HEAVEN TO BETSY

A couple of weeks ago I was at the library, looking for a book by Madeline L’Engle in the always-disorderly Juvenile section. It wasn’t on the shelf, even though the library catalog said it was (See? Always disorderly), but while I was searching through the “L”s, my eye fell upon an old Perma-Bound copy of Heaven to Betsy by Maud Hart Lovelace, the same vintage (1960s) as the library copies I read when I was a kid. It looked lonely and I suddenly felt nostalgic (the musty smell of a library does that to me), so I checked it out.

I’ve read this book at least six times. The series is right up there with the Little House and Anne of Green Gables books in my “beloved childhood reading” pantheon. My mother read them when she was a little girl, I have read and reread them throughout my life, and most of my grade-school friends read them, but when I grew up, and especially when I moved to California, I realized that Lovelace never quite hit it big outside the Midwest the way Laura Ingalls Wilder did, and most people I know who aren’t from Minnesota haven’t heard of her. Which is sad, because these books (originally published in the 1940s and early 1950s) are delightful. The first four are sweet kids’ books, but it’s the later six books, which follow Betsy Ray through high school and beyond, that I especially love. Written in a more complex style, they’re equally as enjoyable for adults as for kids and teens, so if you haven’t read them yet, it’s not too late to start.

Like the Little House and Anne books, the Betsy-Tacy books lovingly and loosely autobiographically document the life of a smart, stubborn, spirited girl in a particular time and place—in this case, the early 1900s in Deep Valley, Minnesota (a fictionalized version of Mankato, where my aunt and uncle live). As in the Little House books, there is an emphasis on family coziness, but unlike Laura, Betsy faces little in the way of material hardship (no blindess, locusts, or nearly wandering out to die on the prairie in the middle of a blizzard here). As in the Anne series, Betsy is has a “bosom friend” (devoted redhead Tacy), aspires to be a writer, and competes academically with her future husband (the blond, poor-but-proud Joe Willard), but unlike Anne, Betsy isn’t enough of a drama queen to get into serious trouble with her temper or imagination. Mostly, she just has fun. I loved all three series equally, but this was the one I wanted to live in.

Betsy wrestles with some issues in Heaven to Betsy, which covers her freshman year of high school in 1906. Like Laura wishing for blond hair and blue eyes or Anne wishing for violet eyes and an alabaster complexion, Betsy wishes she were prettier, despairing over her freckles and her straight hair (which she curls every night on Magic Waver rollers). She gets homesick while visiting the country, is sad when her family moves out of her childhood home, wants to convert from Baptist to Episcopalian, has an unrequited crush (or, as they called it in 1906, a “case”) on bad-boy-lite Tony Markham, says goodbye to a few friends who move away to distant cities, and gets so caught up in her social life that she neglects her writing and loses the school essay contest (topic: “The Philippines: Their Present and Future Value”) to Joe Willard. But her problems rarely get in the way of wholesome, old-fashioned good times with her cheerful family and madcap crowd of friends: eating banana splits at Heinz’s soda fountain, making fudge, singing the latest songs around the piano, having sleepovers, joining school societies (the Philomathians and the Zetamathians, which compete throughout the school year in a Hogwarts-reminiscent rivalry), making up catchphrases in Latin (“O di immortales!”), taking surrey rides, going to football games, eating the onion sandwiches Mr. Ray makes for Sunday night lunch, going to Presbyterian youth group, popping popcorn, drinking cocoa endlessly, playing with Ouija boards, going ice skating, having winter picnics, building bonfires, and throwing innumerable parties. The Crowd is coed, but there is no dating (only one girl, Carney, gets to have a lone real date, attending a play “with Larry…in the evening…alone,” and it’s a special concession from their parents because his family is about to move away to California). Boy-girl relations are refreshingly easygoing, cheerful, and innocent: The boys tease and banter with Betsy, walk her to and from parties and other events, kiss her on the cheek under the mistletoe, and drop by the Ray house to eat the delicious food cooked by Anna, the “hired girl” (who, judging by the illustrations, is at least in her 40s). Like the Little House books, in retrospect this turns out to be a slightly food-porny series; the food isn’t described in any great detail—except perhaps those remarkably tasty-sounding raw onion sandwiches sprinkled with salt and pepper—but it is omnipresent, and always delicious. No wonder I grew up to have a food blog if this is what I was lovingly rereading as a kid.

As an adult, I also can’t help exclaiming over all the period details. The Rays’ new house has all the modern conveniences: a bathroom (“no more baths in a tub in the kitchen”), a bedroom for all three girls (no more sleeping “in the same room, in the very same bed”), a gas stove (“no more horrid wood fires to build”), gas fixtures (“no more lamps to clean”), and a furnace (“no coal stove in the parlor”). Betsy wears sailor suits and shirtwaists, wears her hair in a grown-up pompadour for the first time, affects an “Ethel Barrymore droop,” and pins starched ruffles across her chest “to give her figure an Anna Held curve.” All-girl parties are called “hen parties,” and for Halloween there is a “sheet-and-pillowcase party” (everyone dresses as ghosts). The Crowd plays intriguing-sounding games like Consequences and Fortunes; Ruth and Jacob; Going to Jerusalem; Bird, Beast, or Fish; Jenkins Says Thumbs Up; Pass the Ring; and Prisoners’ Base. On Halloween, the girls drop apple peelings, snap apple stems, and walk backwards down the stairs with a mirror to try to foretell their future husbands. But gender roles never seem too oppressive, even if Betsy comes off as rather coquettish and boy-crazy in this book (a late bloomer myself, I always sympathized with the shy, more sensible Tacy, who doesn’t really see what all the fuss over boys is about). Still, Betsy’s dreams for the future always revolve around her career:

Not that she was anxious to get married. Far from it! She had been almost appalled, when she started going around with Carney and Bonnie, to discover how fixed and definite their ideas of marriage were. They both had cedar hope chests and took pleasure in embroidering their initials on towels to lay away. Each one had picked out a silver pattern and they were planning to give each other spoons in these patterns for Christmases and birthdays. When Betsy and Tacy and Tib talked about their future they planned to be writers, dancers, circus acrobats.

See? Fun people.

For some reason, I never owned these books when I was a kid, instead just checking out the same dogeared copies from the library over and over again. Little did I know at the time that I was missing my chance. In my adult life, they’ve fallen in and out of print in dismaying cycles, and even when they’re in print the new covers have been loudly flowery, modernized, and…let’s face it, pretty lame-looking, without the charming Lois Lenski illustrations of the earlier four books or the classy Vera Neville drawings of the later six (which that made them seem so sophisticated to me as a child and shaped my mental images of all the characters). Used copies of the older, more attractive editions are hard to come by in used bookstores outside of Minnesota (I’ve only managed to find Betsy in Spite of Herself so far), and even on the Internet they often sell for as much as $80. As soon as I started rereading Heaven to Betsy this month and remembered just how much I loved it, I became determined to acquire the entire series at any price and promptly started Googling. Imagine my delight when I discovered that HarperCollins is not only finally putting the later six books back into print this fall, but it’s giving them the deluxe treatment, in beautiful grown-up editions featuring the original cover art, with forewords from writers who are fans of the series (Laura Lippman, Anna Quindlen, and Meg Cabot)! You can be sure I’ll be snapping them up this time around.

Despite having spent my childhood visiting the Little House sites within easy driving distance (Pepin, Walnut Grove) and yearning to go to Prince Edward Island, I’ve never visited any of the Betsy-Tacy sites in Mankato, but I’d like to try to the next time I’m in town. The Betsy-Tacy Society has purchased and restored the “Betsy House” (Maud Hart Lovelace’s birthplace and childhood home) and the “Tacy House” (the home of Frances “Bick” Kenney, on whom the character was based), and placed a bench at the spot where the real-life Betsy and Tacy would sit and eat their dinners on “The Big Hill.” You can also see Tib’s house and many of the other sites mentioned in the books, as well as visiting Lovelace’s grave. Later this month, there’s actually going to be a Betsy-Tacy Convention in Mankato, with a keynote speech by Meg Cabot, walking tours, picnics, an essay contest, and a re-creation of Heinz’s ice cream parlor (and on the same weekend, a tour of the Betsy’s Wedding-related sites in Minneapolis and dedication of a Maud Hart Lovelace memorial in Mueller Park)! If I still lived in Minnesota, that’s totally the kind of dorky thing I would want to go to. But I’ll have to content myself with rereading the familiar old library copies and preordering the new editions.