Girl Sleuth (4 page)

“I
GREW UP
in a story-book house,” Harriet Stratemeyer Adams rhapsodized over and over again in her later years. “My earliest recollection of my father was when he was playing with my sister and me—outdoors, indoors; and we had continuous stories—not just bedtime stories, but all day long . . . my recollection of him as a child has more to do I think with his imagination than anything.” Edward, just entering the prime of his writing career when she was a small child, often tried out new story lines on Harriet and her sister, Edna, two and a half years her junior, before putting them down on paper. The favorite family game was another version of this; Edward would gather his offspring and spin an instant story around whatever topic they picked for him. He excelled at it, delighting his daughters. At the age of eighty-eight, Harriet was still bragging to reporters: “I was fortunate to have a father who could tell an original story at a moment's notice.”

Much like his books, Edward's stories for his daughters often took the form of serials in which the same characters appeared night after night. Harriet's personal favorite characters were two fops named Mr. Bobalincoln and Mr. Whistler, whom Edward must have created for his daughters' pleasure alone as they never appeared in print and he was too shy to invite the neighborhood children in for a listen. He did, however, accept other devotions from the local boys who frequently dropped by to ask him questions about his characters' progress and when his next book would be out. Though he abhorred any kind of organized lecturing, he was always interested in the boys' reactions to his work and considered them far and away his best critics. “I am afraid I shall have to decline your invitation to address your boys' department,” he wrote at one point to the head of the Newark YWCA. “I am no public speaker, and have always declined to inflict myself on the public in that way. I am sorry that your committee of boys did not call upon me, for I am always glad to meet the boys, even though I do not feel equal to addressing them publicly. All my ‘talking,' so to speak, is done through the medium of my books.” Even when newspapers and librarians disparaged his writing, he was content in the knowledge that the only constituency he cared about admired his work ardently and trusted him to be their guide. As he once implored a disagreeable editor: “Don't take the heart out of a fellow when he is straining every nerve to the utmost to make every boy in these United States his warm friend.”

The Newark neighborhood of Roseville, where the Stratemeyers lived, was an ideal place for him to come into contact with his fans, for it was filled with children. Boys could be found “on the block” at all times of day, playing baseball and marbles. There was no such thing as a playground, nor any need for one, as the area was still covered by “an endless stretch of vacant lots that seemed to the boyish eye as limitless as the Argentine pampas or the western prairies.” Though it was officially a part of the city of Newark, Roseville was fast becoming a tranquil antidote to the crowded, roaring downtown. The city had been purchased by New England Pilgrims from the Hackensack Indians in 1667, for the price of about $700, though no money had exchanged hands. The transaction read like nothing so much as a thrilling scene in a Stratemeyer story, payment having been made in the form of “fifty double hands of powder, one hundred bars of lead, twenty axes, twenty coats, ten guns, twenty pistols, ten kettles, ten swords, four blankets, four barrels of beer, ten pairs of breeches, fifty knives, twenty hoes, eight hundred and fifty fathoms of wampum, twenty ankers of liquors and ten troopers coats.”

Since its Indian days, Newark had been transformed into the centerpiece of New Jersey industry. The downtown buzzed with factories that made plastic and forged iron, as well as numerous insurance companies, railroad depots, and thousands of immigrants from Germany, Poland, and Italy, among other places. By 1897, when Harriet was five years old, its population was roughly a quarter million people. But Roseville, just a few miles from the center of town, still showed signs of its recent transformation from farmland, and on its edges working farms remained. “Streets had been cut through lots that still showed ridges where the plow had tilled. Glacial boulders were commonplace. Houses were . . . few [and] swamps were at hand for exploration.”

In spite of this, Roseville was not without a certain flair. One contemporary of Harriet's, recalling the halcyon days of his youth, described how growing up there, one could count “the pleasure of city, suburbs, and country in his common experiences. He grew up with most of the sophistication of the city lad, but he knew cows, horses, farming and the freedom that alone can be found where no concentrated population has safeguarded itself with restrictions.” The neighborhood also boasted excellent schools. Roseville was a well-off, white, God-fearing community, a world apart from the working-class, predominantly foreign neighborhoods in other parts of the city.

For upper-class girls like Harriet and Edna—Edward's earnings and investments along with Lenna's private income set the family well above the average—playing in back lots and in the street was less acceptable than it was for the boys they knew. The outdoor pursuits open to girls fell more along the lines of hopscotch, hide-and-seek, hoops, and jacks. Roller-skating was popular, too, though the long skirts in fashion made it treacherous. Girls were allowed outside by themselves, but not after dark and only with at least a bit more supervision than their brothers. Games and recreation were also critical vehicles for imbuing girls with the idea that they were different from boys. They were given dolls by the score in order to teach them how to be mothers, and one child-rearing book published in 1905, when Harriet was thirteen years old, suggested that mothers throw tea parties with their daughters “so they could ‘acquire niceties of speech and manner.'” As historian Victoria Bissell Brown notes, girls of the era “adopted the assumption that women were—or should be—more moral, less materialistic, more selfless, and less aggressive than men . . . Rare was the girl who emerged from this era's upbringing with a secure sense of her own independence or an unbridled eagerness to pursue her own interests.”

Nonetheless, Harriet, or Hattie as she was known, was as much of a tomboy as the times and her Victorian-era parents permitted. This was acceptable, but only up to a certain point—as one girl put it in a 1902 interview, “After the age of thirteen, a lady should not climb trees unless to get away from a dog.” Dark-haired, with a solid build and a long face, Hattie claimed to be “the best one-handed fence vaulter” in the neighborhood in spite of the high collars, dark stockings, and dresses she wore. Though she was not often found trading books or marbles over fences with neighborhood boys, Harriet couldn't help but come into contact with the opposite sex on a regular basis. A certain amount of interaction with boys was also encouraged, as it provided “the inculcation of respect for and interest in that which was masculine.” Among the boys she was acquainted with was a nearby neighbor, Russell Vroom Adams, whose family kept chickens in the backyard. The Stratemeyers bought both chickens and eggs from him, and, as Harriet recalled, “my sister and I used to tease him unmercifully.” These encounters, mean-spirited though they may have been, somehow formed the beginning of the solid foundation on which Harriet's marriage to Russell in 1915 would be built.

The mockery that poor young Russell endured was also a sign of the willful streak Hattie developed early on. It flared up in situations when she felt she was being treated unfairly, beginning when she was still a schoolgirl. Her parents, perhaps thinking that as the eldest she could carry on the family name as her middle name after she married, had not given her a middle name at birth. But Harriet would have none of it. When her grandmother gave her the gift of a locket with her initials engraved on it, the intertwined “H” and “S” looked to her like a dollar sign, which she found embarrassing. Determined to change her lot in life, she took Margaret as her middle name and informed her friends that they were to address all mail to her, from then on, as Harriet Margaret Stratemeyer. But she had neglected to tell her father, and he discovered her plan, presumably when one such-addressed letter arrived at the Stratemeyer home. The result was a cutting lecture on the all-important subject of taking pride in her given name, a lesson that Harriet remembered as long as she lived.

She repeated the story of her youthful digression so often it became part of her lore, much as Edward's story about the publication of “Victor Horton's Idea” had become part of his. A mini-drama composed of one part determination and one part bowing to tradition, it was Harriet, through and through. On her eighty-third birthday, the staff of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which she had been running for forty-five years by then, wrote a song to commemorate the events of her life. It included these lyrics, to be sung to the tune of “Mary, Mary,” concerning the infamous incident: “Born without a middle name, / we found out you took one secretly! / For it was Margaret, Margaret—/ That's the name I chose for me. I could have chosen Sue or Mary Lou / or Marjorie / But it was Margaret, Margaret—/ That's the name I tried to claim. / But Daddy said, ‘No dice. / That's just not nice.'”

Some of Harriet's boisterousness was tempered by Lenna's ever-present medical problems, which often dominated the family's lives and necessitated quiet in the house. So, as one might expect of any child expected to avoid creating a disturbance, not to mention the child of a storybook writer, Harriet spent a great deal of time reading. She was enamored in particular of Dickens, whose humor she admired along with his clever uses of the coincidence as a plot twist, and of
Grimm's Fairy Tales.
To a sheltered, privileged child, these stories offered at least secondhand experience of the kind of challenges and thrills she did not encounter in her own world. Harriet's was a gentle, innocent childhood, but in her adult life she reflected that she had not always been happy to be so protected. She felt a certain kinship to Nancy Drew, she thought, because the girl detective was “what I would have liked to have been at her age.” (Of course, as Nancy Drew, Harriet would have only had to give up the restrictions on her freedom, not money, nice clothes, a car, or a devoted relationship with her father.) On one occasion, when a reporter was present, she couldn't help revealing her regret about the restraints put on her by society and family in her childhood and adolescence. “A couple of hours with the spritely, curly-haired author . . . and a visitor realizes that Nancy Drew leads the kind of life that Adams would like to have lived instead of the more traditional early twentieth-century upper-middle-class life that was her lot. ‘Oh I would have loved to be a teenage detective and solved all mysteries,' Adams says wistfully.”

Still, Harriet developed into a bright, headstrong girl. She attended the public school in Roseville, where she did well but had a tendency to jump to conclusions. One day in second grade, her teacher asked the class if anyone knew what a furlough was. Harriet raised her hand immediately, sure she knew the answer. “A donkey,” she said. With a look of consternation, her teacher asked why she thought this was the right answer. Harriet replied: “I saw a picture of a soldier riding through the woods. Under it was the title ‘Jim going home on a furlough.'”

W
HILE HIS DAUGHTERS
were busy growing up, Edward, too, was maturing. In the years following Harriet's birth, he wrote at a rate that seems almost unimaginable. Between May of 1892 and November of 1893, he produced forty-two dime novels, and that same year he published his first book under his own name, with an apposite subtitle, to say the least.
Richard Dare's Venture; or,
Striking Out for Himself
was originally a serial that had appeared in
Argosy.
A classic tale of a boy who makes good by using his wits and working hard, the book was beloved from its first appearance, leading Stratemeyer to thank his audience in a subsequent edition: “The author had hoped that it would receive some notice; but he was hardly prepared for the warm reception which readers and critics alike all over the country accorded it. For this enthusiasm he is profoundly grateful. The street scenes in New York have been particularly commended; the author would add that these are not fictitious, but are taken from life.”