended up specializing in cowboy art.

And a photo borrowed from the US Fish and Wildlife's National Digital Library, of bison grazing under a very big sky.

Credit: Ryan Haggerty/USFWS.  From the US Fish and Wildlife National Digital Library at
http://digitalmedia.fws.gov/