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Center for the Study of Children's
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Transcripts for September 1999 Programs #3-24 |
Program #3
1 September 1999 -- Tarzan
Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of Tarzan of the Apes, was born in Chicago on this day in 1875. Burroughs was a classic late-bloomer. He didn't begin writing novels until he was approaching 40, and then only because he had a family to support and he had tried just about everything else -- ranching and gold mining in Idaho, a stint in the 7th Cavalry in Arizona, clerking in a factory, running a stationary store, working as a policeman on a railroad, selling pencil sharpeners. By 1912 he was sharpening his own pencils to write Under the Moons of Mars for All Story Magazine. He told someone later, "If people were paid for writing rot such as I read [in magazines] . . . [I can] write stories just as rotten .... just as entertaining and probably a lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines." That's just what he did. The same year his imagination took him to Mars , it also transported him to the coast of Africa, the setting for Tarzan, one of the most entertaining stories in American popular fiction. Burroughs was off and running and quickly became one of our country's most successful writers. By 1918, the first of the many Tarzan movies appeared, and Burroughs had written two sequels in the Tarzan saga. In all, he would write 25 novels about the lord of the jungle, and another seven books that took place in a land located at the center of the earth -- the Pellucidar series, plus eleven sci-fi novels set on Mars, and dozens of other works. He even did a stint as a war correspondent during World War II, before his death from a heart attack in 1950 while he was reading the Sunday funnies, which probably contained a Tarzan comic strip. Along with the many Tarzan movies, radio and television shows, Tarzan tchotzke keep rolling off the assembly line: Tarzan bathing suits and bread, lunch boxes, wrist watches, candy, action figures, stickers, removable tatoos. Why does the Tarzan story remain so popular? The critics can't decide if its a reminder of our dark, primeval roots or a victory of civilization (and Tarzan's noble genes) over brute, inferior nature. But perhaps it all comes down to that call, made famous by Johnny Weismuller in 1932, that proclaims a universal desire for freedom, independence, uniqueness -- it's a celebration of the strength it takes to get through the jungle out there, and to do it with real style. Remember how it goes? Just grab a vine, kick back, and . . . . (Sound Cut. See: mini-disc JC #1 - Tracks 6 and 7) There's a doppler effect on the old film soundtracks. Hopefully, one of these can be used.
Program #4
2 September 1999 -- Mia Hamm Rocks!
Mia Hamm Rocks! is the title of a new book by Chloe Weber just published this summer in the wake of the American women's soccer team's dramatic penalty kick win for its second world cup. A victory that a lot of people are still talking about. This book might seem to be just another drop in the already full glass of media attention that the team and a number of its star players have received. But what's so unique about it is that this "appreciation" of a spectacularly talented athelete was written by a New York City high school student who just happens to be a first-team, All-City soccer player at the same position that Mia Hamm has been such a dominant force at during her career. And from the beginning, Chloe Weber's book has an engaging, athelete's frankness: "I am not the world's leading authority on Mia Hamm," she tells us in her author's note, "but I've been a fan of hers since I played with a #3 ball. So that's the spirit in which I've written the book." Indeed, the book isn't, in fact, a biography of Mia Hamm at all, but rather an overview and a celebration of her career, beginning with her record-breaking run as a member of the University of North Carolina women's soccer team. Chloe Weber also looks at the sport of women's soccer itself (vs. the men's game), and she traces in some detail the amazing success of the American women's team, even before this summer's competition. Mia Hamm Rocks has a bold, jazzy design, with plenty of graphic energy and action photographs of Mia and her teammates that serve to showcase the sheer physical intensity of their play. It's a book for all the budding soccer players in your family, boys and girls alike, and its especially valuable because of its no-nonsense insistence on regarding soccer as a team sport, in which even stars like Mia Hamm often make their most important contributions in ways that give others the all the glory. Mia Hamm Rocks! is also a book for all the aspiring young writers in your life, who have that yearning to someday see a book of theirs in print. Chloe Weber's message to them seems to be pretty clear: follow those dreams as they arc in from the corner and head them right into the net.
Program #5
3 September 1999 -- Beatrix Potter
C. S. Lewis, who wrote the Narnia books, thought that there were three ways of writing for children. One of the better ways (though, not the best, he thought) was to let your story "grow out of a [tale] told to a particular child." Alice in Wonderland started this way -- so did The Wind in the Willows, and the book that we're celebrating today -- Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which hopped into history a hundred and six years ago this month. Her book began as a letter to a child she knew -- Noel Moore, the son of Annie Carter Moore, who had been Potter's governess and friend. Annie had left the Potter household, gotten married, and soon had her own children. Potter wrote letters to them all, but her favorite seems to have been Noel, who was often bed-ridden as a young child. Here is how she began the letter: My dear Noel, I don't know what to write to you so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotontail and Peter. They lived with their mother in a sand bank under the root of a big fir tree. "Now, my dears," said old Mrs Bunny "You may go into the field or down the lane, but don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden." Of course, that's the first place Peter goes and gorges himself and, "coming round the end of the cucumber frame" he meets up with Mr. McGregor, who gives chase, waving a rake and shouting, "stop thief!" Peter is so green and woozey around the whiskers from everthing he's eaten, that he nearly gets caught. Potter has yet to add the macabre fact that McGregor had snared Peter's father and put him into a pie. Nor has Potter found that supremely Victorian moment when Peter is caught in the gooseberry net and the birds fly down and with impeccable diction "implore him to exert himself." When her family and friends implore her to publish the story and she turns it into her first book, printed eight years after the letter (in 1901) she will add these details and her miraculous pictures. She gave many of the first books away, and in one of these gift copies she remembered her own pet rabbit, Peter, the other inspiration for the story, who just died. She wrote : whatever the limitations of his intellect or outward shortcomings of his fur, and his ears and toes, his disposition was uniformly amiable and his temper unfailingly sweet. An affectionate companion and a quiet friend. Just like this book. (Weekly Production Credits, plus special credit for Fiona Barnes who read these excerpts)
Program #6
6 September 1999 -- Labor Day
America didn't have lasting child labor laws until the 1930s, when the Great Depression made work so scarce that adults were taking the jobs that children had previously done. Among the many social reforms of that decade, was a heightened consciousness of how children should be treated, including whether or not they should be sent to work in coal mines or textile factories. FDR's White House Conference on Youth in a Democracy, held in 1940, made a sweeping statement about the nation's role in protecting and helping to advance the lives of all children, the priveledged and the underpriveledged alike. One of the leaders of the conference, Homer Folks, proclaimed in his opening remarks that "what we might wish to do for ...[a] future President, we must be willing to do for every child." This movement toward a more enlighted view of children began in England over a hundred years earlier, with the Romantic writers of the late 18th century. One of the most poignant reflections on the nature of child labor, and perhaps one of the first, was William Blake's poem "The Chimney Sweeper" from his Songs of Innocence of 1789 . The speaker in the poem is a trusting young child, who sees the facts of his life -- its drudgery, dangers, and early death -- without irony and with heartbreaking candor. Here's the poem, so that we may be reminded of all the unprotected children in other countries and in our own -- so that we may remember all the chimney sweepers who are still at work: When my mother died I was very young And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep, So your chimneys I sweep and in soot I sleep. There's Little Tom Dacre who cried when his head That curled like a lambs back was shaved, so I said. Hush Tom never mind it, for when your head's bare, You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair. And so he was quiet and that very night As Tom was a sleeping he had such a sight, That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned & Jack Were all of them locked up in coffins of black. And by came an angel who had a bright key And he opened the coffins and set them all free. Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run And wash in a river and shine in the sun. Then naked & white all their bags left behind They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind. And the Angel told Tom if he'd be a good boy, He'd have God for his father and never want joy. And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark And got with our bags and our brushes to work. Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm, So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm. (We'll need a credit here for August Hatten, who read the poem.)
Program #7
7 September 1999 -- "Harry Potter"
Got your running shoes on? Got the car warmed up? Today Scholastic Books finally releases, in this country, the third of the Harry Potter books, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. What's a Harry Potter book? Unless you're really living in Muggle land, you know it's the kind of book that parents will hide from their children so that they can read it first. The kind of book that has both eight year olds and octegenarians writing fan letters to the author, Joanne Rowling. In England, where the books first appeared, the publishers wouldn't let bookstores put the Prisoner of Azkaban on the shelves until after school was out, so as not to encourage kids to skip. For a book? For The Phantom Menace we can understand, given the fifty or sixty million dollars of hype, the action figures, the lazer-driven lollipops, but a book about a boy who goes to a boarding school for magicians -- Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, to be exact -- which exists in a parallel place to our so-called real, Muggle world. We first meet Harry in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, when he is an infant and newly orphaned after the dark lord, Voldemort (whom everyone calls You-Know-Who) has killed Harry's parents. Rescuing wizards decide to hide the child, for safe keeping, with Harry's nasty relatives, the Dursleys. I don't want to say any more about these fantastic fantasies and risk spoiling their surprises, except to note that, in a few pages, Ms. Rowling manages to create more suspense and convincing involvement in her story than the recent edition of the Star Wars saga manages to do in several long, long hours. These books are a publishing miracle, in this age of big budget name recognition. The out-of-work and on-the-dole Ms. Rowling had the idea for the seven books she plans for the series during a train trip. And she began writing them in the cafes of Edinborough, while her infant daughter slept in a stroller nearby. She hoped that maybe, just maybe, her publisher would want another book after the first. The popularity of the books spread among children, and it was fueled by -- surprise! -- the sheer love of reading a story well told. This isn't the follow-the-leader reading of the Goosebumps or Babysitters Club series; the Harry Potter books are complex and witty, subtle and engaging. Harry is a character who is not only special, chosen (he has a lightening bolt mark on his forehead after all ) but he also has something to say for himself, and noble deeds to do. Plus the novels read aloud like a dream. I can't imagine a better way for a family to spend a quiet September evening, than to turn off the t.v., and share together the magic of a book like this.
This will be a "Books that Last" Segment, recorded on August 4th, at the United Nations by Sylvia Fuhrman, the Director of the United Nations School (It's UN International Literacy Day) They'll express the tape to us.
Program #9
9 September 1999 -- Jack Prelutsky
Fade up on mini-disc #JC-1, track 1. That's Jack Prelutsky, whose birthday it is today, with part of his poem, "I am Diggin a Hole in the Ceiling." While Shel Silverstein has grabbed the national spotlight for several decades, and Dr. Seuss has had it trained on him for decades before that, since the 1970s Jack Prelutsky has been adding a strong third voice to a remarkable trio of poets for children. Prelutsky is a talented musician and a gifted singer (in fact he was something of a singing prodigy in his native Brooklyn when he was a boy. He attended New York City's famed High School of Music and Art, and was being groomed for a career as an opera singer -- until he heard Pavarotti, and knew he didn't want to be forever competing (even in his own imagination) with that voice! Instead, he experimented with a variety of jobs -- exactly what you want to do to become a poet. He made and moved furniture, drove a cab, sculpted; he worked in a coffee shop in Greenwich Village, where he met and became friends with Bob Dylan, who said Prelutsky's voice was a "cross between Woody Guthrie and Enrico Caruso." And it's just that combination of the folksy and the cultivated, the raspy and the refined, that give his poems their special ring. He has a finely tuned ear for the poetry that children love, poems full of nonsense and punny word play, gross-out humor and absurd situations. Most important, perhaps, Prelutsky has an infallible ear for the predicaments in which children find themselves -- with a new baby in the house, an older brother who does everything better, or the need to come up with a really good excuse for a missed homework assignment: -- Fade up on the first stanza of "A Remarkable Adventure" See mini-disc #JC - 1, track 2. There are dozens of books in the Prelutsky library, and we wish him dozens more. May they keep sprouting like the musical instruments in his wonderful poem, "I Am Growing a Glorious Garden": -- Fade up on first stanza from "I Am Growing a Glorious Garden" See: mini-disc # JC -1, track 3. -- Standard Outro.
Program #10
10 September 1999 -- Grandparents
Coming up this weekend is Grandparents Day on Sunday -- a day for celebrations, and a good time to mention several of the fine books that have appeared recently about children and their interactions with the senior members of our families. A little girl is dropped off at her grandfather's house at the beginning of Ann Witford Paul's picture book, Everything to Spend the Night, and the fun starts as the the child drags a large duffle bag up the front walk. She has packed 26 overnight necessities into it, one for every letter of the alpahbet, and before she's even entered the house, she has begun to unload her treasures, much to the bemusement of her Grandfather. Apples are first, followed quickly by a stuffed bear and a bunny. Soon the yard and, eventually, all the rooms of the house are filled with her belongings. By the time she gets to her music box and the letter "M", she is dancing to the rhymes that she has created, non-stop, since her arrival. Grandfather is dancing too, and so are we. The illustrator, Maggie Smith, has captured the essence of this playful exuberance in her lively, tender pictures -- right down to the last "Z's" that bring this recitation to its sleepy and contented end. In Three Cheers for Catherine the Great! Cari Best builds her story around a little girl (Sarah), her closeness to her Russian grandmother (the Catherine of the title), and the festivities that Sarah and her mother plan for grandmother's birthday. Catherine has stipulated that hers is to be a no present, borscht and blini party. The guests -- family and the kind folks of their apartment building -- are only allowed to bring gifts of love -- nothing that they have to spend any money on. It's a request that leads to unusually imaginative and utterly touching tokens of affection for this generous-hearted, immigrant grandmother -- who, in the words of a poem Sarah has written for her, "sailed here on a boat, arrived with no money, Or warm winter coat." This is a remarkable book, seasoned with unforgettable ingredients, with whispers of the old world that has begun to find its voice in the new, with poetry and pictures that are unexpected, vivid, and altogether perfect. Three cheers for this book, and for all those remarkable grandparents who give us the present of their lives, for the stories to fill our homes. (Weekly production credits.)
Program #11
13 September 1999 -- Roald Dahl
It's always struck me as one of the supremely correct accidents in the history of children's books when the half-starving Charlie Bucket finds the last of Willy Wonka's Golden Tickets in his second Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight chocolate bar, just when Charlie (and the reader) think that there's no possible chance that he'll win one of the prizes that will gain him entrance to Willy Wonka's mysterious world. Roald Dahl, the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, its sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, was no stranger to accidents himself. In fact, he became a writer by merest chance. Born on September the 13th in 1916, as a boy Dahl struggled through boarding school, where a teacher claimed he was "a persistent muddler" with a "vocabulary negligible" and "sentences mal-constructed." All in all, the master said, "he reminds me of a camel." After Dahl finished the English equivalent of high school, he decided to get as far away from England boarding schools as he could and managed to find land a job with Shell Oil in Africa. When World War II broke out, he joined the Royal Air Force, and was shot down over Egypt. He was wounded but survived and even went back into battle for awhile. Eventually, though, he was transferred to Washington for the duration of the war. In Washington, he met the novelist C.S. Forester, who interviewed Dahl about his adventures. Forester was so impressed by Dahl's storytelling abilities, that he sent the notes of their conversation as a story written by Dahl to the Saturday Evening Post. The Post took the story and Dahl , like Charlie finding that golden ticket, was suddenly a published author and at the beginning of the career he would pursue for nearly 50 years. Among the many books that Dahl wrote are numerous collections of short stories for adults, and a long list of works for children, among them James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Danny: The Champion of the World, The BFG, The Witches, and Matilda. If your children haven't read Dahl's books, they've probably seen the movies these books have been transformed into. But urge your children to read the books -- for Dahl's strong, dark sense of humor and his even stronger sense of justice. Kids love his satiric bite: they know all about spoiled brats like Veruca Salt and Augustus Gloop, and tyrannical adults like the headmistress of Matilda's school, Miss Trunchbull. In Dahl's world, though, the bad get their comeuppance -- often in hilarious, over-the-top ways, and the good, humble, and decent always triumph. That's a worthy legacy to leave.
Program # 12
14 September 1999 -- Bullies
On my way home from school every day in third grade, Paulie Sullivan beat me up. I fought him, but always lost. He was bigger than me -- a burly fifth grader. I tried coming home a different way, but within a day or two he'd catch up with me again. I rode my bike, he bent the front wheel. My mother talked to his mother, but she denied that her son would ever do such a thing, and how dare my mother accuse him of it. My father talked to his father, and he said a kid needed to learn take care of himself and not go whining to his parents. My father taught me how to throw jabs and bolo punches -- just like Kid Gavalan, one of the famous prize fighters of the time. It didn't matter. Paulie held me at arm's length and all I could do was pummel the air. The only thing that saved me from Paulie was that the teachers were as tired of him as I was and they shipped off to middle school the next year. When I met up with him later, I was hanging around with a group of friends. We looked out for one another. Paulie figured it wasn't worth his trouble and left me alone. Not much has changed since then. When I visit schools today, the one thing, children tell me, that bothers almost all of them is bullying and the physical violence, threatened or acted out, that comes with it. So what's a kid to do? Hire another kid who's bigger and tougher than the bully to protect you? That's the premise of a pretty good movie for teenagers, "My Bodyguard," even though it is pretty unrealistic. Learn some martial arts and become the block's Karate Kid? Not a bad idea, except that you need a sensei like Mr. Myagi to cover your back while you're learning. Trick the bully? Ah, that would be Marty McFly's department, but it requires a very nible mind, a lot of luck, and a bully as dumb as Buzz. A growing number of books and learning videos in recent years have addressed the problem of bullies -- how to spot them, how to understand them, how to react to them. We know that most bullies are passing on what has been done to them; we know that they tend to pick on vulnerable, isolated children who won't fight back; we know that a school or community must be willing to acknowlege and concentrate on the problem if it ever hopes to reach any viable solutions, and that it must do this vigilantly year in and year out. The most successful school programs have recognized that you can not simply punish and isolate the bully, much as we might like to do just that. (I know I wouldn't have minded if Paulie spent some time in solitary detention.) Instead, what really works is if the bully is required to rejoin the community, and to put something positive back in place of the damage he has done. In some school systems, the bully is required to spend carefully supervised time tutoring and helping younger children -- the kinds of kids he probably picked on. I like the symmetry and justice of that. It may not satisfy the urge for revenge, but it teaches lessons that a bolo punch never could: it re-educates the heart and soul.
Program #13
15 September 1999 -- Robert McCloskey
In Boston they take their ducklings very seriously. In Boston Common, there's a larger than life-sized statue of the famous mother duck and her children from Robert McCloskey's 1942 Caldecott award-winning picture book, Make Way for Ducklings. Every spring, parents and children put on yellow, feathery costumes and deck their prams and strollers in eideredown for a duckling parade around the Public Gardens. I don't know about any creature venturing on foot or flipper across Storrow Drive from the Charles River to Back Bay, as the duck family does in McCloskey's book, but if any drivers will stop for ducklings, they'll do it here. Robert McCloskey was born today in 1914 and in the past fifty years he has become not only a kind of spokesman for the spirit of New England, but also a consummate chronicler of the idyllic life of small-town, mid-western America. In fact, his first book for children, Lentil, and two others -- Homer Price, and Centerburg Tales -- were based on his boyhood experiences growing up in Hamilton, Ohio, which he converted into the fictional, all-American town of Centerburg, with its quirky, good-natured citizens and its Tom-Sawyer-like hero, Homer Price. Like McCloskey himself was as a boy, Homer is a classic tinkerer, creating, among other things, a remarkably productive doughnut machine. Homer would have grown up to be Doc Brown in "Back to the Future," if he hadn't become Robert McCloskey and went east to art school instead. After his apprenticeship as an artist in Boston and New York during the 1930s, he met and married Margaret Durand, whose mother was the children's book writer, Ruth Sawyer. After serving in the Second World War, he and Margaret eventually retreated, in the early 1950s to an island off the coast of Maine, where they raised their daughters and he painted and wrote children's books about the region, its inescapable beauties and rock solid people -- quiet, memorable books like Blueberries for Sal, One Morning in Maine, A Time of Wonder, and that rollicking, Down Maine, sea shanty fable, Burt Dow, Deep Water Man -- a robust send-up of all tall sea tales. These are kind, gentle books, from a calm, generous nature. "I'm not prolific," McCloskey has said about his work with his characteristic candor. "I have to wait until it bubbles out." But what an eight books he has both written and illustrated in his career. Who needs a geyser when each one is such a pure, steady stream.
Program #14
16 September 1999 -- H. A. Rey
Hans Augusto Rey, better known as H.A., and his wife and collaborator Margret, escaped from Paris in 1939 just before the Nazis captured the city. They left Paris on bicycles, with only their overcoats and some ideas for children's books they had been working on together. They headed south for Spain and eventual freedom. The manuscripts and drawings they brought with them included their most famous creation, a little monkey who was, at the time, named ZoZo, but who would later become Curious George. Eventually, the Reys got to New York via Rio de Janiero. H.A. had lived in South American in the 1930s -- in fact, that's where he met Margret -- who was there for an extended visit from Germany. At the time, incredibly, he was selling bathtubs up and down the Amazon. They make movies about this sort of thing. H.A. and Margret fell in love, married and started an ad agency. He could draw (he especially loved to paint zoo and circus animals); she could paint and photograph and write. Soon they were back in Europe on their honeymoon, and they had begun producing children's books -- Cecily G. and the Nine Monkeys was the first, in 1937, and it introduced Curious George in a minor role. Soon George got a book of his own -- in 1941 it was published in America, and it has gone on to sell over 13 million copies in over a dozen languages, as well as six sequels and other Curious George books that have appeared since H.A. Rey's death in 1977. George's popularity shows no signs of diminishing. You just can't keep a good monkey down or locked up for too long. In that respect, George is like his ancient relative, the Monkey king, the immortal, irrepressible trickster of Asian mythology. Yet children don't love him because he's an archetypal folk figure. They love George because he's a lot like they are. George is about the same size they are when they first read about him, and he gets into the same kinds of trouble kids do, in the most casual, fun-loving ways. I think children also like the fact that he also escapes unharmed and undaunted, and always outsmarts the authorities (something children would certainly like to be able to do). George's sense of playful adventure is the beginning of heroism, before the little monkey becomes King Kong and wreaks a different kind of havoc in the city where he's taken. Indeed, the hero has at least a thousand faces, as Joseph Campbell suggests, and one of the youngest of them all is a laughing, furry face who loves bananas and balloon rides.
Program #15
17 September 1999 -- Media with Elaine Needelman
A Conversation about the new animated television shows for the fall. Taped 7/29/99 (Weekly Production Credits)
Program #16
20 September 1999 -- Rita Smith, Lost and Found Essay on Baseball
Cards
Edited version retaped for slower reading on 7/27/99.
Program #17
21 September 1999 -- Children's Music, Joshua Krause
A lot of children's music doesn't inspire children artistically, and we all know children are the harshest critics. In addition to children's music superstar Raffi, many popular musicians have ventured into children's recordings, offering legitimacy to both the musicians and the genre. And like any timeless children's book, the best of the bunch is to be enjoyed by parent and child alike. There is a variety of artistic impression, from the rap duo Salt N' Pepa redoing the classic "This Old Man" in true bubble-gum Hip-Hop style on Disney's Pediatric AIDS benefit CD titled "For Our Children" (which includes Bobby McFerrin, Melissa Ethridge, and Celine Dion), to Los Lobos' travel concept album "Papa"s Dream" which mixes classic rock nÌ roll with traditional Mexican folk songs. Among the more notable artists to have recorded children's tracks, if not entire albums, are John Lennon and Yoko Ono, The Doobie Brothers, James Taylor, Bette Midler, Judy Collins, and this year's back-to-school album by Jewel. Of particular interest are the bad-boys and girls of popular music, now less provocative than their bravado music videos. On Music for Little People's "A Child's Celebration of Song Vol.2," the Red Hot Chili Peppers do a funky interpretive version of Dr. Seuss's anti-totalitarian classic "Yertle the Turtle." (Sound Cut. See: mini-disc JC#1 - Track 4) Though there are many versions of "Peter and the Wolf" pop icon David Bowie's narration is probably the best. Then there is always the "Parakeet Album," featuring children covering Jimmy Buffet classics such as "Cheeseburger in Paradise." Johnny Cash's comrade Merle Haggard gets in on the fun with his cover of "Bingo" on the CD "Country Music for Kids." On "Big Blues," a blues compilation for kids, B.B. King and his guitar, Lucille, belt out "The Rainy Day Blues." (Sound Cut. See: mini-disc JC #1 - Track 5) As more popular musicians create for kids, they offer us a way of connecting with our children, as we share the joys and emotions that can only be expressed through song.
Program #18
22 September 1999 -- Mrs. Delphine Jackson
A "Books that Last" segment, taped on 7/29/99 Special thanks today to Mrs. Delphine Jackson, owner of the African Violet Bookstore, and director of the Willie Jackson Youth Foundation. Recess is a co-production of The University of Florida's WUFT - FM and the Center for the Study of Children's Literature and Media.
Program #19
23 September 1999 -- Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
This is John Cech, and this is Recess. Here's Rita Smith, the curator of the Baldwin Collection of Children's Literature, with a Lost and Found Essay. Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star Essay Special thanks today to Jocelyn Richardson for her reading, and for production help to Sybil Odom of the All - Children's Theater. Recess is a co-production of The University of Florida's WUFT - FM and the Center for the Study of Children's Literature and Media.
Program #20
24 September 1999 -- Jim Hensen's Birthday
A Conversation with Elaine Needelman Taped 7/29/99 Recess is a co-production of The University of Florida's WUFT-FM and the Center for the Study of Children's Literature and Media. The programs this week were written by Rita Smith and Joshua Krause and produced by Henri Pensis and Steve Seip, with technical assistance from Manus _____________________. Thanks to Jerre Conner, Helane Davis, Rosie Russo for helping to research these shows. For Transcripts and additional information about these programs, visit our web site at w w w . recess . ufl . edu
Program #21
27 September 1999 -- Lost & Found Essay
This is John Cech, and this is Recess. Here's Rita Smith, the curator of the Baldwin Collection of Children's Literature, with a Lost and Found Essay. Rita Smith on Inscriptions in Old Children's Books Edited version retaped for slower reading on 7/27/99 Recess is a co-production of The University of Florida's WUFT - FM and the Center for the Study of Children's Literature and Media.
Program #22
28 September 1999 -- Books That Last
Conversation with Dr. Robert Cade (Currently arranging for taping) This segment could also be switched with Mrs. Jackson's from September 22md.
Program #23
29 September 1999 -- Media
A conversation with Elaine Needelman on the good stuff that was released this summer and is still around and worth a look. Taped on 7/29/99
Program #24
30 September 1999 -- Little Women
It's the anniversary of the publication of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, which first appeared in 1868. Here today is Shelley Frazer Mickel with her personal reflections on that classic. Shelley Frazer Mickel with an essay on the anniversary of the publication of Little Women in 1868. Recess is a co-production of The University of Florida's WUFT - FM and the Center for the Study of Children's Literature and Media.
