Conformity is Golden

We are in the process of sorting through old (or unwanted) stuff for donation and that includes the hundreds (yep) of books that are now too babyish for the six-year-old.  

The wife sorted through the library and she magnanimously let us save the ones that meant something to us in case we really cherished them.  We “rescued” about 15 from the pile.  Three of the rescued books were Little Golden Books and are discussed briefly below. 

These first two were read exactly once.  I un-donated them basically to take them out of circulation.

Scuffy the Tugboat (1946) - A charming story about a little red-painted tugboat who refuses to sail in a bathtub, believing he is meant for bigger things.  After he tricks his masters into letting him sail in a brook he makes a break for it, eventually reaching ever larger bodies of terrifying, chaos-filled water.  Just as he reaches the ocean, he is “rescued” by his owners and he is relieved to spend the rest of his life sailing from one end of a bathtub to the next.

Tootle (1945) - Trains-in-training are taught the most important rule: “Staying on the Rails No Matter What”.  Tootle decides to jump the tracks to have some fun in the meadow, which he does, then returns to his tracks. His masters want him back on the track permanently , so they come up with a plan. He soon runs into a bunch of Red Flags, which means he can’t go that way (the townsfolk have hidden throughout the meadow waving Red Flags).  The only Green Flag he sees is on the tracks.  He gets back on and happily chirps “This is the place for me.  There is nothing but red flags for locomotives that get off their tracks”.

This last one was kept just for the crazy.  The wife and I laughed so hard at this one.  No idea why it was in the donate pile to begin with.

The Happy Man and His Dump Truck (1950) - There is nothing I can say in words that the illustrations don’t say a thousand times better.  This happy (read: totally hammered) dude rides around from farm to farm all day, kidnapping animals and “tipping his dumper” to everyone he sees.  Miraculously, no one is injured and all the animals are returned to their proper homes.