Remembering Uncle Wiggily

The "Myers Family Farm" a couple of miles north of Beaman, Iowa, is the setting of many of my growing-up memories. The old house where my grandparents lived is long gone, but I can still clearly remember it and much of what happened there.

"Uncle Wiggily" stories often played an important role in our visits there. So when Garrison Keillor's April 25 Writer's Almanac included the following paragraph, I took notice:

"It's the birthday of writer Howard R. Garis, born in Binghamton, New York (1873). His most famous character is Uncle Wiggily, a gentlemanly old rabbit who always wears a suit and a silk top hat. Garis was a reporter for the Newark Evening News and he wrote hundreds of children's books, many of them as a ghostwriter. He published his first Uncle Wiggily story in a newspaper in 1910, and it was so popular that he ended up publishing an Uncle Wiggily story six days a week for more than 30 years. By the time he retired, he had written more than 10,000 stories about the rabbit."

A quick survey of on-line resources reveals that Garis wrote and "ghost wrote" far more than the Uncle Wiggily stories, and some say as many as 15,000 "Uncle Wiggily" stories for more than 40 years. It also reminded me of some of the Uncle Wiggily characters, particularly his main adversaries, "The Pipsisewah" and side-kick, "The Skeezicks."  Most of the rest of the stories themselves I have long forgotten, although the Wikipedia summaries jogged a few memories. 

It seems to me that the stories were often new to me, though I am quite sure that only means that there were several books with several stories in each book. I know my grandparents didn't subscribe to the Newark newspaper, so even if the daily stories were still being published in the late 1940's and early 1950's, that's not where I heard and read them. So far as I know, Uncle Wiggily was not represented in my own home, most likely because my parents knew it was good to have something new for us kids to do while visiting my grandparents.

There was also an "Uncle Wiggily" board game in the farmhouse, I believe. I remember playing it with my grandmother. She always found time to do fun things with her grandchildren, despite all the work a farm-wife had to do in those days. My grandparents Myers were very family-oriented people, for which I am grateful.

I may decide to see if our library has any Uncle Wiggily books I could check out and read. On the other hand, I should probably be guided by Howard Garis' wisdom (which Keillor reports):

"He (Garis) said, 'Half the fun of nearly everything, you know, is thinking about it beforehand, or afterward.'"

Epilogue: Maxine just dug out “Uncle Wiggily’s Happy Days,” which her Uncle Ray gave her for Christmas, 1951. Now I remember: the best part of each story was the final paragraph. Now they were fun!