Juniper Sage ~ Bill Ballantine ~ William R. Scott, Inc. and E.M. Hale and
Company, 1946
The stamp on the inside of this book says ‘Glenside School
Library, Muskegon Michigan’, so I guess my grandfather must have swiped it
while he was either the band director or administrator there back in the day. Or, more likely, it was a discard and was picked up in a book sale. The first possibility sounds better.
Regardless, I've had this book for as long as I can remember and have always loved the pictures and simple text. Picture books about occupations have their own special place in the history of children’s literature, and this one, while not especially informative, is easily one of my favorites.
Fix it, fix it, where
are the Fix-it Men?
Down in the ground in
a dark manhole,
Or up in the air on a
telephone pole.
Fix it, fix it, here
come the Fix-it Men.
That’s the first paragraph and it pretty much sums up the whole story. In wonderful mid-century style, the illustrations depict a variety of ‘fix-it’ men, including a telephone repair man, a wrecking truck man, a steam roller man, a carpenter man, and, of course, a Boss Man.
There’s something I've always been drawn to about the way
that picture books depict the big city and the various workers that make it
run. Boiling down the complexity of a real city into a simple form and
portraying everyone as pretty much content to do their job seems like a perfect
sentiment to be found in a 1940s picture book. I can get behind that
simplification and the optimism it presents, naive as it may be.
As I said, I have always loved this book, but my appreciation for the simplicity of the designs and the charming approach to the subject matter has increased in recent years. (I wasn't even aware that $65 is about the cheapest price around for a used one these days). I’ll be hanging on to my heavily worn copy to share with my son in a year or two. Track it down through your local library’s Interlibrary Loan program, if you can!
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