| Subject: Re: The Drew Crew |
Author:
Kirby Lambert
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Date Posted: 17:41:32 04/27/16 Wed
In reply to:
Wes Boyd
's message, "The Drew Crew" on 14:03:30 04/27/16 Wed
As a kid my folks encouraged us to read. In my case you might say they infected me with a virus.
Amoung the books I was encouraged to read were The Hardy Boy's, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift and Ralph Moody's Little Britches series. I still re-read the Moody books every couple of years or so. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys less often but when I do it is the early books when I can find them.
Another good mystery series was by Howard Pease, the Todd Moran stories as well as Pease;s stories of early day San Francisco.
Like The music that stays with us from our youth the books and stories stay also.
Kirby
>Another column picked up from the paper.
>
>My hobby of writing novels leads me to some strange
>places sometimes, and last weekend it took me
>somewhere I never expected it to go.
>
>I'll let the reasons go by, but they involved research
>for a character for one of my stories -- but a little
>bit of websurfing and trying to design this character
>led me to Nancy Drew.
>
>Now, I'll have to admit that I never read a Nancy Drew
>story back when I was a kid. It was a girl's story,
>after all, so for a boy it was sort of beyond the
>pale. In fact, I don't recall reading many Hardy Boys
>stories, the older companion series to Nancy Drew.
>Now, these are all kid's books and I read others, but
>not these, for whatever reason.
>
>But I have to admit that I got interested in Nancy
>Drew this weekend, and there proved to be more there
>than I thought.
>
>It turns out that there have been over six hundred
>Nancy Drew stories written in various series over
>eighty-five years, and they're still going strong.
>Although "Carolyn Keene" appears on the cover as the
>author, the books have always been written by a series
>of ghostwriters. The original series ran to 175 books
>from 1930 up into the seventies. If you have a copy of
>one of the first thirty books of the series published
>before 1959, you have something valuable; first
>editions have gone for prices over over a thousand
>dollars, a real increase in value for a book that
>first sold for fifty cents.
>
>The thing I find interesting and admirable about Nancy
>Drew is how much of a role model she's been for young
>girls for most of a century. Especially in her early
>period she was beautiful, brave, classy,
>sharp-tongued, independent teenager, who drove her
>blue roadster fast, flew planes, solved confusing
>mysteries but maintained her femininity. In
>reflection, Nancy was a very liberated woman for the
>1930s and she must have had a subtle impact on how
>women of today view themselves.
>
>A cultural icon, Nancy Drew is cited as a formative
>influence by a number of women, like Supreme Court
>Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Sonia Sotomayor and
>former First Lady Laura Bush. Feminist literary
>critics have analyzed the character's enduring appeal,
>arguing variously that Nancy Drew is a mythic hero, an
>expression of wish fulfillment,or an embodiment of
>contradictory ideas about femininity.
>
>Carole Kismaric in The Mysterious Case of Nancy
>Drew and the Hardy Boys says "Convention has it
>that girls are passive, respectful, and emotional, but
>with the energy of a girl shot out of a cannon, Nancy
>bends conventions and acts out every girl's fantasies
>of power." Other commentators see Nancy as "a paradox
>-- which may be why feminists can laud her as a
>formative 'girl power' icon and conservatives can love
>her well-scrubbed middle-class values."
>
>The character was conceived by Edward Stratemeyer,
>founder of the Stratemeyer publishing syndicate.
>Stratemeyer had created the Hardy Boys series in 1926,
>which had been such a success that he decided on a
>similar series for girls, featuring an amateur girl
>detective as the heroine. He was aware that the Hardy
>Boys books were popular with girl readers and wished
>to capitalize on girls' interest in mysteries by
>offering a strong female heroine.The thing I find
>ironic is that Stratemeyer believed that a woman's
>place was in the home, his vision created a character
>that broke through his own limitations.
>
>The earliest Nancy Drew books were revised in 1959 and
>later, and one of the things that was lost was the
>feel of the era of the 1930s. Nancy's blue roadster
>became a blue convertible, and a lot of the other
>magic of the originals fell by the wayside. Even so,
>Nancy Drew remains a good read and a good role model
>for kids -- and I had fun discovering there was more
>story there than I thought. Not bad for an 86 year old
>teenager.
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