My Favorite Childhood Reads
With memories of this fictional family dancing in my
mind, I Google “Melendy” and see that this series of books is still out there.
In multiple printings, plus an audio version that parents can play in the car
on long road trips with their kids.
I’m pleased to know that. I was maybe in third grade when I
found The Saturdays at my town library. The kids in the Melendy family (Mona,
Rush, Randy and Oliver) get bored at home on weekends, so they form a kind of mutual
association. Each Saturday, they’ll pool their allowances and give the money to
one sibling to spend as s/he chooses. In the 1940s, when these books were
written, a couple of bucks would have been enough to get somewhere – especially
if you lived in a big city with public transportation, as the Melendys did. The
chapters of the book describe their individual adventures. When
six-year-old Oliver’s turn comes, nobody really expects him to board a bus and
head off by himself -- but he does, with interesting results.
In the next book, the family moves to the country. They live with their father, who's a fairly cool guy, and a housekeeper/nanny named Cuffy, in a house that’s old and peculiar enough to harbor
interesting secrets (The
Four-Story Mistake.) One of the kids gets to know a teenager named Mark, who
appears to be alone in the world. The family eventually adopts him (Then There
Were Five). The older kids grow up and get on with their lives. In the last
book, Spiderweb for Two, Randy and Oliver are the only ones left at home.
In some ways, this series reminds me of the Narnia Chronicles.
Two brothers, two sisters, and a string of adventures that progresses over time.
But the Melendys’ lives happen in the everyday world. Sure, it was a world
different from mine. My small Texas town didn’t have city buses, subways or art
museums. We didn’t have the seasonal changes that the characters experienced in
their country home (it was here, I think, that I first heard of “Indian
summer.”) But the house, the woods that surrounded it, and the characters that graced the pages were vividly drawn. I felt like I knew this family. I was always thrilled to find the next volume at the library, to know the story wasn't over yet.
