Last fall, I stopped by an assisted living center in Blue Hill to see Robert McCloskey. He wouldn’t see me, although 40 years ago I visited the McCloskeys on their East Blue Hill Bay island. I was a boy on a family sailboat, a boy who knew and loved One Morning in Maine and the other McCloskey classics.
So I called him on the phone. He sounded discouraged, particularly with the status of his health, at 88 and suffering from Parkinson’s. A few weeks ago, he died. His daughters, Sal and Jane, had visited with him faithfully until the end, driving over from their homes in nearby Deer Isle.
When I talked to McCloskey on the phone, he brightened at the mention of the Scott Islands, where he had his seaside studio, where he had family closeness and a sense that life could be simply beautiful, like his drawings, paintings and stories. At times his life really was like the books – according to Sal and Jane.
McCloskey liked to party, and he liked to drink. Perhaps there was hidden pain, or dashed hopes and dreams. Yet he gave us, for all time, what are arguably some of the best children’s books ever written, including Make Way for Ducklings and Blueberries for Sal. I still read them, and if I have a young audience and can read them aloud, all the better.
Robert McCloskey hadn’t written a book in decades. He liked to invent things, to tinker. He completed some paintings, but his life seemed to unravel. The reality of Robert McCloskey’s life only sometimes matched the romanticized view captured in a long-ago Life Magazine photo spread. But some of the McCloskey mystique was factual. Sal and Jane really did snuggle with their mother, Peggy on a sofa with a wonderful bay view. That old couch is still there, on the island.
As a young man, McCloskey attended art school in Boston. He tried commercial art but was unsatisfied. He returned to his native Ohio and wrote and illustrated Lentil, a story built on his own childhood. McCloskey moved to Boston, where he noticed wild ducks trying to negotiate busy streets around Boston’s Public Garden and Beacon Hill. That led to four ducks living in his apartment, so he could learn to draw them and create Make Way for Ducklings. It’s been translated into many languages and is known to millions of children and adults. It won the Caldecott Medal, as did McCloskey’s later book about Sal and Jane and a Maine summer, Time of Wonder. Blueberries for Sal and One Morning in Maine were both Caldecott honor books.
I remember laughing over Homer Price, a collection of adventures of a boy and his friends, including the unstoppable doughnut machine. Homer was followed by a sequel, Centerburg Tales.
While serving in the U.S. Army in Alabama during World War II, McCloskey drew pictures used in training troops. Around that time, he met and married Peggy Durand, whose mother, Ruth, wrote books for children, and who had roots in Hancock, Maine.
With the war over, the McCloskeys lived for a year in Italy. Back in the U.S., they bought the islands, one of them with a cottage on it, a house Sal is restoring. Robert McCloskey received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from Miami University in Ohio, and an honorary Doctor of Letters diploma from Mount Holyoke, from which Sal and Jane graduated.
The elder McCloskeys lived for a while in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and with their dogs set up housekeeping in a house on Deer Isle. Peggy McCloskey, suffering from emphysema, died in 1991.
At a meeting of the McCloskey sisters’ East Penobscot Bay Environmental Alliance, held the other day on an island beach, there was a moment of silence for their father, with the just the sound of gentle waves coming ashore.
Not long ago I was driving through a marshy part of Woolwich, on Route 1, when a tractor-trailer rig came to an abrupt halt. At first I thought he must have broken down. Then I saw why he stopped. A mother duck was leading her ducklings across the road, waddling proudly, I thought. I knew I was watching Mrs. Mallard, “with Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack and Quack all marching behind her.” Perhaps the truck driver knew the book, too.