Return to the ’20s

One weekend almost three years ago I struck out for Governor’s Island with some reading I needed to get through for Locomotive. I figured that if I had to be working on a weekend I might as well be doing it in an appealing setting. But then, while looking for a spot where I could knuckle down in comfort with the research, I came across a Jazz-Age Lawn Party in full swing, if you’ll forgive the expression. Instead of reading I did some drawing (which I posted on the blog, here.) 

The party was on again last weekend — and will be again in August, if you’re interested — and this year I went by on purpose. I’m hoping that one of these years they can combine this thing with a Civil War reenactment and get all the people who like to dress up in period outfits out there on the island together. In the meantime these ’20s-era weekends offer music, dancing, drinks, oysters, people looking better than they usually do, and old automobiles and trucks like this Citroën H van, which I enjoyed sketching.

There is, incidentally, a faded, former Citroën dealership around the corner from my studio in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, where Citroëns are seldom seen. In a neighborhood full of incongruities, the old dealership still stands out.

Population 1

You may have seen Buford, Wyoming in the news last week (here, for instance). The town, population 1 (one), was recently sold. I stopped in Buford in the summer of 2010 while I was on the road doing research for my current project, Locomotive, which is about the transcontinental railroad. (Yes, this book has taken an inordinately long time.) I had pulled off the interstate to look for where a spectacularly rickety bridge once stood, and also I wanted to find an H. H. Richardson pyramid, built to sustain the memory of two brothers whose fortune, made from the sale of shovels, helped fund the railroad. (One odd thing leads to another in the transcontinental railroad story. This has been part of my problem.) 

Anyway, Buford. There was a flinty woman behind the register when I stepped in to the Buford Trading Post pay for a tank of gas and, I hoped, to buy a good local map that would help me find those local sites. “Do you sell maps?” I asked. “No,” she said. I was surprised. “No maps?” I said. “No maps,” she said. I handed over my credit card to pay for the gas. For reasons that escape me I attempted small talk as I waited for the card to be approved. “Are you the population of one?” I asked. She shook her head. With a stoney straight face she said, “I’m from out of town.” 

Moonshot: The Annotated Edition

I’ve just added a new page to the web site, titled Moonshot Notes. It begins like this:

I had two goals while researching and writing Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11.

First, I wanted to find the information that I needed to make an accurate book.

Second, I wanted to keep from beating the reader over the head with all that information. I wanted to be accurate but to evoke the mission, not exhaustively detail it.

But maybe you want some of those details. Possibly you enjoy annotated editions, director’s commentary tracks, and footnotes. Or maybe you've read Moonshot and you've asked, what’s with the yellow shoes? What are those long pointy things sticking off the legs of the Lunar Module? And who’s MOM?

If yes to any of that, then pull up a copy of Moonshot and read on.

Blurbs

In January I wrote about how glad I was to have words of support for Moonshot from Michael Collins, Command Module Pilot on the Apollo 11 mission. Since then I’ve been happy and honored to receive additional blurbs from these Apollo veterans:

“Moonshot is a treat to look at and enjoy. The art is very accurate, in fact more accurate than I can remember seeing anywhere else. There is little that is not complex and confusing about space hardware, yet Moonshot gets it right. Very wonderful art in every way.”
— Alan Bean, Lunar Module Pilot, Apollo 12

“Moonshot is well done and should receive a warm welcome from many space age boys and girls.”
— James Lovell, Command Module Pilot, Apollo 8; Commander, Apollo 13

“Moonshot is wonderful for keeping the dream alive for young people.”
— Edgar Mitchell, Lunar Module Pilot, Apollo 14

“The most significant legacy of Apollo is the inspiration it instills in the hearts and minds of those young dreamers who follow in our footsteps. Moonshot furthers the romance of once again going where no man has gone before.”
— Gene Cernan, Lunar Module Pilot, Apollo 10; Commander, Apollo 17

Those blurbs have been up on my web site, but I wanted quickly to say here how much I appreciate getting them and having the chance to communicate, even briefly, with such incredible individuals — individuals who have been to the Moon. Seeing those names in my e-mail inbox, or hearing them on my phone after wondering who might be calling from an area code I didn’t recognize (Houston, of course), has been a huge thrill. Just incredibly exciting.

I was particularly happy to receive Alan Bean’s note. This is indeed complicated stuff, and no matter how much of it you think you’ve figured out, it’s hard to know what you might still be missing or misunderstanding. So that note was a vindication and a relief. The other added thrill with hearing from Bean was that it was from artist to artist; since retiring from NASA in 1981, Bean has been painting full-time. You can see his art online at alanbean.com. You can also see it in the forthcoming Mission Control, This is Apollo, a big, beautiful, information-packed book for young readers, with text by Andrew Chaikin, author of the fantastic adult book (“adult book”) A Man on the Moon. Mission Control, This is Apollo is for ages 9 to 12, they say, but I’ve had a look at it and love it and I haven't been 12 in a long time.

Paperclip

It’s not all fun and games and retrorockets when you’re researching the space race. An obituary in the Times today, here, covers the life of Konrad Dannenberg, a father of Apollo, and takes a reader into one of the more morally murky aspects of the beginnings of the American space program, Operation Paperclip, the recruitment of German rocket scientists at the end of World War II.

In the popular culture of the space race era, one can see an America both impressed by these former adversaries, and made uneasy by them. On the impressed side of the ledger, consider Werner von Braun’s stature as a major public figure and his influential series about the potential of manned space flight in Collier’s Magazine. See some of those articles here. For unease, listen to a biting song by Tom Lehrer about von Braun here, or watch Peter Seller’s darkly hilarious Dr. Strangelove here.

And, no, there are no Dr. Strangelove references in Moonshot. This is the sort of background material that does not make it into the book when you’re writing for the four-and-up crowd.

Space Mouse (Inner Space)

I don’t think it’s giving away too much to say that some action in Avi’s forthcoming Poppy and Ereth will occur in a cave. A trip to Texas has given me a chance to research those scenes, and to revisit the site of a childhood trip, at Laubach Cave near Georgetown, Texas.

The caves were discovered in 1963 during drilling by the Texas Highway Department. The drill got about 40 feet deep into the ground — and then the bit fell off. A department geologist, the skinniest available, was lowered down the narrow hole into a vast cavern loaded with limestone formations and even some prehistoric remains. The caves were opened to the public as a commercial venture and, in an attempt to connect with the then consuming space race — another segue! — were given the name by which they are now best known, “Inner Space Caverns.”

The sign out front of the caverns, just off Exit 259 on I-35 today, still has that space-age feel. The set of lights inside that big black ball pulse on and off, and when you see the thing as you’re driving by, it lends your trip a strange malevolent Sputnik/Great of Eye of Sauron mood. But if the sign seems dated, the caves (truly dated) hold up. There are spectacular formations in them, and if you’re in the area it’s worth the visit.

More about the caverns at the Inner Space website, here.

Henni and Her Eggs

Here are two sketches for a piece running with the story “Henni and Her Eggs,” by Peggy Nolan, in the October issue of Cricket. The story takes place during World War II in occupied Holland; this scene shows the father angry over scarcities imposed by the German army.

In the first sketch, at left, I suppose my inner casting director had in mind the idea of a sturdy, stocky Dutch farm family. It was the art director who pointed out (thanks, Karen) that the story was set in “the hunger winter” — the winter of 1944-45, which in Holland was a time of catastrophic shortages and indeed starvation. Then, while still working on the piece, I happened actually to meet a woman who had grown up in Holland during the war. As soon as I mentioned the work she told me, cheerfully, “Oh, yes. We didn’t look like this then, either.” You wouldn’t have considered her overweight, but she did look as though she ate regularly, and I suppose that was the point. S0 the family in the sketch was put on the Photoshop diet. I generally stay away from the stuff myself, but when it comes to tweaking sketches I have to admit that it can be handy.

Shake it, Ereth

Avi’s forthcoming Poppy and Ereth will be the fifth book that I’ve illustrated featuring Ereth the porcupine, so you might think that I know my way around the walking pincushions by now. The true professional, though, always aspires to a more perfect porcupine, and so this morning, thanks to the generosity of the staff at the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn, I tagged along with camera in hand for their porcupine Brody’s morning stroll. Brody was a big change from last week’s stuffed animals; he is happily and emphatically far from the taxidermist. Anyway, I had a great visit and thank the Zoo for the chance to get up close and personal with a genuine moving and grooving Erethizon dorsatum. The day contributed much to my sense of how these fellows are put together and move and sit and stand—and one more thing, too. How to put this? Before meeting Brody, I knew from reading the Poppy stories that Ereth doesn’t smell great. I knew it, but I didn’t know it. I smelled through a glass, darkly. On this hot and muggy morning, I smelled face to face. Whooo!


Thanks again to the Prospect Park Zoo. And of course if you’re in the neighborhood, you can swing by and see Brody (and his mother) for yourself. They’re worth the trip! More on the zoo here.

A late edit to this post: If you enjoyed that look at Brody, another short video that gives a better look at Brody’s morning walk is posted by the zoo on YouTube here.

Rodent research redux

Here’s introducing one of a couple of big projects that I’m happy to be working on in the coming months, the drawings for the sixth (and final) book in Avi’s Poppy Stories series, Poppy and Ereth. Research got underway last week with a trip to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. The visit provided useful material and also a full circle moment: years ago, before the idea of sequel or series was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, I visited the museum for help with the drawings for the book Poppy (no longer first in the series, but the first of the books published). On last week’s trip, I made a point of finding the great horned owl who gave aid to that book’s drawings of Mr. Ocax. It was a good visit, and a reminder that while Google image search will do for you some of the time, there’s no substitute for looking at the real thing, even when stuffed.

Back in the day, by the way, the sign over the door did not say Harvard Museum of Natural History. It bore the more cryptic and (therefore?) more satisfying name Museum of Comparative Zoology. Technically that name name still applies; the Harvard Museum of Natural History was invented in 1998 to serve as “the public face of three research museums,” one of them being the MCZ, but good luck to you if you try to find the words Museum of Comparative Zoology anywhere in the place. No big deal, I suppose, yet there’s something in the older, less expected name that I miss.

Crossed over the bar

Last night I had an e-mail from Jay McCarthy of the Lightship Sailors Association, letting me know that early last month Hal Washburn, one of the lightship sailors I interviewed for Lightship, had, as they say in these circles, “crossed over the bar.”

Hal served on Light Vessel 115 as a young man, in 1945 and 1946, helping to warn ships away from the dangerous Frying Pan Shoals off the coast of North Carolina. His old ship, known to many people these days simply as the Frying Pan, happens to be docked in the Hudson River here in New York. (The picture here is one that I snapped earlier this month, while out on a schooner on the Hudson. Unlike the staid Ambrose lightship at the South Street Seaport Museum, the Frying Pan lightship is now used basically as a bar.) When Lightship was still in the sketch stage I got Hal’s contact information from the folks who run the Frying Pan now, and he treated me like an old friend from word one. He happily sent photos of himself and his friends from his lightship days, shared stories, and reviewed drawings and text. He was pleased, I think, to see his obscure (to most people, anyway) old line of work get the picture book treatment. I am pleased that the book got to him in time for him to see it and share it with his grandson, and remain grateful for his help.