On August 9, 1899, Pamela Lyndon Goff was born in Queensland, Australia. She grew up to be an actress, and used the stage name “Pamela Lyndon Travers” because her family objected to her acting career.
She was pretty good, though, and joined a traveling Shakespearean acting company in Australia. From there she moved to England, and shortened her stage name to “Pamela Travers.”
Besides acting, she published poems and short stories, and used another variation as her pen name: “P.L. Travers.” That was the name she used for her first book, published in 1934. She was pretty good at writing, too, and you may have heard of the book: Mary Poppins.
After the success of Mary Poppins, Travers concentrated on writing, and published a whole series of Poppins books. The last one is Mary Poppins and the House Next Door, published when she was 87.
Walt Disney started trying to talk Travers into selling him the film rights to Mary Poppins during World War II — at the time Travers was working for the British Ministry of Information and living in New York. She wasn’t easily convinced; it took Disney years of visits. The film version isn’t particularly faithful to the books, and Travers never liked it very much — even though it made her quite wealthy.
The Mary Poppins in the books is a lot crankier than the one in the movie; she’s “stern, vain, and usually cross,” but has the same magical abilities as in the film. Raising children that way would have been of great interest to Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist also born on August 9.
Mary Poppins introduced interesting and unique experiences to the Banks children when they were were, more or less, ready for them. Or at least you could argue she did. That’s pure Piaget, who thought education should be “learner centric,” and teachers should adapt their curricula so that when students learn one thing, it can flow naturally learning something else.
Travers certainly learned a lot over her life (she lived to 98), and one of the best indicators is what happened to the chapter Bad Tuesday in the original Mary Poppins book. In the first version, Mary and the kids use a compass to visit China, Alaska, Africa, and Native Americans. But she described the people there in the standard 1934 western European way — that is to say, she used a lot of stereotypes and language that wouldn’t be acceptable today.
She listed to her critics, though, and updated the chapter in a 1967 edition to change the language and stereotypes. It might have been significant that in between she’d spent time living among the Navajo, Hopi, and Pueblo tribes in the US, and moved to Japan for a while to study Zen Buddhism.
Then in 1981 she revised the chapter again, and took the people out entirely. Mary and the children visited a polar bear, a macaw, a panda, and a dolphin. The original illustrator, Mary Shepard, replaced all the pictures, too.
Having the children visit a bear was right in line with other cultural trends; August 9 is also the anniversary of the introduction in the US of Smokey the Bear in 1944. Or actually, the introduction of Smokey Bear; he didn’t get his middle name (“the”) until the 50s. The Forest Service has explained a number of times over the years that his name Smokey isn’t misspelled; it’s not supposed to be the same as the word “smoky”.
It also wasn’t an accident that Smokey was introduced during WWII; the campaign was partly in response to a Japanese attempt to use forest fires as a weapon. In 1942, Japanese submarines fired incendiary shells around Santa Barbara trying to start fires. A couple of years later they tried the same thing with balloons — they launched 9,000 “fire balloons” from Japan high into the jet stream, hoping they’d reach the US and start forest fires. It actually worked; nearly a thousand of the balloons reached the US. Each “fire balloon” was just a balloon with an incendiary bomb, and one of them exploded and killed a family in Oregon in 1945.
A real live Smokey the Bear joined the campaign when firefighters rescued a black bear cub from a fire in the mountains in New Mexico in 1950. A game warden took care of the cub — he originally named him “Hotfoot Teddy,” but it didn’t take long for him to be called “Smokey.” He eventually moved into the National Zoo in Washington, where he lived for 26 years with Goldie Bear and their “adopted son” (an orphan black bear cub), Little Smokey.
At the peak of his popularity, Smokey was getting 13,000 letters per week, and became the only bear with his own ZIP code. It’s still active: 20252. There were comic books, tv shows, and ads about Smokey, where everybody found out that his normal diet was bluefish and trout, but his favorite treat was peanut butter sandwiches.
It’s not clear whether Smokey ever learned how to make his own sandwiches — but if he’d been reading the Mary Poppins books, he might have gotten some tips from the sixth one, Mary Poppins in the Kitchen. Mary comes to the rescue when the family cook has to leave unexpectedly, and the children (and readers) learn how to cook, following recipes helpfully included in the book. According to some critics, the recipes aren’t quite as magical as the rest of Mary’s exploits, but they include at least one cake, a kind of pudding, and a meal of the day for a week or two. But remember, they’re still in England, so the meals are things like roast beef and shepherd’s pie. Not a peanut butter sandwich to be found.
