A note on sources and method

There are a variety of online sources for Burgess newspaper stories, some of them free. Google News Archives is the most comprehensive source, though the quality of indexing and scanning varies quite a bit from paper to paper. The digital newspaper collection at Chronicling America is another free source for issues before 1923 (the public domain era).

I have also maintained an account at Newspaper Archive, a service that despite its spammy appearance, is actually quite useful and worth the subscription fee. While it is too slow and clunky for much extended browsing, its reproductions tend to be of higher quality than Google News Archives and its search functions seem to be improving. Most of my "Little Stories for Bedtime" reading was done via the Proquest Boston Daily Globe collection (free to anyone with a Minuteman or Noble library card). To get access to some the earliest stories I had to pay for a short subscription to the Kansas City Star and Omaha World-Herald archives via Newsbank.

 As I've noted previously, the history of Burgess newspaper bedtime stories needs to be split into two main eras. The "Little Stories for Bedtime" era runs from February 5, 1912 to February 7, 1920. These stories were syndicated by Associated Newspapers. The "Burgess Bedtime Story" era runs from February 17, 1920 to January 16, 1960. These stories were syndicated by The New York Tribune (later the Herald Tribune). When Burgess changed syndicates some papers (e.g., Milwaukee Journal) followed him to the new syndicate. Others (e.g., Spokane Daily Chronicle) repeated the "Little Stories for Bedtime" series. As far as I can tell, Associated Newspapers offered up "Little Stories for Bedtime" reruns in five cycles, beginning in 1920, 1927, 1934, 1940, and 1945. If you do a search for "Thornton Burgess" after Feb 1920 you may get "Little Stories for Bedtime" repeats or new "Burgess Bedtime Stories." Headers may not help, as some papers maintained the "Little Stories for Bedtime" title into the Tribune syndication era, and others used "Burgess Bedtime Stories" despite being Associated Newspaper reruns. One of the things I will try to do in coming weeks is make clear which is which, and which sources can be relied upon for which series.

The flagship for "Little Stories for Bedtime" was the New York Globe (and Commercial Advertiser), a paper long gone with no online trace.  I'm not even certain the New York Public Library has complete holdings from the Burgess era. This created a significant gap in my reading of the very earliest Burgess stories. My main source, the Boston Daily Globe, did not start running the story daily until February 1913, a full year into the feature's run. Using Associated Newspaper reruns and cross-referencing them against a very handy chart provided by Wayne Wright in his Burgess book bibliography filled in most of the year, and access to the Kansas City Star archive has made me fairly secure in my knowledge of Burgess stories after mid March 1912. And most of February 1912 is available via the Omaha Star-Herald. At the moment, I still am missing a hand-full of stories from the first three months.

As part of the process of writing this up, I am compiling a comprehensive database of ALL 15,000 Burgess bedtime stories listed with dates and titles. Burgess syndicated these stories with specific titles and intended dates of publication. Unfortunately newspapers did not always publish the stories as intended, especially during the first year. When my list is done I plan to return to Boston University and check it against the stories/story clippings in the TWB archive and hopefully will have something authoritative that I can share. For now, especially for 1912 and 1913, things will remain a little tentative.

Individual editors had a great deal of latitude when it came to editing Burgess stories for length, running or omitting the included illustration, and using the intended title as a headline or inventing a new one. Burgess wrote the stories as serials, meaning that one-third to one-half of the 750 words in the average story might simply recap the action up to that point. This benefited both readers who might miss the occasional story and editors looking for copy (or even whole stories) that might be eliminated. In fact, when the Boston Globe picked the feature back up in the 1940s, it saved space by completely eliminating the recap portion and never running the Harrison Cady illustration. In short, readers' experiences of Burgess bedtime stories were highly dependent on editorial choices made at specific newspapers. I've tried to find the most complete and accurate versions but this may not be what many readers of Burgess actually experienced.

Finally, one of the things that surprised me when trying to put together online sources was the amount of churn as papers dropped the feature and others picked it up. Aside from the flagship papers there were only a few loyalists. Few papers ran the feature for as long as ten years in a row. This makes me exceedingly grateful for two particularly loyal papers in the Google News Archive: The Lewiston (ME) Daily Sun (April 1921-October 1961) and the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix (January 1929-October 1965). [Burgess reruns were available deep into the 1960s.]

Next: Story #00001 Billy Mink loses a race

Burgess's Bedtime Story Characters

The very first published Burgess bedtime story, "How Reddy Fox was surprised," appeared in the April 1910 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine. In this story we are introduced not only to Johnny Chuck and Reddy Fox, the main characters, but also to Peter Rabbit, Farmer Brown & his son Tommy, Bowser the Hound, Jimmy Skunk, Bobby Coon, and Happy Jack Squirrel. The publication of Old Mother West Wind later in the year added Striped Chipmunk, Billy Mink, Grandfather Frog, Little Joe Otter, Jerry Muskrat, Hooty the Owl, Sammy Jay, Blacky the Crow, Mr. Toad, Spotty the Turtle, Mr. & Mrs. Bob White, Mrs. Grouse, and Boomer the Nighthawk to the pantheon of characters. Mother West Wind's Children in 1911 added Danny Meadow Mouse, Shadow the Weasel, Jumper the Hare, and Lightfoot the Deer. 

In short, by the debut of Burgess's "Little Stories for Bedtime" in February 1912, most of the characters he would use for the next 48 years had already been introduced.

Ultimately the Mother West Wind books and the Bedtime Stories would take very different directions: Mother West Wind offered animal fables and the Bedtime Stories offered natural history. But in the early days, stretching from the first two Mother West Wind books through the first two years or so of "Little Stories for Bedtime," there is a great deal of continuity. Although the stories do provide some pertinent facts (red-winged blackbird eggs are speckled, toads eat their old skin, meadow mice have short tails), Burgess is more interested in trickster tales and boy adventure stories than nature study. When Burgess does go for pure nature study, as in "The Disappointed Bush," the results can be pretty tedious.

During this period, the main characters are clearly boys. Johnny Chuck's mother warns him against playing with Reddy Fox, Reddy Fox's mother (replaced in the Bedtime Stories with Granny Fox) scolds him when he disobeys, and extended family members, including Old Grandpa Mink and Blind Old Granny Otter, can still be seen hanging around the Smiling Pool. (What ever happened to Peter Rabbit's baby brother, introduced in "Johnny Chuck's great fight," we never learn). And while Reddy Fox quickly moves from being a bully to being a deadly predator, the real heavies (especially from Johnny Chuck's perspective) are the gun-toting Farmer Brown and his mischievous egg-stealing, trap-setting son. Perhaps most astonishingly, in "Bobby Coon and Reddy Fox play tricks," Jimmy Skunk is friends with Hooty the Owl, later his only real natural enemy.

A rule about naming is also suggested in Old Mother West Wind. In the story, "Why Jimmy Skunk wears stripes," TWB, despite telling a fable about a skunk generations earlier, uses both "Jimmy Skunk" and his other character names to refer to the actors in the story. In other words, "Jimmy" could be used to refer to ANY skunk, a rule that universalizes the stories he tells and reduces the individuality of his characters. TWB would pull back from this rule for the most part. In future origin fables, the character would be introduced as Mr. Skunk, not "Jimmy." And his characters would have enduring histories (Reddy Fox, e.g., could be identified by his missing toe), though Peter Rabbit must be the most forgetful character in the history of children's literature (we will count the number of times he is astonished learning that Mr. Toad eats his old suit or that mourning cloak butterflies survive the winter.) But there would be rare occasions where suddenly "Jimmy Skunk" or "Shadow the Weasel" show up far from their homes (Shadow the Weasel's far-west doppelganger actually gets eaten by a golden eagle), suggesting also a certain lack of character continuity over the next 50 years.

Burgess's earliest newspaper stories

The first Thornton W. Burgess newspaper stories ran as part of a short-lived but widely syndicated children's page, "The Children's Corner."

The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, one of its subscribers, introduced the page on November 6, 1910 with the following headline:

"$50,000 for the children to be spent in one year. Cleanest Children's Page in America." The impressive cost would be used to procure the best authors of children's stories. The editorial vision of Herbert Myrick (President of the Phelps Publishing Company, TWB's employer) would assure parents that their children would be exposed to material of the best taste.

There will be no "slapstick," alleged comedy. There will be no drawings that teach young people that it is an exquisitely amusing thing to stick pins into the Fat Man; or to set a "booby trap" for your uncle and chuck him into the water; or to make slides with the tapioca pudding on the hardwood floor to the end that Jane may fall down and empty the soup tureen all over Mother's new dress.

No Katzenjammer Kids allowed.

Among the authors promised were: Carolyn Wells, Ellis Parker Butler, Jerome K. Jerome, Charles Battell Loomis, Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, as well as Holman Day, Porter Emerson Browne, Cynthia Westover Alden, Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon, and Edward Lear, plus "Onoto Watanna" [Winnifred Eaton] and "Sui Sin Far" [Edith Maude Eaton] for exotic appeal.

And, of course, Thornton W. Burgess, whose 1909 Good Housekeeping serial nursery rhyme, "Captain Toodles," would appear on the very first Children's Corner page.

In addition to "Captain Toodles" (I am deliberately omitting Captain Toodles's unfortunate [racist] adventure among the cannibals here), The Children's Corner would also draw from Good Housekeeping the 1907 poem, "Christmas Toys," the 1911 poem, "Chickens on Parade," and the 1911 story, "The million little raindrops and what happened to them."

More significantly, for our purposes, The Children's Corner would also run some of the earliest bedtime character stories, originally published in Good Housekeeping and then in Old Mother West Wind. These would include "Little Johnny Chuck" (AKA "Peter Rabbit plays a joke"), "How Reddy Fox was surprised," "What Johnny Chuck found"(AKA "Johnny Chuck finds the best thing in the world"), and "Reddy Fox barks at the moon" (AKA "Reddy Fox disobeys") complete with George Kerr illustrations.

As far as I can tell, The Children's Corner was gone before the year was up, but by that time TWB, newly unemployed, was vigorously pursuing his own newspaper bedtime story project.

Next: The bedtime story characters

Howard R. Garis: Newspapers' other 15,000 Story Man

On January 10, 1910, Howard R. Garis, a writer of some note already, began contributing a daily story to the Newark News. Initially the stories featured the adventures of a family of rabbits, the Littletails, and their muskrat servant, Jane Fuzzy-wuzzy, but soon the stories began to focus on their wise old uncle, Wiggily Longears. According to a column by Nat Bodian, Garis would write over 15,000 of these stories by the time he retired in 1947. (The accounting here seems a little off, given it took Burgess ten more years to reach the number, so the much quoted 15,000 Garis stories must include non-Wiggily stories as well).

The first month or so of stories was collected and published as Sammie and Susie Littletail and syndicated to other newspapers to run as daily bedtime stories. The book is worth skimming through, particularly the early chapters, which are located in a relatively naturalistic milieu. The Littletails live in a burrow (note: cottontails, unlike European rabbits, do not typically live underground) and have dangerous run-ins with traps (Sammie gets caught), hunters with guns (Uncle Wiggily gets shot), and boys looking for animal skins. By the end of the book, however, the stories are deep into fairyland. Fantasy rather than natural history would be the normal Uncle Wiggily mode for most of the rest of its run.

Let's look at the experience of a particular paper. The Washington Times began running the Garis stories under the "Bedtime Stories" header beginning on August 1, 1910 (it replaced Farmer Smith's "Daddy's Good Night Story"). Here's the first story (identical to the first chapter in the book linked to above).

The Garis stories did not necessarily run on consecutive days. Some issues, such as the August 4, 1910 Times, featured a different series, in this case "The Ticklemouse and his Sleepyland Adventures--with Davy and Dorfy"

And while the Times ran the next set of Garis stories, about the squirrels Johnnie and Billie Bushytail, by March of 1911, it seems to have committed to yet another bedtime story series, "The Sandman's Stories, for little folk just before bedtime."

For a un-cropped original go here

It is worth noting that the characters and action of this particular story (the Sandman series was ultimately quite varied in its story-types) are very Burgess-like (especially if you swap the wolf character for a coyote), though clearly the rabbit and the fox have a different relationship than Peter and Reddy.

In his memoirs Thornton Burgess recounts surveying the existing newspaper bedtime stories and finding them lacking. This would motivate the development of his own bedtime story series, which would indeed be superior in certain ways (especially in respect to natural history education) to what was available. At the same time, I think it is also important to reflect on the similarities and even influences that these precursors had on him.

Next: Burgess's earliest newspaper stories for children

Pre-Burgess Newspaper Bedtime Stories

Thornton W. Burgess was "The Bedtime Story Man." His 15,000 newspaper bedtime stories earned him that nickname. But his syndicated "Little Stories for Bedtime" was not the first newspaper bedtime story feature.

On March 9, 1910 the Mansfield (Ohio) News pitched a new labor-saving device, "Daddy's Bedtime Story."

Parents without the time or energy or imagination to create their own stories for bedtime would now have a new story every night (except for Sunday) to read to their children.

Here is an example from March 18 1910, which should be read carefully for reasons that will become obvious.

"Daddy's Bedtime Story" was, at least initially, framed as a story about bedtime stories. The children, Jack and Evelyn, were ready for bed and "daddy" was obliged to tell them a story, usually with a moral directly tagged on at the end. I have no evidence that Thornton Burgess read this particular story, though the character names (Billy Possum [a common colloquialism] and Tommy) and the scenario (possum playing dead, carried by the tail by Tommy) are strikingly similar to future Burgess. The shockingly casual cruelty ("they took him home and showed him to Mr. McFudge, who killed him and had Mrs. McFudge cook him"), on the other hand, is in sharp contrast to the endlessly empathetic Burgess story.

The "Daddy's Bedtime Story" feature was widely syndicated throughout the United States and Canada. Mary Graham Bonner apparently wrote the stories, and although she didn't receive credit in the newspaper, she published several collections of them, including Daddy's Bird Bedtime Stories, under her own name. Initially she offered original stories, largely in the animal and fairy story vein, but eventually (as her own well of creativity ran dry?) she would draw from the larger cultural reserve of the folk tale. In the 1930s she would write thousands of stories under her own name for an Uncle Wiggily-like syndicated feature, "Sundown Stories."

"Daddy's Bedtime Story" should not confused with "Daddy's Good Night Stories," a different syndicated newspaper feature of 1910, written by George Henry Smith (AKA Farmer Smith). Here's a sample from August 18, 1910 that ran in the Meriden (CT) Daily Journal (the highlighted bits are an artifact of searching Google News Archives).

"Daddy's Good Night Stories" were animal fables. Here Smith unapologeticaly appropriates the  "Br'er Rabbit" name for his character (as Burgess would do with "Peter Rabbit") and even offers a little bit of natural history ("ten to twelve days" until baby rabbits are ready to hop around). Like Burgess (and unlike "Daddy's Bedtime Story"), Smith served up a serial. Note the hard sell at the column's end to read the next evening's installment.

Next: Howard R. Garis: Newspapers' other 15,000 Story Man

15,000 Burgess Bedtime Stories

I can't be a true Thornton Burgess expert unless I read all 15,000 of his newspaper stories. That's what motivated my latest project. If I haven't posted on this blog for a while, that's a good indication of how long this has taken. But I'm nearing the end. I'm now in 1951, with about 3000 stories left to go. (I started in 1912). Once I'm finished and organized I'll begin posting about what I've found. The goal is to hit 1960 by the end of this week (August 4) by the end of August. Meanwhile I'll be tweeting my daily progress.
[UPDATE August 13 2012. I'm done. Now back to the beginning to see if I can find a source for the first month of stories in 1912.]

O Rare Harrison Cady

Archive Screen for harrisoncady.tumblr.com

O Rare Harrison Cady, published by the Sandy Bay Historical Society in Rockport, is one of the very few sources of biographical information about Harrison Cady that I've been able to find. It is essentially a memoir done in collaboration with the journalist, John L. Cooley. It is a charming book, breezing through Cady's childhood (he loved animals, circuses, and his drawings were praised by P.T. Barnum), his early career struggles, and his eventual successes. Cady's worldview is peaceful and urbane--though he always considered himself a "country boy"--and he had a lot of famous friends, listed at length.

I was hoping to find information that would flesh out his bibliography. Here the book is a mixed success. On the one hand, Cady provides very useful details about the ways he ended up at certain publications. On the other hand, there are serious factual problems with the information he provides, particularly around dates. My concern is that Cady's inclination to just make stuff up--which is an explicit theme later in the book--makes this memoir less than reliable.

With that disclaimer in mind, here is the early career chronology I was able to distill from his account.

During the autumn of 1895, at the age of 18, Cady moved to New York City. (He states 1897 in the book, which is completely inconsistent with his bibliography).

Almost immediately, he sold a drawing to Harper's Round Table--a "gnome with a lily" published in the November 1895 issue. He would end up selling Harpers a handful of similar images.

He sold fifteen decorative initial letters to the humor magazine, Truth. These ran in 1896.

He starved for a little while.

He then got a 3-month position at the New York Journal drawing decorative frames for the comics page. He notes that Hearst had just bought the publication--the first Hearst issue was November 1895, so this would be late 1895/early 1896.

The position ended and he starved some more.

He then got a stable job with an advertising firm, W.H. Wagstaff and Co., that specialized in transit cards. He had a relatively peripheral position but contributed at least one illustration to a widely displayed ad--for a brand of beef extract.  According to Cady's account, he was still at Wagstaff when the U.S.S. Maine exploded (Feb. 1898).

Cady's first published piece in St. Nicholas

While at Wagstaff he put together a package of drawings, including a set of illustrated original poems, which he sold to the children's magazine, St. Nicholas. The first drawing ran in August, 1898. [The poems that Cady indicates were part of this initial batch did not run until 1903 and 1904. Either Cady mis-remembers or St. Nicholas sat on them for an awfully long time!]

After the job at Wagstaff ended (the company was a casualty of restricted ad spending during the Spanish-American War), he "conserved his funds" and picked up a few "odd jobs" but was soon contacted by the advertising manager of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, who offered him a salaried staff position. Eventually, Cady moved to the news department, doubled his salary, and never struggled again. This would appear to have been mid to late 1898.

He describes himself as a pictorial reporter for the Eagle, offering drawings to accompany a wide variety of stories, from fires and murders to special events such as America's Cup and horse shows. He recounts some specific events he covered:

With my pencil I reported the funeral of Henry George, the noted advocate for a single tax....I also recorded the reception given to Angelina Asnoras [sic--a transcription error of "Cisneros"] after her rescue from Morro Castle by Karl Decker, a big story of the day. (p. 41)

Here's the problem: both events happened during the fall of 1897, before the sinking of the Maine that supposedly precipitated the end of Cady's work for Wagstaff.  Moreover, a review of these stories as covered in the Eagle reveals that none of them were accompanied by illustrations. I have to assume that Cady is just making stuff up here. Cady's primary responsibility--well documented--for the Eagle was similar to his work for the New York Journal: the design of decorative frames for photo layouts.

An example of Cady's decorative frame work, 1901.

Cady discusses his most famous work for the Eagle, a series of sketches of typical Brooklyn girls, as well as the nearly fatal illness (pleural pneumonia) that curtailed his work on the project.

The Heights Girl, 1902.

It turns out that this project led directly to an illustration job for one of the leading romance writers of the day, Laura Jean Libbey. Cady does not discuss, however, the series of cartoons that first put his name before the public (in Brooklyn anyway).

The Horse Show as seen by Harrison Cady

A semi-regular feature on Sundays from August 1901 to February 1902, these "...as seen by Harrison Cady" cartoons were humorous pictorial reports of events and life-style trends around the New York area. I wonder if Cady conflated these later efforts with his recollections of his earliest responsibilities for the Eagle.

Cady's first cartoon for Life, May 21, 1903.

While still working at the Eagle, Cady began to contribute cartoons to the prestigious humor magazine, Life.  After "several months" of successful submissions, he had his first official meeting with the editor, John Ames Mitchell, and according to Cady's account, Mitchell encouraged him to quit the Eagle and join the staff of Life.  Here again the chronology doesn't quite work, unless by "several months" Cady means "a year and a half." (Cady's last credited piece for the Eagle ran in February 1905.) It also doesn't explain why Cady, as a well-paid staff artist for Life, would continue to submit material to Life's direct competitors, Puck and The Judge, throughout 1905 and 1906. Even taking into account the possibility that the other publications held onto material submitted far earlier, it seems likely there was a significant gap between the end of Cady's work for the Eagle and the start of his full time job at Life. Indeed, Cady's account of his meeting with Mitchell suggests as much:

"Have you saved any money?" he asked, with a trace of a smile.
"Yes," I told him. "I have saved a little. I live with my mother and she, a good Yankee, has managed on what I earn."
"Well," said Mr. Mitchell, "I suggest you go back to the Eagle and quit. Life will pay you much better. We can use your talent."(p. 49)

Cady would remain on the Life staff for over two decades (this overlaps with the beginning of his partnership with Thornton Burgess). Eventually he would move beyond the "beetlebug" material he began with and would begin to reflect Mitchell's editorial vision. This included both a strong sense of social justice and an unfortunate tendency toward antisemitism.

Those interested in the earliest stages of Cady's career are invited to check out my Harrison Cady TumBlog, where I have collected the majority of Cady's efforts, in roughly chronological order, up until the end of 1908 until 1923. That project will continue until I exhaust Cady's available public domain work. O Rare Harrison Cady may be ordered directly from the Sandy Bay Historical Society.