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A BOYHOOD DREAM |
 The original hard cover edition of "BOY WITH A PACK" from 1939 |
Resuming an adventure
that began in the 1940s
of TheColumnists.com
For much of the past 20 years, I spent an inordinate amount of time searching through the "children's books" section of used book stores, desperately hoping to find a copy of a book I was pretty sure was called "Boy With A Pack." I never saw even a remote sign of it and most of the booksellers I asked told me they'd never had a copy on their shelves.
I couldn't have told them who wrote it because I had no clue. Though I read a lot of books when I was a kid, they were mostly "classics" like Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" or anything by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I had an aversion to "books for boys" because they were usually about baseball or featured characters I considered dippy, like Tom Swift or Horatio Alger.
But somewhere around the fourth or fifth grade, I found "Boy With A Pack" in the school library and started to read it. I was fascinated because it was about a teenager in early 19th century America whose parents had died. He had been living in the home of his older, married brother and decided to step out on his own. Using all his savings, he stocked a tin box full of small items like scissors, needles and thread and hefted his "goods" in a pack on his back, setting out on foot to walk westward as a peddler, earning his living selling items to pioneer women whose homes were far from stores carrying such vital household items.
I couldn't have told you anything about his adventures on the road because I'd forgotten them all in the 60 or so years since I'd held that book in my hands. All I could remember is that I'd loved that book with a passion and was brokenhearted when I had to turn it back to the library before I'd finished reading it because our school year had come to an end.
As fate would have it, I headed right to the library when school resumed just a few months later, but discovered the book had vanished. Luckily, they had a record that I'd returned it, but nobody knew where it had gone.
That sent me off to the East Side branch of the public library, a tidy little structure built, oddly enough, on an island in the middle of an intersection of streets. The head librarian there was a rather old lady who didn't believe children should be allowed into the adult section. She always directed me straight to the kiddie room until I finally convinced her I was reading way ahead of my age group. This time I didn't mind, though, because I knew "Boy With A Pack" would be in the kid's wing.
Only it wasn't. They didn't have it. The librarian handed me a copy of something called "T-Model Tommy," swearing I'd like it because all the boys did. That's usually when I got ornery and showed her a little attitude. I had a dad who worked on cars and an uncle who ran an auto shop. I didn't like that world and was damn sure I didn't want to read about it. Unlike most boys of my generation, I didn't have any great desire to own a car or even drive one. I had my bike, which was good enough for me.
(As it turned out, I was about 24 before I got a driving license and my first car was a Nash Metropolitan, so that ought to tell you where cars stood on my priority list.)
By 1949-50, movies became my first love, so I don't think I thought much about how "Boy With A Pack" had ended for most of my teen years and even through my 20s. But sooner or later I became intrigued with the American love of the "open road" adventure and I guess I began to figure out my passion for "Boy With A Pack" was linked to my adult passion for all the "road" movies I loved up to and including "Easy Rider" and all the rest.
In my 50s, I began to seriously long for ways to reconnect with my youth, so I suppose that's when I started to look for "Boy With A Pack" whenever I found myself in a used book store. I finally had gotten used to the idea that I was never going to re-live that interrupted childhood experience when suddenly I found a copy of the book in front of me. Here's how it happened:
My beloved niece, Natasha, who lives with my wife and I while working for her graduate degree in botany, heard me talking about "Boy With A Pack" and decidedit would be an ideal present for me for Christmas 2006. She went on the Internet and conducted a long search, finally locating a used copy for sale. The transaction took longer than she'd expected, so she missed Christmas and held the book to give me on my birthday last February.
I knew there was a special connection between me and this book. The copy she found is a well-worn edition discarded by the Deadwood public library (I love it! I'm a diehard western fan!) in 1965. I checked. It has no bullet holes. I also checked the publication date: It was 1939, the year of my birth.
After reading it--all the way through this time--I can readily understand why I connected with it in my youth: It's author, Stephen W. Meader, doesn't write down to his juvenile readers. It moves like a modern novel for adults. Though the hero, 17-year-old Bill Crawford, is a clean-cut kid, by today's standards, he gets into some terrible situations that give you a real appreciation of how tough life could be for a teenager in 1837.
Bill sets out walking from his home in New Hampshire, bound for the western frontier. He finally sells all his goods by the time he reaches Ohio, but he also acquires a dog, a horse, a colt and a very pretty girl friend by the time the story comes to a close. Along the way, he has to work a stint on an Erie Canal cargo boat, cope with a treacherous horse thief, evade some murderous scoundrels anxious to slit his throat and gets involved in helping deliver a runaway slave child to the "underground railroad" taking him to freedom in Canada. It's a breathless adventure and gives you a real feeling for life in the early 19th century. As for the ending I missed the first time, it was superb.
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...author of 'Boy With A Pack' |
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Since finishing the book, I've done some of my own Internet research, learning that Meader wrote scores of books for young adults, including, if you can believe it, the notorious "T-Model Tommy," the book the librarian was always pushing on me. Maybe she knew what she was doing, all right. Now I'll have to dig that one up and give it a read, 60 or so years late.
Born in 1892, Meader died in 1977 at age 85. His last published book was "The Cape May Packet" in 1969. His first novel for boys, "The Black Buccaneer," was published in 1920 and, like most of his 40-plus novels, was out of print most of the years I was searching for "Boy With A Pack." By the way, "Pack" received The Newbury Honor from the children's division of the American Library Assn., so it was an acclaimed novel in its time, too.
But I'm delighted to report that a small publishing house, Southern Skies, has since begun putting out all-new copies of Meader's books, including "Boy With A Pack," that are exact duplicates of the originals. They're offered in three bindings: Trade (large-size) paperback for $20; hard cover with dust jacket for $35 and. for "T-Model Tommy" only, a leather bound special edition for $100. Southern Skies is located at 27 Overlook Circle, Little Rock, AR, 72207. Phone number is 501-664-1313.
I'm also happy to tell you that virtually all the books I spent years yearning for have finally come into my possession, including a rare first edition of "Bomba the Jungle Boy," which I found while killing time in an antique store in Minden, NV; "Smoke From An Altar," the volume of poetry that was Louis L'Amour's first published book, finally reissued in a new edition in the 1990s, and "Some May Watch," the original English thriller novel by Ethel Lina White which served as the basis for Robert Siodmak's classic film "The Spiral Staircase." I found it through an Internet company that does poorly-made reprints of out of print novels on demand. They're expensive, loaded with typographical errors and are in a large format that doesn't fit any normal bookshelves, but it's better than never finding the book at all.
Still, no thrill matches the one I got when I unwrapped my very unusual birthday present from my niece and found "Boy With A Pack" in exactly the same edition I'd held in my hands as a fourth grader As I told Natasha, "Thanks to you, now I can die in peace!"
©2007 by Ron Miller. The book cover illustration is courtesy of Southern Skies publishing company. This column first posted June 18, 2007.
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