Tag Archives: Make Way for Ducklings

Books for reading and giving away

Sometimes I read recent books by Boston authors and describe them in this column. The following three books fit the Boston criteria, but vary widely in their subject matter. One of them might be just what you are looking for either for yourself or a holiday gift.

The Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt

Ms. Holt, a resident of Roslindale, has done a prodigious amount of research for this book about formerly obscure women, talented in mathematics, who worked together in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California beginning in the 1940s.
She tells how they grew as a team, working under the guidance of an older woman who earned their loyalty. Calculating over and over to make sure they were accurate, they first worked on paper, then on huge, early IBM computers and finally on individual PCs.
We read about Wernher von Braun’s visits. Von Braun, as you know, was a premier rocket scientist in Germany during World War II, but was welcomed to the U.S. afterward to move American rocket science forward. Hmmmm. That’s what the rocket girls also thought—hmmm.
The author revisits the milestones of rocket history, Sputnik, the fire that killed Gus Grissom, Roger Chafee and Ed White on the launch pad, moon landings, the explorations of Mars and deep space.
Naturally, being women, the rocket girls’ domestic lives influenced their success. Those whose husbands shared the burdens of maintaining a household and raising children had greater success than the women whose husbands were non-participants. The latter typically divorced.
Holt has a good story to tell and she tells it well. My only problem was keeping the characters straight because there are so many of them.
In the end, though, it doesn’t matter. After all, it is rocket science, and we can all enjoy the women’s story.

Serpents in the Cold by Thomas O’Malley and Douglas Graham Purdy

There is so much to like about this book. It takes place in Boston in the 1950s. You’ll recognize where the locations of the action. It’s got the tribes of Boston doing what the tribes do, but it is not as cliché-ridden as, let’s say, Ben Affleck’s movies. A bonus is that the book is filled with 1950s photographs, adding to the sense of time and place.
The sentences are good. This team knows how to write. For example, “She chopped some parsley, filled a pot with water and placed it on the stove top, then opened the fridge, peering in, but, as if she had forgotten what she was looking for, closed the door and shuffled back over to the stove and turned on the gas to boil the water.” That long sentence, filled with prosaic detail, hints at the character’s intention to put up with her situation.
But I could not finish the book. I realized that reviewers rarely divulge their biases or preferences. But I will: I can take only so much violence, sadism and mayhem. This book was too much for me.
The story ends on a high note, or as high as these characters can get. I know because I read the last pages.
If you can stomach such characteristics then you won’t be disappointed by the book’s pace, story telling or interesting characters. So it’s up to you, as it always is.

Make Way for Nancy by Nancy Schön

The sculptor who fashioned Mrs. Mallard and her ducklings for the Boston Public Garden does a fine job of telling her story and that of her creations, even though she warns readers that she is a sculptor, not a writer. She also tells the story of public art, its squabbles, its setbacks and successes and the difficulties of getting funding.
While she’s most famous in Boston for the ducklings, you’ll learn she has created bronze prairie dogs, bears, dragons, owls and pussycats, giraffes and Greek goddesses for display in the U.S. as well as in Moscow, where the only copy of the ducklings statues stands.
She fashioned the ducklings as close to the original drawings as possible. But her other animals are often pared-down versions that project movement and intention. An example is the dynamic Tortoise and the Hare pairing in Copley Square. How can she get bronze to look so lively? We learn how the project moved in fits and starts and how long it took to install it, finally in 1995 near the Boston Marathon finish line. Before that these heavy pieces made a trip to Washington and back, as well as taking a trip to Symphony Hall.
We learn how Schön creates her pieces, starting with a skeleton of plumbing pipes and ending with the finishing after the foundry casts them. She includes a bit of Boston history, a lot about art and, best of all, some insight into the life of a determined, talented, happy woman. We can use a bit of happiness in this world.
One complaint—the book’s layout and quality are not up to the typical standards of the publisher, David Godine. The pages, filled with awkward spacing and widows and orphans, look as if the book designer flowed the text without checking the result. The photos are interesting, but look as if no one took the time to Photoshop them. Strange.

Finding hope

After the election, Nancy Schön was blue. When faced with sadness, what’s a sculptor to do? She fashions a piece that acknowledges her feelings, yet points toward hope.

The mother dove has a tear in her eye. But her fledgling is rising from a lilac branch that already has buds on it. Laurel leaves lie nearby. This small sculpture, still in wax, shows how an artist conceives of a project, decides how big it will be, plays with the image until it feels right and finally can send it off to the Chelsea foundry to be cast in bronze. Nancy is still playing with the image, so the doves are not finished. But the project is making her feel better.

Nancy, of course, is the renowned sculptor who turned Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings mallards into the bronze statues in the Boston Public Garden. (Her last name is pronounced “Shern.”) Children have been playing on the ducks, and their parents have been taking photographs of those children on the ducks, for almost 30 years.

This remarkable woman showed me around her house and studio the other day so I could tell some of her story.

Nancy lives in a section of Newton that has big, early 20th-century, gorgeous houses. Her pleasant home is filled with the paintings and sculpture of other artists, as well as her own art.

“I’ve always wanted to pursue my love of sculpture, help others and earn a living,” she said. That’s what she is doing.

Nancy is slender and good looking, taking after her mother, who was a beauty herself. She is strong and agile, which comes in handy when she makes such big pieces as a lifesize pig, bear or giraffe. Seven months of the year she swims a quarter of a mile daily in her outdoor pool, which takes up most of her back yard. She works every day in her spacious studio behind the swimming pool, using materials and tools familiar to carpenters, jewelers and plumbers—Styrofoam, steel netting, drywall nails, pipes, scrapers, magnifying glasses, clay, wax, plaster, marble, turntables, wire. She spends lots of time at lumber yards. She follows the Red Sox, goes to symphony and likes places that offer valet parking.

Did I mention that she is 88 years old? She seems at least 25 years younger.

Nancy grew up in Newton in a loving family. Her father ran Harry Quint Florist in the Back Bay, and her mother delivered the flowers. From an early age Nancy was sculpting. “I intuitively knew how things go together,” she said.

She trained at the Museum School, married philosopher, professor and author Donald Schön and had four children, all happy and healthy. Her early sculptures featured many mothers and children. She created images of her husband and children walking in the woods. She made giraffes because Donald was six feet four and told her he sometimes felt like a giraffe. She made sculptures of people waiting, of people climbing. She watched people looking at sculpture and had an insight. “Children patted the cat or stroked the donkey, but paid no attention to the people sculptures,” she said.

Her public art commissions came fast after the ducklings statues were unveiled. First Lady Barbara Bush called on her to reprise Mrs. Mallard and her brood for the children of the then-Soviet Union. Mrs. Bush and Nancy went to Moscow to present the ducks to Raisa Gorbachev. Nancy made a tortoise and a hare for Copley Square to celebrate the Boston Marathon. She made a dragon with a heart at the end of its tail for the Nonquit Street Green in Dorchester. The city of Hamilton, Ohio, commissioned a statue of Lentil and his dog in honor of hometown boy Robert McCloskey, whose first book, Lentil, was believed to be autobiographical.

Nancy made prairie dogs for Oklahoma City to symbolize friendship. She created Eeyore, Piglet and Winnie-the-Pooh for the Newton Free Library. Her raccoons occupy a place of regard in Tennessee, another tortoise and hare live in Arkansas, and the bear Sal met in Blueberries for Sal stands in Boothbay Harbor, Maine’s botanical garden.

Nancy’s husband, Don, died about 20 years ago at age 67 so she had to create a new life for herself. That involved finishing a studio they had planned together and expanding her work with non-profit organizations. She partners with many groups doing good in the world to make works of art—desk-size sculptures, pins, even a zipper pull—to help them raise money or honor volunteers. She was a prime mover in building the skate park near the Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge because she believed the kids skateboarding in Copley Square needed a better place to do their tricks. She created a series of small sculptures illustrating 24 of Aesop’s Fables that are still waiting for public home. She spends much time with her children, grandchildren and her first great-grandchild.

She is still working on the doves, trying to decide which composition will capture the hope she strives for. But in a world that contains so much bad news, so many bad actors, so much corruption and so many falsehoods, it is relieving to come upon a good story. It is what Nancy has made of her life that gives everyone hope that good lives can occur.

Ducklings then and now

Duckling Day is coming up. On Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 8, starting at 10 a.m., the Harvard Marching Band will lead hundreds of parents and children dressed like ducklings from the Boston Common’s Parkman Bandstand into the Public Garden in a re-creation—sort of—of Mrs. Mallard’s trip to the Public Garden with her eight ducklings. (Mrs. Mallard led her babies from the Esplanade, but she wouldn’t be able to get across Storrow Drive now.)

The parade ends up near the beloved duckling statues, created by sculptor Nancy Schön in 1987.

You can participate in Duckling Day, either by taking your children or grandchildren or by volunteering. If you decide not to do so, you still might want to look at Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings, the 1941 book that inspired the duckling statues and the parade. It reveals a Boston of 75 years ago. It describes a fumbling father duck who is only partially engaged and a smart, inventive mother duck who runs her family with confidence and discipline. Were fathers like this in the 1940s? Mine wasn’t, but I can’t know what other fathers were like.

Mr. Mallard’s disengagement would be frowned upon in today’s families, whose dads are expected to be involved. Mr. Mallard reveals poor judgment, such as in his suggestions that the family build their nest near turtles and foxes, which are predators, Mrs. Mallard reminds him.

Mrs. Mallard finds a safe, protected spot on an island in the Charles River, lays her eggs and then sits on them with little help from their father. Just after the ducklings hatch, Mr. Mallard decides to take a week-long jaunt, leaving Mrs. Mallard with all the responsibility for the newborns. How do you think that would go over with new human mothers in today’s world?

McCloskey not only portrays a different kind of father, but his drawings show a different physical world. He provides a faithful representation of Boston in 1941. The Esplanade has no Storrow Drive so the policeman, Michael, can easily stop traffic on the slower street that Storrow Drive replaced. Bicycle riding in the Public Garden, which scared off Mrs. Mallard when she was contemplating her newborn ducklings’ safety, was permitted then, but is prohibited now.

Boston police officers, unlike Michael and Clancy, are no longer all Irish, nor are they all men. Streets that were two-ways in the 1940s are now one one-way. McCloskey’s drawings show the real shops on Charles Street in the 1940s. What wouldn’t we give for The Corner Bookstore instead of the chain coffee shop that now occupies that space. The drawings show a man sweeping the street. Was Boston cleaner then than it is now?

Some features of Boston, however, are the same. The Public Garden is fully recognizable, right down to the handsome bridge over the lagoon and the Swan Boats. The Longfellow Bridge is in its right place, although the Cambridge side of the river was more industrial than it is now. Louisburg Square hasn’t changed. On one page a bottle floats in the Charles River. I’m sure you can still find a bottle or two in the river, even though it has been mercifully cleaned up since the 1940s.

After almost 30 years, the duckling statues are still one of the most visited attractions in Boston. It is always wonderful to walk by and watch happy little children playing on the ducklings. Parents still snap photos of the tykes, although, unlike 30 years ago, it is with smartphones instead of cameras.

There is still time to register for the ducklings parade. It costs $35 for a family until May 6 and $40 afterward. Contact the Friends of the Public Garden, the organization that now runs the parade. Amazon.com has duckling costumes.