Trolley Car Family
March 20, 2009 at 6:58 pm 2 comments
The Trolley Car Family, Eleanor Clymer (1947, out of print)
This story is unique in that it transplants a city family to the countryside for a summer to live in the conductor father’s retired trolley car. Here the joys of quintessential simple country life are seen through the wide eyes of city children. In one episode, a daughter buys a dummy egg used to encourage chickens to lay because she thinks it’s a toy. The book is charming and engaging for young readers (I certainly read it enough to make the cover fall off), and the unique perspective of the city family enchanted with country life fleshes out that idea of American childhood we’ve been seeing.
Entry filed under: Weekly Themes. Tags: childrens books, Donut Machine Week, Eleanor Clymer, nostalgia, trolley car family.
A Shrewdness of Apes 
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dr | March 24, 2009 at 9:33 pm
I’m really interested in this theme — I can remember the Boxcar children, of course, and this one seems vaguely familiar. There was also a chapter book about a German family that ended living in a boxcar on another family’s dog-breeding farm (also in Germany) that fit the category for me. In all of those cases there’s a strong element of kids-remaking-home-without-adults, which is absent here. We’ve just been reading “We Were Tired of Living in a House” with Tricksy, which is a picture-book version. (And for which the 2000 reissue has illustrations vastly inferior to the original version from the ’60s.)
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Sarah | March 31, 2009 at 5:15 am
There is also “Sea View Secret” by the same author. Another book wher kids have the freedom to roam and solve the mystery by themselves