Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Gertrude Chandler Warner: ‘The Boxcar Children’ and Beyond About this episode Gertrude Chandler Warner's most well known writing is "The Boxcar Children." But that series is far from the only professional writing Chandler did – she made a career as a writer while also teaching elementary school for decades.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:18 Holly Frey? Robert, Mick, Bill and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune into Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Workplace chaos. We've all been there. Deadlines are slipping, projects are piling up, and suddenly you realize the missing piece is the right person. That's when you say, this is a job for sponsored jobs. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, your job post gets a boost so you can connect with quality candidates faster. In fact, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs.
2:01 Holly Frey? Spend less time searching and more time interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:26 Holly Frey? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Okay, so The Boxcar Children was one of my absolute favorite book series as a kid. Yeah. Obsessed. I, just like a lot of other kids, got completely fished in by the very adventurous idea of living without adults in an abandoned boxcar. It's the opposite of Lord of the Flies. Everybody gets along. It's really cool. Seems like a lot of fun. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about Gertrude Chandler Warner. And it's interesting because her work has landed on a number of best books lists for kids over the years, although apparently when it was
3:10 Holly Frey? very first released, which even if you grew up reading them, is probably not the version you read, there were people who allegedly wanted to put it on a banned book list. It's quite quaint to think about that today because it's really very wholesome. But The Boxcar Children series is the thing she's known for, but it is far from the only professional writing that Warner did. She made a career as a writer while she was also teaching elementary school full time for decades. So I thought she would be an interesting person to talk about, as well as why The Boxcar Children is so appealing. Okay. I'll go ahead and confess, I don't think I ever read these. I'm sure we can talk about it more on Friday.
3:55 Holly Frey? I have a theory that will tie into you not reading it. Okay. That I don't know if it holds any weight, but yes, we'll discuss it on Friday. Cool. Gertrude Chandler Warner was born April 16, 1890, in Putnam, Connecticut. Her parents were Edgar and Jane Carpenter Warner. Edgar was a Harvard educated lawyer and Jane was active on the Putnam School Committee. Both of them came from families that had lived in Connecticut for a long time. Jane could trace her family in Connecticut back to 1686. The Warners had three children. Gertrude had an older sister named Frances, born in 1888. And in 1892, her younger brother, John, was born.
4:39 Holly Frey? The family lived in a house built by the children's maternal grandfather for the family at 42 South Main Street. There are really only two what I would categorize as easily accessible biographies of Warner. Both of them are written by the same person. That's Mary Ellen Ellsworth. When I say easily accessible, I will say, uh, I got mine secondhand, but I think you can find them online at most of the big bookstores. One, you definitely can. It's very, very easily available right now. So one is like a biography that's a young reader's book that's just about her. That was published in 1997.
5:18 Holly Frey? And the other is a shorter, like an amended version of that, which appeared in a recent anniversary edition of The Boxcar Children. And the approach in both of these definitely draws parallels between the author's childhood and the experiences of the children in her famous stories. So just keep all of that in mind as we talk through this, because the Warner home sounds almost surreally idyllic. The Warner children seem to even acknowledge this as adults. There is a comment that Frances once noted that they didn't really have much to complain about. The worst story that she could conjure about their youth was their mother fussing at them once for sliding down the back porch roof when it had iced over.
6:01 Holly Frey? I mean, if that's the worst thing that happens in your family, that's a sunny place to live. This sounds like something that my spouse's brothers would have coerced him into doing when he was a child. Uh, the family lived across the street from a train station and the children loved to watch the trains go by. They learned the schedules so that they could identify which train they were watching at any given time. The kids put on plays in the attic and the family started its own orchestra when the kids were in their teens. All of the ladies in the house played string instruments. Frances and her mother Jane both played the violin, while Gertrude played the cello. Cellos are expensive and that cello had been a special
6:44 Holly Frey? gift for Gertrude from her father. Their father played piano and John played cornet. Gertrude was fond of reading from an early age and she and her sister both loved to write. She wrote her first story at the age of nine titled Gollywog at the Zoo, which he also illustrated with watercolors. Uh, that book was actually something of a rush job initially. According to the story, Gertrude had come home late from school several days in a row because she had lost track of time playing tea party with friends. But she fibbed and told her mother she had been working on a book. Jane eventually wanted to see this
7:25 Holly Frey? book, so Gertrude just kinda churned it out, super fast, so that she had something to show her mother. She had based it on another popular book from the time called Gollywog at the Seaside. I certainly love that. She at least, she would rather than admit that she lied, she delivered on it. I'm like, this, I understand this. Uh, Jane bought notebooks to encourage both of her daughters' creative writing. Presumably she would have bought them for John as well, but he was not focused on that. Uh, Gertrude refined her slapdash Gollywog book, made it a little more, uh, a little more cohesive, added the illustrations, and then she gave that completed manuscript of Gollywog at the Zoo.
8:10 Holly Frey? To her grandfather as his Christmas gift that year. And that actually started a tradition because each year thereafter, she made a new book with a new story for another family member. Frances would also join in on these projects from time to time. She would bind the books and she sometimes contributed illustrations. And sometimes they were narratives like gollywog, but sometimes they were sets of short stories that were combined into one project, like a little anthology for the year. And as Gertrude got older, of course, these stories became longer and more complex. Frances, Gertrude and John also spent time with their nearby relatives and frequently explored the woods. They learned about the plants and animals in the area from their grandfather and great uncle,
8:55 Holly Frey? and they also spent time in nature on their own. These three siblings were very close. We'll talk about some of their relationship later on in a book that Gertrude writes. High school, though, did not go well for Gertrude Warner, not because she wasn't interested or a good student, but because she had ongoing health issues. She had a number of illnesses since childhood, including measles and mumps, and she's often described as having sort of a chronic sore throat. I don't, that seems like it's probably indicative of something else, but what that something else is, is never really pinpointed. And because of this chronic ill health, she had to stay home from school so often during high school that even though she had a tutor, she was just unable to keep up
9:40 Holly Frey? and unable to finish and get her diploma. As her siblings finished school and went on to careers, Frances is a teacher and writer, and John is an engineer. Gertrude stayed home, but she did start writing, first for a Sunday School newspaper. And she wrote her first novel, The House of Delight, which was published in 1916. The House of Delight is a novel for kids. Project Gutenberg puts it at a sixth grade reading level. It's about a girl and her dolls and their dollhouse. Warner dedicated it to her grandfather, who she calls my best playmate. Her brother John photographed dolls that she had arranged for the book's illustrations. Overall, it's pretty charming.
10:23 Holly Frey? There's, there's one primary issue that we'll talk about in a second, but there are two persons listed in the book. Quote, William Delight, a bisque doll, just as long as Betsy's hand. And the other one is, quote, Betsy, a real girl who takes the part of. And then it lists all of the other characters underneath it. So William seems like a real entity, almost even though he's a doll. Um, the preface sets up the concept of the book. Quote, Betsy was a curly headed little girl, nine years old, who played with her dolls in the most interesting way you ever saw. Little Mrs. Delight, with her soft brown hair and beautiful brown eyes, was Betsy's very dearest doll, and she played most of the time with her and her charming little
11:07 Holly Frey? husband, Mr. Delight. But Betsy's sister Anne, who was away at school and who was much too old to play with dolls anymore, had given Mr. And Mrs. Delight to Betsy, for it did seem too bad to keep them packed away in their dark, stuffy box. Now, Betsy didn't call herself the doll's mother, for they were all grown up and much older than she was already, and they seemed to need a new chair or new bed so very often that a carpenter was necessary most of the time. So whenever Mr. Delight wished to order new furniture, Betsy called herself Mr. Bets and talked exactly like a carpenter. When Mrs. Delight needed new dresses or new curtains, Betsy called herself Madame Bettina and talked as nearly as she could like mother's French dressmaker.
11:51 Holly Frey? And when any of the dolls were sick, Betsy at once took the part of old Dr. Betson and talked gruffly with them about tonics and pills. She talked for each of the dolls, too, and if you had listened in the next room, you would have said that at least three or four people were talking. So the book unfolds almost like a play and Betsy's world and the dolls' world is one and the same. When the dolls are talking or having any kind of business, they're written about as active characters, not something a little girl is playing with. For example, when Betsy is given her dollhouse as a gift for her ninth birthday, Betsy's play and the dolls' reactions are integrated together this way. Little Mr. Delight was sitting in his law office behind the radiator.
12:35 Holly Frey? Betsy picked him up, put on his gray derby hat, and walked him rapidly across the room to the Morris chair. Edith, oh Edith, he cried excitedly. My salary has been raised to a million dollars a year. Now we can move into a new house. How perfectly lovely, cried Mrs. Delight. Can't we buy one directly? A million dollars a year. A million, that is so many dollars. It was very charming. A lot of the book really is about ingenuity and problem solving through play, as Betsy sees to the needs of her dolls' lives and figures out ways to make the furniture, clothes, and other accessories they require.
13:17 Holly Frey? This is kind of a theme that appears throughout a lot of her books that she writes for kids. But there is a problematic element to it that we mentioned earlier in the form of the Delights Cook, who is a rag doll that Betsy made to look like a black woman. And her dialogue is written in an outdated and borderline racist way. I will say it is not nearly as bad as some of the other things like it I have read, but it definitely like sets her apart as being uneducated and, you know, from a completely different social class. It seemed like Warner was poised to start a career as a writer, but that was not a direct line, thanks to world events. We will talk about how she fell into another career after we pause for a sponsor break.
14:07 Speaker 01 That sound? That's the National Squash League. Pro teams, the world's best players, and rallies so fast you'll forget to breathe. Season four is in full swing, and every match streams free on YouTube. Big hits, bigger rivalries, and a front row seat from wherever you are. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.
14:35 Speaker 03 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
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14:59 Speaker 03 It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
15:06 Holly Frey? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
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16:44 Speaker 06 Livrite, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, "The Gales of November: A Chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 Shipwreck." "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Seitz proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. "The Gales of November," now in paperback.
17:18 Holly Frey? Twenty-seven-year-old Warner was incredibly excited to have her first book published. The House of Delight had a run of 1,000 copies. And after it was published, she continued to pursue a writing career by following in her sister Frances's example and writing for magazines. But the United States entry into World War I in 1917 shifted the course of Gertrude's life. As their town of Putnam lost some of their working-age young men to the war, it also lost many of the women who had been working as teachers to mill jobs that provided necessary materials for the war effort. And that meant that there was a real need for teachers. Although she hadn't finished high school,
18:00 Holly Frey? Gertrude had continued her own self-directed study, and she was deemed fit enough to help teach first grade. She worked as an assistant to another teacher for several months, but this was also at the time when the flu pandemic was starting and the teacher she was working with died after contracting it. At that point, Warner took over the class entirely. The idea was that she just needed to do it as long as the war continued to keep the career teachers occupied elsewhere. But that wasn't how things played out. Warner was really good at teaching, and the school kept her on. Teaching became her permanent career, and she taught first and third grade for the next 32 years.
18:43 Holly Frey? She also continued to write and publish. She worked with a magazine called Little Folks, writing stories about nature and astronomy. In 1918, her astronomy pieces for the magazine were collected and published in a book titled, Star Stories for Little Folks. And this book has the conceit that a student named Helen is relaying her experiences in learning about the stars from a Dr. Laurie. And it opens with a letter from Helen to the reader, which includes, quote, "Before you read this little book, Dr. Laurie says I must tell you that the stars are not always in the same place in the sky. If you are not acquainted with them, it is easier to find them when they are just coming up in the east.
19:25 Holly Frey? So, under the name of each group of stars, you will find the best time of year to look for it. As soon as you find a constellation, write the date on the dotted line under the picture. Then you will know when you have earned your diploma. I hope you will have as good a time as I did finding the 15 constellations." And then this cute letter is signed, "Your little friend, Helen." The book gives instructions with rudimentary drawings on how to find various constellations, and the narrative of Helen's experience of learning them is told along with it. She begins the story sick in some way that's not detailed, and Dr. Laurie promises he will teach her about stars when she's well enough to go outside.
20:09 Holly Frey? From there, her learning and health progress in tandem, as she has various adventures. At the end is a diploma that the reader can fill out with their name. Another book of collected writing was published in 1921, and this is titled, Life's Minor Collisions. And this is a book that Gertrude co-authored with her sister Frances, pulling from writings that they had each done for the Atlantic Monthly and Ladies' Home Journal. And unlike Gertrude's previously published works, this book was written for adults, and it featured essays about the various challenges each of the Warner Daughters had experienced in life. The preface to this book is also quite charming. It reads, "Collisions are measured by what they will smash.
20:53 Holly Frey? Potentially, all collisions are major. A slight blow will explode a bomb. But since most of us do not commonly carry dynamite through the busy sections of this life, we can take a good many brisk knocks and still survive. The collisions, though dealt with in separate chapters by two of us, are seldom between two people alone. They are collisions, mostly minor, between the individual and the group, the individual and circumstances, the individual and the horse he rides on. All the chapters are for those kindred spirits who try to be easy to live with and find it difficult." The chapters each cover different kinds of collisions. The first, for example, is about the way it can be easy to hurt the people we're closest
21:38 Holly Frey? to, particularly family. The second is about a brother and sister arguing over the sister's inherent difficulty with learning directions to get places. It includes this description of the brother's inherent ability to find his way. Quote, "He branches from one street into another with as sure an instinct as a cat who retraces on foot a journey once traversed in a bag. This is not because he knows Boston, but because he has a capacity for Boston." There's also an essay titled "More to It Than You Think" that examines the fact that people don't really understand another person's job unless they've actually worked in that field.
22:21 Holly Frey? And Warner shares her experiences as a teacher to illustrate that fact. She shares a rather lovely approach to teaching in this passage. Quote, "It is true that children, with the best intentions, sometimes bring inappropriate busy work to school, but teaching them has not dowered me with any disdain for my students. They are beneath me only in years. In fact, I raise my hat to some of them in spirit as I teach them to raise theirs to me in truth. Here and there, I calmly recognize a superior." She also shares how she's able to envision the great future lives and achievements of her students and how she's careful in scenarios where she has to discipline them to not break their spirits.
23:07 Holly Frey? It is apparent in reading her writing about teaching that this was a profession that Warner really loved and was probably great at, and that is also supported by things that her former students said.
23:20 Holly Frey? One of her former students, Ruth Flag, told the New York Times in 2004, quote, "When she read to us, she made me her page turner. She was aware that not all children learned in the same way. Each child was meant to feel special. She just had that gift." Flag, for example, had been incredibly shy, and that page turning job was a way to involve and encourage her. Flag also said, quote, "She always encouraged our imaginations. It was an adventure to come to her class each day." That is so sweet. It is very sweet. But Warner's ongoing health issues meant that, just as she'd missed a lot of school when she was a child, she sometimes had to take leaves of absences from teaching due to her health.
24:05 Holly Frey? But she wasn't idle during those times. She would take advantage of the downtime to write. It was during one of these leaves from work in the early 1920s that she penned "The Boxcar Children." Rand McNally published the book in 1924. It featured the tale of four orphaned children, Henry, Jess, Violet, and Benny Alden. There isn't, in the book, a lot of information about what happened to these children before the narrative starts, and even some of the plot points that drive the characters' behavior never really gets an explanation. We'll talk a little bit about that more in just a moment. But it shares the story of how these children survive on their own. They're a very plucky quartet.
24:49 Holly Frey? All of them are pretty upbeat despite their circumstances, and they manage to get along just fine for a while until Violet gets sick and they have to ask an adult for help. The denouement is very happy. Spoiler alert, in case you haven't read them, I guess skip ahead, but these books are 100 years old. They end up living in a lavish house with their wealthy grandfather, and even the one happy ending detour that pops up, that they might not get to keep the dog they found in the woods, actually has a very positive resolution. Though that book would become the writing that Warner is most known for, when it was first released, it was just sort of a blip. The 1924 version was popular with kids.
25:31 Holly Frey? And although we couldn't find any references to this fact outside of Warner's account, she noted that librarians didn't seem to care for it. According to Warner, the protestations were because the children were just far too happy without any kind of adult supervision. But Warner always said of this complaint, quote, "That is exactly why children like it." This is funny to me because children without parents is like a very common theme in fairy tales and children's stories. But I think the fact that they were getting along just fine is like, no, no, we need to teach them that they need those missing parents. And it's like, well, you know, other than that illness, they were doing A-OK.
26:15 Holly Frey? But not knowing that this story of four orphans who live in a boxcar would become a classic. We'll talk more about that book in just a bit. Gertrude went on with her life. She kept teaching, writing, and playing music. She learned to play the pipe organ so she could substitute for the organist at church. And she published another book in 1926 called Good Americans: First Lessons for the Littlest Ones. Good Americans is an update to an existing set of lessons that were popular in the United States at the time to teach children about morality and citizenship. We are going to have an upcoming episode about this morality code for kids.
26:57 Holly Frey? Warner notes that the system as it exists is great, but some of the content is, quote, "rather vague for six-year-olds." So her book addresses the same ideas in a way that's simplified for younger students. Warner notes in the introduction that she found these sorts of lessons turned out to be the favorites of the children she taught, in part because they feature the use of paper dolls in stories that give the lesson. It's a complete program for teachers that focuses on five subjects. Health, self-control, reliability, good workmanship, and kindness. The health story, for example, uses the paper doll character Billy Bumps and points
27:38 Holly Frey? out that he maintains good hygiene, gets enough sleep, drinks enough water, et cetera, to keep himself healthy. The point is that if Billy isn't taking care of himself, he won't be in any kind of shape to be a good American. There was a lot of concern at this time about whether kids in the post-World War I United States would grow up into adults that could properly uphold the republic. Yeah, we'll talk more about all of that in that upcoming episode on the children's morality code. This is getting back to Warner, though. Warner's father Edgar died in 1928, and at that point Gertrude still lived at home with her parents. And this death actually led Gertrude and her mother Jane to move. But they didn't go far.
28:23 Holly Frey? They just moved down the street to live with Jane's mother Marcia. That would have been Gertrude's grandmother. She needed some help and care in her advancing age. Marcia died the year after Edgar, and Gertrude and her mother stayed on in the house. But in 1932, Jane also died at the age of 66, and that meant that Gertrude, then aged 42, lived alone for the first time in her life. We'll talk about this new phase of Warner's life after we hear from the sponsors that keep Stuff You Missed in History Class going.
29:02 Speaker 01 That sound? That's the National Squash League. Pro teams, the world's best players, and rallies so fast you'll forget to breathe. Season four is in full swing, and every match streams free on YouTube. Big hits, bigger rivalries, and a front row seat from wherever you are. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.
29:32 Speaker 06 Live Right, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, "The Gales of November: A Chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 Shipwreck." "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Seitz proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. "The Gales of November, now in paperback."
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30:43 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
31:04 Holly Frey? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey. And discover the silver linings you can take with you.
31:43 Holly Frey? All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
32:09 Holly Frey? Through all of the losses that Warner experienced in that brief period of time, she had continued to write. And once she was the only person in the house, her focus on her writing intensified. The year before her father died, Warner had published the first book in a four-volume series designed to teach children about other cultures. And these are, like her other books for kids, laid out in a narrative where the main character encounters other people and learns about them as a sort of stand-in for the reader. In the beginnings of these books, she often thanked the various people who had advised her in the writing. So while none of them are called out with specificity in terms of what they contributed, it seems that she was talking to people who were knowledgeable about the cultures that
32:53 Holly Frey? Warner didn't have familiarity with. This series was collected into an educational course called The Friendly Farmers: A Course for Primary Boys and Girls on Rural Life Around the World. Okay, confession, I didn't read all of these.
33:09 Holly Frey? Partially because the first one is a little hard to find on its own. And then it's just like you're tracing down, you know, various scans from different sources. What I did read seemed pretty respectful.
33:22 Holly Frey? But one that I was not able to get a hold of that I really wanted to look at was called Children of the Harvest. And in it, Warner teaches kids about migrant workers and how some children are part of that system. And she encourages readers to get in touch with the Home Mission Council, which was a religious organization, so that they could send aid in the forms of gifts to those children. So having not read it, it's impossible to know if this well-intentioned idea comes off as dicey in any way.
33:50 Holly Frey? Or how accurate her portrayal of any of these cultures are. The year that Gertrude lost her mother, she also was seriously injured in a car accident. She was a passenger in her aunt's car when her aunt had to swerve to avoid a truck that was backing into the road. The car ran into a fence and Gertrude, who was the only person injured in the crash, ended up in the hospital for several months with a broken back. During her convalescence, she wrote, because she and her sister Frances had another collaborative project in process for adult readers, and she didn't want to derail it, even in her compromised state. She was really, really intent that they were not going to slip their deadline.
34:32 Holly Frey? That book, Pleasures in Palaces, was published in 1933. And this, like their first book together, was a compilation of essays that had mostly been previously published in magazines. And the stories in it are from their real lives, mostly related to travel. Despite having gone through so much loss in the years leading up to this book, Warner exhibits an attitude of total positivity, noting regarding her change in status to being by herself most of the time, that in traveling alone, she's really likely to make good friends. She also did not sit idle, or even seemed to ease back into her life once she had recovered from her injuries.
35:12 Holly Frey? She knew that she wanted to focus even more on writing for children, so she did two things. One is that she took a summer job working in publishing in Chicago. That was in 1936. Then from 1937 to 1939, she spent her summers attending teacher training classes at Yale. At this point, she had been teaching for almost 20 years, so she kind of breezed through this work and allegedly shocked one of her professors when she confessed that she had never finished high school. But she came out of this training really focused on her path as a writer, which was an area she had already been working in. She wanted to write books that were accessible to young readers, or readers for whom English was not their first language.
35:57 Holly Frey? She first looked at the stories that were already popular with kids to see if she could simplify any of them for her target audience without losing the energy or excitement of the original narrative. And after she produced a number of these, she turned back to her own work. And in 1942, Warner published a new version of The Boxcar Children. This new version isn't a rewrite in terms of the narrative. The story still moves along with the same beats, the characters are the same, but the language is simplified. Sentences are shorter and easier to parse for younger readers, and the vocabulary was less challenging. Warner made herself a rule that the rewrite could only use 600 different words.
36:41 Holly Frey? The one big change is that the children's backstory did get a makeover in the later version of the book. It's one that's still tragic. They were orphaned, after all, but in a more palatable way. This only takes up the first few pages of the book, so it's not a huge change. But the opening paragraph of the original 1924 version reads, quote, "About 7 o'clock one hot summer evening, a strange family moved into the little village of Middlesex. Nobody knew where they came from or who they were, but the neighbors soon made up their minds what they thought of the strangers, for the father was very drunk. He could hardly walk up the rickety front steps of the old tumble-down house, and his 13-year-old son had to help him.
37:24 Holly Frey? Toward 8 o'clock, a pretty, capable-looking girl of 12 came out of the house and bought a loaf of bread at the baker's, and that was all the villagers learned about the newcomers that night." And in that 1924 version, things progressed very quickly from there. Their father actually dies the next day, and the bake shop woman and her husband, the baker, intend to send the children to their grandfather, so the children run away. The 1942 version in comparison starts like this, quote, "One warm night, four children stood in front of a bakery. No one knew them. No one knew where they had come from." In this version, the baker's wife, who does not like children, sells them three loaves of bread, and then the children ask if they can sleep
38:09 Holly Frey? in the bakery that night and wash dishes for them in the morning. In this version, the baker woman intends to keep the three older children for a while to work in the bakery, but she and her husband plan to send Benny, the youngest, to the children's home and then ship the older children to their grandfather when they get tired of them. That catalyzes the children's exit. Incidentally, the 100th anniversary edition of the book, published by Random House in 2024, does not use the 100-year-old book. It uses the 1942 edition. Yeah, they leave out the drunk dad. And the baker woman, who is kind of like the equivalent
38:50 Holly Frey? of a wicked witch character in a fairy tale, is very minimized. There are some head-scratchy elements for both books. The main reason that the children run away, despite knowing that they have a grandfather who wants to take them in, they spend time evading him because they know he is like posting, you know, signs up around town that he's looking for these kids, is that they are convinced that that grandfather disliked their mother and thus wanted nothing to do with their father once he had married her and had a family. This issue never gets addressed again. Even once the wealthy grandfather turns out to be very kind and loving, and there's a whole set of events that happen where they learn
39:33 Holly Frey? that this nice man is their grandfather, no one stops to go, "Hey, why did you think he hated your mom?" It never comes up, and they just kind of accept everything at face value. Modern criticisms of The Boxcar Children also note some other issues. Writing for The New Yorker in 2016, Gia Tolentino notes, "The Boxcar Children, one realizes upon rereading it, is an odd sort of capitalist parable in which children without parents recreate the division of labor that in the 1940s would become increasingly associated with a popular vision of the American nuclear family." And it does shake out that way. Jess and Henry take on the parental roles and Violet and Benny
40:16 Holly Frey? fall more into the role of children, although Violet does a lot of childcare and domestic chores like sewing. She's often noted for how smart she is and how often she sees solutions to their challenges. Once they find the boxcar in the woods, Henry goes out and finds ways to make money while the girls stay in the boxcar, caring for Benny and literally homemaking by creating curtains, making a shelf to hold the dishes that they've managed to forage, cooking, all of that. Tolentino also makes the point that while the children are orphaned, they focus entirely on their future and they just don't get bogged down in their grief or talk about their past and their tragedy.
40:59 Holly Frey? This lets readers focus on the story, the adventure, and the children's resilience without the emotional baggage that would normally come with such a scenario. None of the children even cry. There is never a sentence about, "I miss mom and dad." The only crying that happens is when Violet gets really, really ill. She starts to cry uncontrollably and that's what makes Jess and Henry realize that she's sick. It's not very emotional. It's just like being physically weak crying. This may make it easier for kids to read, but it also feels sort of surreal to read about four kids happily housekeeping and problem solving immediately after such a huge loss. Still, the book was wildly popular.
41:44 Holly Frey? And because of the simplified language, it got kids who thought they weren't interested in reading really invested in it. They saw sort of an escape fantasy in the story of the Aldens. Warner herself frequently said that she wrote it because she thought it would be fun to run away and live in an abandoned boxcar. Between the updated version of the book and the end of the 1940s, Warner went back to teaching and also other writing projects. She actually wrote several reference books during this time and some biographies. But then in 1949, The Boxcar Children got a sequel, Surprise Island. In this book, written by Warner, the children, who now live in a mansion,
42:27 Holly Frey? spend a summer on their grandfather's private island. So, pretty significantly different circumstances. But they soon realized that the friendly handyman on the island, Joe, has a secret and they set out to discover it. And this kicks off The Boxcar Children's series as a batch of mystery books. The year after Surprise Island was published, Warner retired from teaching at the age of 60 so she could focus on her volunteer work with the Red Cross and the Connecticut Cancer Society and on writing more children's books. In 1953, she published the third Boxcar Children book, The Yellow House Mystery. But her next book wasn't another boxcar book. It was a children's adaptation of A Thousand and One Nights.
43:12 Holly Frey? She soon turned back to her own series and published Mystery Ranch in 1958. From there, she continued to churn out Boxcar Children's stories, eventually writing 19 of them, including while she was hospitalized for a broken hip at the end of the 1950s. Warner continued to teach even though she was retired, but in a very informal way. In 1962, she moved from the home that she had lived in with her mother and grandmother to a home that she shared with her friend Esther Wells. And her house was sort of open to the kids of the neighborhood and she would have them over for nighttime constellation spotting or to talk about books that they had read. She stayed very active in her community until 1974,
43:57 Holly Frey? when she shattered her hip. She was 84 at this point and this injury severely limited her mobility even after she had healed. So that is her second broken hip, just in case you're curious if we accidentally repeated. Nope, second, second time. Her vision at this point had also declined, so she couldn't read as much as she had throughout her life. But she did find ways to continue her interests in her work. She listened to a lot of audio recordings of books and to the television, and she still had visitors. Then in 1979, she had a long illness and she died on August 30th. She had lived long enough to see a new elementary school built in Putnam the year before, and the library in that school was named the Gertrude C. Warner Library.
44:42 Holly Frey? Gertrude's church was the Congregational Church of Putnam and posthumously published two chapters of her last project in their newsletter. It was titled Sunday School Lessons for Shut-Ins. Since Warner's death, there have been other writers that have penned boxcar children books, and the first and second books have been made into animated movies. In 2004, Putnam established the Gertrude Chandler Warner Boxcar Museum, which includes artifacts from the author's life, including the desk where she wrote that first rushed gollywog story at the age of nine. It also has a replica of the Alden children set up in their boxcar, and all of this is housed in a vintage Depression-era boxcar that was donated by the Connecticut Trolley
45:27 Holly Frey? Museum. That museum is still open. It's open seasonally to visitors. It's usually like in the warmer months of the year, and I think it has kind of limited hours. So if you're there and you want to check it out, make sure you check their, their open hours. But that is Gertrude Chandler Warner and the Boxcar Children, much beloved by me. Do you have some beloved listener mail? I do.
45:53 Holly Frey? This one just tickled me to pieces for two reasons, one of which is actually in the content of the email, and one of which is in the photograph. This is from our listener Wendy who writes, "Hello, ladies. I just listened to the podcast about Charles Nestler's Permanent Waves. Yes, I'm a bit behind, but I binge listened, so it's fine. I have quite the coincidence that I think you'll enjoy. Last Saturday, my mom, me, and my sisters all went to my cousin's salon to get our hair done, and the conversation turned to perms. And my cousin mentioned that our grandma used to get perms that were Plugged into the wall. She described it as this big apparatus that hung from the ceiling that plugged into the wall. We all thought she was crazy. Even my mom,
46:37 Holly Frey? who is in her 70s, thought my cousin was up in the night as well. Then I ended up coming upon that episode. We laughed at the thought of our grandma hooked up, but glad our cousin is not as crazy as we thought. That tickles me a little bit. I'm telling you, go to Magic Kingdom and ride the people mover and you'll see one of these, sort of. Anyway, Wendy attached a pet tax of her standard poodle brownie, who she says can be a drama queen when she wants to be. I mean, come on. Everybody knows I love poodles and I love a poodle in a puppy clip, which this dog is. It's the cutest thing on the planet. But here's what tickled me double. The dog is on what
47:17 Holly Frey? looks like a bed with a comforter and some Afghans, but in the background is a BB8 plush and I have the same one. And it just made me laugh. You know, Star Wars in your dog picture? Come on, that's an A+. Thank you, Wendy, for writing us. I'm glad that we were able to corroborate your cousin's story and make you realize she, in fact, is knowledgeable and not, not talking nonsense. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at [email protected] . You can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
48:01 Holly Frey? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
48:15 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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