Chuggy and the Blue Caboose
Here is Lydia’s story of how Chuggy and the Blue Caboose came into being:
“After moving from New York to Santa Barbara in 1948, the only place we could find to live was an apartment very close to the railroad tracks. We had lost our first child shortly after birth. I was pregnant again and although I never liked the idea of being next to a railroad track, we were stuck with what we could find. We were always awakened at night because of the trains. Sometimes they would change engines at a roundhouse. There was a little caboose that was often left there overnight, and it looked lonely and blue in the moonlight. It was also only a short block to the ocean, and after Roy was born in Spring, I used to walk by the tracks with him in his pram through the shoreside park on the way to the beach.
“One morning, Don went out sketching. He took a sketch-book along, and mentioned that he was going to make a drawing of the railroad trains and tracks. I said: “Well, I hope you come back with a book.” And he did! This was how the idea for Chuggy was born! There was a switch-man at the level crossing who had a shack with a little garden, and the train engineers always enjoyed stopping their trains there to have a chat with him. He was a real “guardian of the crossing.” This man appears as “Mitch the Switchman” on pages 15 and 16 of Chuggy.
“Don then started to make some notes about the book, we worked on it together. I was always very good at thinking of a plot, and a climax. In Chuggy, we placed this climax at the part where the trains are having trouble, getting stuck in the snow, and Chuggy goes to the rescue.”
It was a local librarian, Marjory Rankin, who encouraged Don to publish his book. She liked Chuggy, and when Don asked “Well, what shall I do with it?” Marjory said: “Send it to May Massee, the head of the children’s book division of the Viking Press in New York. Start at the top!” Don quite often gave her credit for this. “Marge encouraged me to send in a book I did for my son. ‘Send it to a publisher,’ she said. It was published, and since then I’ve been hooked.”
You can order used copies of Chuggy and the Blue Caboose
