More Uncle Wiggily

TonyMyers1@aol.com
Tue, 01 Dec 1998 12:52:34 -0500 (EST)

What I've found: This is by a guy on the comic strip newsgroup, not me - but I
doubt he's mind:

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Working from early childhood memory of my father's books at my grandfather's
house ... that's stretching back a ways ...

Uncle Wiggily, the Rabbit Gentleman, lived with his housekeeper, Nurse Jane
Fuzzy-Wuzzy, a fussy, gentle maternal soul who I believe was a muskrat. As I
recall, the books, each of which contained a series of short stories, were
heavily illustrated but weren't quite comic strips, though there may also have
been a comic strip version. Like the Raggedy Ann and Andy books, these were
hardbound and maybe a half-inch thick, with heavily illustrated covers in full
color, and were full color throughout, though they may have had some minor b&w
artwork.

Uncle Wiggily was a kind of playful eccentric who would decide to go sledding,
play jacks or do other kid games with a semi-permanent selection of
neighborhood youngsters. In one story, he got involved with a crystal radio
set
-- this would have been likely in the mid to late twenties, when radios were
all the rage. Today I suppose he'd have gone on-line.

These games invariably ended with the appearance of the bad guys who wanted to
sample his "souse" -- and what that was was never specified, but it pretty
clearly involved eating him up. The bad guys had funny names, but I can't
remember any of them ... words like "the Skeezix," except that he was, of
course, someone else. But that type of word. Anyway, there would be some
chasing around and he would find a way to turn the tables on them, generally,
as I recall, without a lot of violence. He was much more gentle than, say,
Brer
Rabbit or Bugs Bunny.

Each story ended with a silly, semi-formulaic lead in to the next, with an "if
... then" format, something like "and, if the butter doesn't jump off the
table
and wake up the umbrella holder, I'll tell you the story of Uncle Wiggily and
the ... "

I've never understood why Salinger chose the title "Uncle Wiggily in
Connecticut." Perhaps he used to read his old Uncle Wiggily books to Joyce
Maynard when she was a child. ;-)

If you would like to get a copy of one of the books, try this URL:
http://www.abebooks.com/cgi/abe.exe/routera^_pr=inventoryKeys^phase=1

That will take you to an antiquarian book search site. I turned up several
copies, though most were from 1939, when my father was a bit old to be reading
Uncle Wiggily. There were also some newer editions, but with all of them
costing roughly $20, I don't see any point in not having one of the "real"
ones. Apparently, the folks who wrote Uncle Wiggily also produced the Bobbsey
Twins and Tom Swift, according to a paragraph describing a biography also
offered. There was a lot of crank-it-out syndicated stuff for kids in the two
or three decades before and after the turn of the century, before Walt Disney
and Jim Davis took over the task!

But Uncle Wiggily was rather good, and worth a look.

Mike Peterson
Plattsburgh NY
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