One day I came across an old book that I had owned as a kid. I’d forgotten all about it, but when I saw the cover it made me smile.
I vaguely recalled that McBroom’s Ghost was about a winter so cold that voices froze and then thawed in the spring. I knew it was funny and I figured with an author like Sid Fleischman, there might be more like it. I didn’t have any at school but there were more McBroom titles.
I’m always out trawling for old books and this week I found a prize (or two or three). The book McBroom’s Wonderful One-Acre Farm was a big score. It’s in great shape, a library bound collection of three McBroom stories that a local school had discarded.
The three stories included are McBroom’sWonderful One-Acre Farm, McBroom and the Big Wind and McBroom’s Ear. We learn how McBroom and his family pick up and head out west to find a farm (the one back east was all rocks and stumps.) McBroom’s family includes his wife Melissa and their children: Will, Jill, Hester, Chester, Peter, Polly, Tim, Tom, Mary, Larry and little Clarinda. Of course McBroom doesn’t call their names like that, he does it like this
willjillhesterchesterpeterpollytimtommarylarryandlittleclarinda!
McBroom buys an 80 acre farm sight unseen and it looks like he’s been swindled. It turns out he bought 80 acres stacked up on top of each other inside a one acre bog! Ever the optimist, he tells the kids to jump in for a swim. Unfortunately, at that moment the big dries up and what’s left behind is an acre of the most fertile land you ever saw. When he plants a crop, it’s come up and ready to harvest by the time he finished the field. They can grow 3 or 4 crops a day!
In McBroom and the Big Wind, McBroom tells us about the big wind that blew so hard it blew the children away and broke his leg! I love how this story ends with the line:
That’s the bottom truth. Everyone on the prairie knows Josh McBroom would rather break his leg than tell a fib.
McBroom’s Ear is a story about growing a colossal ear of corn for the county fair all while fighting a swarm of grasshoppers. There are millions of those jumpers willing to eat anything green, even McBroom’s socks. All that were left of those socks was the holes in the toes! He’s telling the truth, after all,
I’d as soon live in a tree as tamper with the truth.
Of course that tall tale ends with the McBroom family living in the treehouse since the grasshoppers ate their house when it was accidentally painted green.
I need to reread McBroom’s Ghost and then I’d like to read the four stories I have to my 4th grade classes. I think they will love the nonsensical joy of these books. I want to find more of these stories, there have been many illustration styles, as they have been reprinted over the years. I’ll take any of them, though I am partial to Quentin Blake’s work — he did most of Ronald Dahl’s books.
