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New York Times article on Little Toot book

November 26, 1989 - NJ edition
by Shirley Horner

Fifty years after Hardie Gramatky wrote the now classic Little Toot, a story beloved by children the world over, the posthumous publication of his sequel, Little Toot and the Loch Ness Monster, represents for his family a triumph of art and spirit.

"Sometimes I wonder why it took me so long to continue with this book, the story my father planned before his death,” his daughter, Linda Gramatky Smith, said in a recent interview from her home in Glen Rock. “Other times I know precisely what kept me away -- the feeling that I could never come up to the high standards of his work. After all, he was a master, a proven success, and he could work with that assurance. Or so it seemed to me.”

It is no accident that the first book her father ever wrote is a well-known favorite. Almost immediately after its publication in 1939, it showed up on recommended lists for children's books, where, one might say, it still holds secure anchor. Looking back to the 1930's, when, as Robert S. McElvaine wrote in “The Great Depression,” the movies provided millions with a temporary escape from reality, there was indeed a ready audience for an upbeat story of a little tugboat eager to take on the odds.

If this seems somewhat reminiscent of Walt Disney and his popular cartoons of the 30's, it is no coincidence. Mr. Gramatky had been one of the first animators to work for Disney; he began there fresh out of art school in 1929 when he was 22 years old. Although his salary at the Disney Studio -- $150 a week -- was a generous one in those days, he and his wife, Dorothea Cooke Gramatky, a fellow artist whom he had married in 1932, yearned to move to New York City.

“Dad was determined to make it on his own,” Mrs. Smith said, “so, in 1936, as soon as his contract was up, they went east, from sunny California, to work in a seventh-floor studio, wedged between factories in lower Manhattan.”

One of her father's great loves was reading, Mrs. Smith remembers, and throughout his career he kept a journal to which, along with quotations from books, plans and sketches, he contributed observations that were often self-revelatory. “When it comes to facing the realities of the world, Little Toot is all of us,” he once wrote.

The story of the tugboat came to him, he would explain later, because as he worked in the studio, he often rested his eyes by looking out through a window that faced the East River. In that same journal, he noted that one of those “chesty little tugs pulling a big load seemed to have a personality all its own.”

Still published by Putnam ($16.95; $5.95 paper), Little Toot doesn't even need a story line to charm the young reader. As a key artist in developing what has come to be known as the California Style of Watercolor, Mr. Gramatky was always partial to a bold style and strong colors, and his illustrations of the little tugboat with the “candy-stick smokestack” often seem to jump off the page.

A free spirit, Little Toot cavorts in the Port of New York and New Jersey, the flag at his masthead dancing in the wind. Later, Mr. Gramatky would acknowledge that “the movement and action in his watercolors” stemmed from what Disney had taught him about animation.

The story has never lost its appeal, for who can resist a tale so openly optimistic? When it begins, Little Toot has been a comparatively insignificant boat with a “gay, small toot-toot-toot,” who dreads the “wild seas” that lie in wait outside the harbor. He had no desire to be tossed around, preferring the “calm water” of the river, gliding, playing thread-the-needle around the piers and cutting figure eights. Such joys diminish when he realizes that his “hard-working” peers regard him with scorn.

He shows them up, however, after “a great idea burst over him” to cease being “a frivolous little tugboat any more.” Not so easy, though, for the others, who think they know him “too well,” shun his company. Sunk in despair, he finds himself adrift in the ocean, where it is his fate to fight a frightful storm; but persistence triumphs, and at book's end, it is Little Toot who -- at the head of the whole tugboat fleet -- leads a great ocean liner to safety.

“My father's life surely changed after that book,” Mrs. Smith said, recalling that the manuscript, however, had weathered an “infamous rejection slip” reading, “Children are not thinking that way this year.”

In time, the book would be translated into many foreign languages, including Japanese, Afrikaans and Thai, and in 1948 it was turned into a Disney movie. The Library of Congress in the 1950's listed Little Toot as “one of the all-time great books in children's literature,” and in 1969 it won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.

In 1946, the Gramatkys, by now including their 3-year-old daughter, Linda, moved to Connecticut, where the author continued to paint the watercolors that brought him more than 70 major awards. In 1950, he was elected to the National Academy of Design.

Little Toot flourished as well. There were to be four additional books about the plucky tugboat; they and the original story along with eight other books that Mr. Gramatky wrote for children have sold more than six million copies.

The idea of a story about the Loch Ness monster had come, Mrs. Gramatky recalled, after she and her husband had taken a trip to Scotland in 1977.

At the time of his death, in 1979, the author would leave behind the almost completed manuscript about Little Toot's adventure with the Loch Ness monster, a book in the making for more than two years. In this tale, Little Toot has traveled to Scotland in search of the “fierce, awful monster” that lives at Loch Ness.

Brave, but fearful and rebuffed by other boats, he finds himself alone at nightfall. The “huge and serpentlike” monster before him turns out be Nessie, a most amiable creature, as playful as Little Toot, and the two friends laughed and “talked all night.”

“We needed a time to grieve,” Mrs. Smith said in talking about her father's death from cancer. She had known, she said, that someday she and her mother would complete Mr. Gramatky's last Little Toot story. She remembers her father's request days before he died that she take dictation because “he had been thinking about his last version of the Loch Ness story and wanted to get it down on paper.”

“But as much as I knew how important this last book was to my dad, I kept putting off finishing it,” she said.

In 1988, she and her mother met with the publisher to discuss the approaching 50th anniversary of “Little Toot.” At that time, she brought along the unfinished manuscript.

“There was no longer any way to hide behind procrastination,” Mrs. Smith said, because Margaret Frith, her editor at Putnam, offered her encouragement, saying “there definitely was a strong book here.”
There was one small problem with the art, however. At a significant point in the manuscript, there was no illustration, but only a preliminary sketch in the journal to show what belonged in that gap, Mrs. Smith said.

“The challenge became a labor of love for me and my mother,” Mrs. Smith said. “We've always had a good relationship, but can you imagine what it means to see a 79-year-old woman, who hadn't illustrated a book for 40 years, go on to tackle this with such courage.”

Although she had contributed art to children's magazines like Jack and Jill, Mrs. Gramatky had turned to volunteer work after the birth of her daughter. “I didn't have to work any more,” she said, “and I wanted to give my free time to working with volunteer groups such as the Girl Scouts and the blood drive.

“My daughter reminds me, though, that I was a sounding board for my husband, and it's true that he often showed me what he was working on. It wasn't that he needed my help. I think he was trying to encourage me to continue with my art, to give me confidence.

“In a way I was dragged into doing the new book, and it was pretty scary at first. But I did it gradually, going over the drawings, developing Hardie's sketches, and it began to come back to me, and the publisher said, 'We have our illustrator.'

Her daughter, she added, also worked with her at choosing the right colors. “She developed into quite a colorist,” Mrs. Gramatky said.

The experience has been so stimulating, Mrs. Gramatky said, that she is “going to try to keep it up.” In the last few years, she has taken art classes in Midland Park and in Glen Rock, NJ. “I'd kept Hardie's palette, his drawing board and the paints that didn't dry up, and I've been going over his art books,” she said.

Since its recent publication, both mother and daughter have given talks to children about Little Toot and the Loch Ness Monster.

Recently Mrs. Gramatky said, “When Linda told me that we were scheduled to talk to the state convention for school librarians in New Brunswick, I wrote down in my calendar, 'Heaven, help me, Hardie.' And he did.”

When Mrs. Smith was combining the different versions of the story, she said, her work was made easier after reading in the journal her father's thoughts about his last book. “I felt,” she said, “a sense of Dad's creative presence being with me, for there in his words I met a person who had some of the same self-doubts I had.”

Her father had written, “Nothing comes easily, especially for those in the creative arts.” He added: “This we surely know. Thank God, though, we meet our problems one by one as we work.”

He also had written in the same journal, Mrs. Smith said, “something that has never left me: 'Remember too, every child must find himself in your book -- the tenderness of Nessie -- the outsider in a strange land -- then the conquering of fear.' “