The world opens up for the Gramatkys

After I went off to Bates College in 1960, my parents began to travel. Their first trip was to Greece, Italy, France, Amsterdam and London, and they were bitten by "the bug." There would be a pattern to their trips. For two years before a trip, they would read up on what they might want to see, and for two years after a trip they would read everything they could on the delights they had experienced.

Not only did my parents travel during their last years together, but so did Little Toot. Twenty-five years after the original book was published (1964), Hardie came out with a sequel. First, Little Toot visited the Thames River, then the Grand Canal, the Mississippi, the Golden Gate Bridge and Loch Ness over the next few years. All in all, over seven million copies of my father's books have been sold in many languages: Thai, Japanese, Danish, Afrikaans and Dutch are some of them. Walt Disney made an animated movie of Little Toot as part of "Melody Time" in 1948 (and the video is still being sold almost sixty years later even though Dad never got any royalties), and the tugboat was a float in the Pasadena Tournament of Roses in 1949. When a 1958 New York Times crossword puzzle asked for an answer to the definition "Tugboat in Gramatky tale for children," my father was on Cloud Nine.

In 1966, Hardie was one of the first artist-correspondents going to Viet Nam for the U.S. Air Force. The paintings he did on that trip hang in the Pentagon and the Air Force Academy. He traveled with his friend Wally Richards, who described one detail of the trip:

"We flew home from Tokyo on a hospital plane, a giant plane loaded with boys twelve hours from the battlefield, four tiers deep on stretchers. Hardie was never too tired to go from bunk to bunk, comforting and talking with the men, some of whom had been put aboard less than half an hour after having been picked up on the battlefield. He spent the whole night from Tokyo to Travis Base walking around and talking with them. He had a personal sweetness as great as his talent." [These comments come from a eulogy at Hardie’s memorial service at Green’s Farms Congregational Church in Westport, CT, quoted by Ruth Lampland Ross in the Bridgeport Post, May 7, 1979.]