Maud’s friend Beulah Hunt was the model for Winona Root. Beulah is shown here with her dog, Peter.
Frank Palmer (“Uncle Keith”) with Stella Palmer Hart (“Mrs. Ray”) in 1915.
Maud wrote many plays that she and her friends performed. She really did write one called The Repentance of Lady Clinton, which Maud and her friends performed in real life, although Betsy, Tacy, Tib, and Winona decide not to in the story. Maud remembers: “We gave The Repentance of Lady Clinton in Midge’s back parlor. I repented so hard and to such good effect that I made a little boy in the audience cry. We had to stop the show to soothe him.”
The character of Mr. Poppy was based on Clarence Saulpaugh …
… and Mrs. Poppy was based on Roma Saulpaugh.
The Saulpaughs in their auto …
… and the Poppys in their auto.
Mankato’s Carnegie Library opened its doors in 1904.
Lois Lenski’s drawing looks just like the photo.
Maud had always known what she wanted to do. “I cannot remember back to a year in which I did not consider myself to be a Writer, and the younger I was the bigger that capital ‘W,’” she wrote. “Back in Mankato, I wrote stories in notebooks and illustrated them with pictures cut from magazines. When I was ten my father, I hope at not too great expense, had printed a booklet of my earliest rhymes.” We don’t know if Maud wrote a story similar to “Flossie’s Accident,” but she did submit one of her early efforts to a magazine. Like “Flossie’s Accident,” it was “written on a brilliant pink paper … [but] never heard from.”
A prediction about Betsy appears on the last page of Downtown: “Some day in her maple or on Uncle Keith’s trunk, she would write something good.” Maud certainly did!
Maud Hart Lovelace died on March 11, 1980. But her legacy lives on in the beloved series she created and in her legions of fans, many of whom are members of the Betsy-Tacy Society and the Maud Hart Lovelace Society.
For more information, write to:
The Betsy-Tacy Society
c/o BECHS
415 Cherry Street
Mankato, MN 56001
The Maud Hart Lovelace Society
Fifty 94th Circle NW, # 201
Minneapolis, MN 55448
Adapted from The Betsy-Tacy Companion: A Biography
of Maud Hart Lovelace by Sharla Scannell Whalen
Copyright
Harper Trophy® is a registered trademark
of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown
Copyright © 1943 by Maud Hart Lovelace
Copyright renewed 1971 by Maud Hart Lovelace
Foreword (originally published in The Betsy-Tacy Companion: A Biography of Maud Hart
Lovelace by Sharla Scannell Whalen) copyright © 1995 by Sharla Scannell Whalen
“Maud Hart Lovelace and Her World” (adapted from The Betsy-Tacy Companion)
Copyright © 2000 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
“All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.”
Epub Edition © MARCH 2011 ISBN: 978-0-061-99828-7
LC Number 43-51264
ISBN 0-06-440098-0 (pbk.)
First published by Thomas Y. Crowell Company in 1943.
First Harper Trophy edition, 1979.
10 11 12 13 LP/CW 20 19 18 17
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