We were sitting in the waiting room and she could tell how nervous and scared I was. She said, “Oh, I see a big basket of books over there in the corner, why don’t you go get some of those books and bring it over and we’ll read them together to make you feel a little bit better before you see the new dentist.” I went over to where the basket was and I pulled out a book. It was a hard covered book so I knew it was kind of expensive, because when I was young hard cover books were the expensive books.
I opened the page and something stood up in the center of it. I had never seen that before. I mean, literally something was standing up on the inside in between the pages. I was just fascinated. The creative, little young artist in me just went crazy when I saw it. I turned the page and there were things where you would pull something and something would move on the inside. I was fascinated by that.
I don’t remember the rest of the dentist visit, I don’t remember anything else about that, but I remember that basket having nothing but pop-up books on inside of it. As soon as I went home after the dentist or following that, I started to experiment with making pop-ups at a very young age, just because I was a curious, creative person. I would peak in beside the pages and see how things worked.
When Christmas would come around I would ask for pop-up books as gifts because they just, not only did I think books were magic, just the pictures and the words, but seeing something like that open was utterly unbelievable to me.
