Well, it was way back in 1963 when I was actually in the fourth grade. We were actually living in New Jersey at the time and my aunt was living in New York City working at The Dalton School as a third grade teacher. And she had just written this book, Amelia Bedelia, and I think it was released in the fall of — or it was probably September of 1963, and it became a big success. And that was — I think it was probably her third book and we were all very proud of her.
Well, my Aunt Peggy unfortunately passed away in 1988 at a pretty young age. She was 61 years old. And I guess the good thing is she had celebrated the character’s 25th year in 1988 and so the publisher had, you know, had all kinds of parties and celebrations at bookstores and libraries and conventions. And so she, I’m sure, had the feeling, the certainty that this character was going to go on and on.
And all of a sudden though, boom, she was gone. And she had written 12 Amelia Bedelia books and kids kept writing to her. They had no idea she had passed away. You know, you don’t really — that doesn’t pop into your head as a kid, you know, the character is so much alive and so much a part of your life that you just assume the author is there too. And so my aunt would get letters, letters from kids saying, you know, “Dear Miss Parish, if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be reading chapter books,” or, “I wouldn’t be reading at all.”
And kids would write to her and say, “Well, I loved your last book. When is your next book coming out?” We would always have to write back and say, you know, “I hate to tell you this, but there aren’t going to be any new Amelia Bedelia books because there’s no more Peggy Parish.” And so this went on for about five years. After about 10,000, maybe 12,000 letters later, we thought well, maybe there should be new books. And I had had experience writing, a very different kind of writing, writing advertisements for television commercials.
I would work on things like Hallmark cards and Mounds and Almond Joy candy bars and just a wide variety — American Express. And so I thought well, maybe I could figure out how to write a children’s book. And I did not take that lightly. I knew from the beginning that this was not an easy thing to do because I had actually watched my Aunt Peggy write a book. She came to babysit me and my older sister and I watched her go through that whole process of writing a book.
And so I had a lot of respect for it because a lot of people will look at a children’s book and they’ll say, “Oh, you know, my memos at work are longer than that. Of course I can write this.” And then they get bogged down and they, you know, and so I had a lot of respect for it. So I gave myself a deadline. I said in one year I’ll figure out how to do this or we’ll let somebody else write a book. And so after about eight months I had come up with enough ideas to do a book called Good Driving, Amelia Bedelia where Amelia Bedelia goes out for a drive in the country with Mr. Rogers and they have all kinds of confusions with left turns and right turns and things like that.
