1941: CALL IT COURAGE by Armstrong Sperry
It happened many years ago, before the traders and missionaries first came into the South Seas, while the Polynesians were still great in numbers and fierce of heart.
One thing I am jealous that my wife has gotten to do in her career teaching middle school Language Arts is that she's gotten to go to conferences for stuff like the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and see all of my children's literature heroes in person. In addition to the teachers and pedagogy academics who give keynotes at the conference, you can always count on a talk from, say, Judy Blume or Christopher Paul Curtis, whom she’s seen give talks, and you can run into more authors if you’re lucky.
The thing about children’s book authors, particularly top-tier ones that went on to win the Newbery, is that they tend to have similar backgrounds, especially professional backgrounds. Many of them - Beverly Cleary, Amy Schlitz, E.L. Konigsburg, Elizabeth George Speare, Katherine Paterson, Sharon Creech - were children’s librarians or teachers, some of them - Katherine Applegate, Jerry Craft, Meg Medina - worked in publishing and got exposure to the world of writing there, and some of them - Jean Craighead George, Joseph Krumgold - started out in nonfiction journalism before trying their hand at fiction. If you dig up photographs of them, they all look like people who spend a lot of time reading and writing, who went to small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast to get BAs in English, and also almost all of the Newbery medalists were white and middle-class until like 2000. There are a lot of tweed jackets visible in those headshots, is what I'm saying. Over the past twenty years, the medalist roster became more diverse in many ways: there’s certainly more racial and ethnic diversity, authors are getting recognized earlier in their careers, and these writers come from different backgrounds. Christopher Paul Curtis was an auto worker. Jack Gantos did time for dealing drugs. And there’s one legendary children’s author, now deceased, that people like my wife would run into at these conferences and always be surprised by, because he did not look like someone who grew up middle class and spent his spare time reading books in a high-backed leather armchair, because at every conference, he dressed like this:
This perpetually be-overalled mountain man holding the axe in the photo above was Gary Paulsen, who never won a Newbery but was a finalist three times, including for his most famous novel, 1986’s Hatchet, a short, sparse tale about a boy who survives a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness and has to survive on his own armed with only the title tool. This is what most of Gary Paulsen’s novels are about: survival in the middle of nowhere. I do not know if he had a library with high-backed leather chairs at his home, but I do know that he had a 40-acre property in the Alaskan wilderness where he raised sled dogs because he regularly competed in the Iditarod, until his doctor told him to stop because of heart problems, after which Paulsen took up “sailing the Pacific” as an alternative hobby before saying “the hell with it” and going back to the Iditarod again, for which he is listed as a participant as late as 2006, when he was 67 years old. Growing up with two parents suffering from alcoholism, Paulsen basically raised himself in his teen years - including teaching himself to hunt his own food - and “survival at any cost” was a recurring theme across much of his fiction for children.
What I’m saying is that Paulsen stands out among famous children’s lit authors; he came from a very different place than the usual school libraries and publishing companies. And he was, perhaps, the best at the twentieth-century survival narrative, which we’ve looked at before with O’Dell’s Island Of The Blue Dolphins. You have a main character, they’re young, they’re alone, they’re in a strange place, they have no idea how they’re going to stay alive, they have to find a way to do it. There are also stylistic hallmarks of this genre: specifically, these books tend to be pretty spare, and pretty quick, because of everything you leave out when you only have one character who has to be singularly focused on one thing in order to stay alive, like dialogue and interpersonal conflict. The loner in Alaska who hunted his own food as a teenager to survive was the best man possible to write these stories. Which brings us to Call It Courage.
Call It Courage is a short - less than 100 pages including illustrations - survival narrative about a young Polynesian boy alone on a Pacific island. It is not, definitely not and not even close, a story about the Civil War, which I definitely thought it was until I started reading it and realized I had confused it with Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge Of Courage. In an earlier entry on a different survival narrative, we had discussed Scott O’Dell and whether he - like most Newbery winners up to that point, a college-educated white history buff, who had come to children’s literature from a career as a newspaper columnist - is really the guy we’d look to today to tell the survival story of a young indigenous girl in the Pacific Ocean. As we had discussed, O’Dell’s Island Of The Blue Dolphins was actually very progressive for his time, and there’s a lot about the novel that’s still progressive today, but it’s still a book that’s going to have a hard time finding its way onto school curricula today when it’s easier to find stories about indigenous people written by actual indigenous authors.
Call It Courage, written twenty years before Dolphins, was also set in the Pacific and heavily featured religious and social customs of the Polynesians, as protagonist Mafatu is shamed by the rest of his village for being cowardly, and decides to build his own canoe, sail it to another island by himself, kill a boar, and then bring the dead boar back to prove his courage. Along the way, he is tossed on the waves of the ocean - Mafatu believes he is being tormented by the sea god Moana - and narrowly escapes a band of savage cannibals. Roy Disney adapted the book into a 1973 television film1, shot the film on Bora Bora, and got Don Ho to narrate it. The author and illustrator of Call It Courage, Armstrong Sperry, wrote many books about Polynesian lads going on adventures, and spent part of his early career working on anthropological voyages in the 1920s. He, again, is not the guy we would immediately look to today to tell stories about this part of the world, but he did his research, he came by his love for the Pacific honestly, and after a childhood of reading Robert Louis Stevenson and similar authors, wrote his own versions of the stories he loved. I don’t know if this former Pacific voyager looked as grizzled as Gary Paulsen, but I just hope that when I pull up a photo of him, he doesn’t look like the whitest, author-iest author who has ever been photographed:
Are you serious! That’s what he looks like! Are you kidding me! He literally wore a tweed jacket for his headshot in the Newbery press release! I was trying to give this guy every possible benefit of the doubt! What, when he was sailing to Christmas Island or whatever, did he bust out the tweed jacket then too, or did he just settle on a popped-collar polo and a pair of top siders?
Here’s the thing: the Sperry of Sperry Top Siders (named “Brand of the Year 2009” by Footwear News) is Armstrong Sperry’s brother. His family created the original boat shoes for rich New England sailing pricks! The whitest non-Vans shoes imaginable! Top Siders are so white that they got name-checked in this 2006 viral ad video from Smirnoff, advertising their "Raw Tea" malt beverage and featuring white Cape Codders rapping!
So, let's talk about 2006 for a minute: the five years after 9/11 were basically the worst stretch in the history of American comedy, as nobody knew what was okay to laugh at and we tried literally everything and then somehow landed on "white people rapping." Malibu's Most Wanted. "Lazy Sunday"2. Will Smith as a hip-hop fish in the Dreamworks film Shark Tale. Bringing Down The House, which made eight figures at the box office and had Steve Martin looking like this:
Smirnoff's "Tea Partay" campaign was notable not only for being one of the last crests of this wave, but for being one of the first hits in a new type of media: I heard about Tea Partay because a friend emailed me a link to a new website called YouTube, and they had gotten that link from another friend in turn3. This was an early viral video, which as a concept had existed before YouTube, but the first actual viral video on YouTube was actually SNL's "Lazy Sunday", which hit the site on maybe the third day that YouTube was available to the public, was so successful that it literally got a live television show to make a major shift to pre-recorded material for the first time in forty years, and was a better-executed version of the "look at these white people rapping" gag.
"Tea Partay" got a late-2022 remembrance on some sort of website called Vinepair, which appears to be mostly blog posts about drinking. But this piece is good:
"When Smirnoff went looking for a splashy idea to launch its new Raw Tea flavored malt beverage line in 2006, it makes sense that its ad agency, Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), pitched an internet video. But as Smirnoff and BBH quickly learned, YouTube’s rising popularity was a double-edged sword: It made it easier to host your videos online, but much harder to stop other people from hosting your videos online, too. “[W]e wanted to control the distribution, but it somehow leaked out onto YouTube,” the video’s creator, Kevin Roddy, told the Ivy Style blog in a 2010 interview. “Somebody posted it, and to this day I don’t know who it was, and it just exploded.” This was the infancy of viral marketing, with all the unsophisticated execution to prove it. Smirnoff was only rolling out Raw Tea in the Northeast market, but YouTube was everywhere; retailers across the country scrambled to line up product to meet demand, but to no avail. The success of “Tea Partay” came as such a surprise to Smirnoff and BBH New York, in fact, that the corresponding website, TeaPartay.com, wasn’t even live when the video started taking off. It was a simpler time, man…
[All our dumb millennial asses were consuming] media that mapped the vibrant, ascendant, and mostly Black aesthetics of hip-hop onto gawkish stereotypes of middle-class, suburban, white America. By the time Raw Tea rolled around in 2006, the dynamic was primed for commercial purposes. The irony of Sack Lodge lookalikes (“Wedding Crashers” came out the year prior) rapping about East Coast resort towns while women in pastels and pearls danced in gawkish approximation of actual video vixens was an instant hit. “It hit a million people in three or four days, which was massive at the time,” Roddy told Ivy Style. The fact that the Smirnoff spot was directed by Julien Christian Lutz, who had already cut non-spoofs for G-Unit and would go on to do videos for Kanye West, Mobb Deep, and Nicki Minaj, made “Tea Partay” look and feel even more like the genuine article in the mid-aughts."
But even more telling is the 2019 interview with the ad man who worked on the campaign, which ran on some other website called “Ivy Style”:
“Because Raw Tea was tea and alcohol, he got the idea to use those two juxtaposed elements and use two other ones. So tea can be the Nantucket world, for lack of a better term, and alcohol can be this urban world. So that’s how the idea came to him…The guy who wrote it is named Matt Ian. He grew up in Greenwich, CT, but if you asked him, you would never guess in a million years that’s where he’s from. He’s tattooed, has long greasy hair, dresses like a slob — but he grew up surrounded by all of this. In fact, the guy who invented Top-Siders lived just a few houses away.”
What! Are you kidding me! I was going to make a joke at the end of this essay about Armstrong Sperry being directly responsible for the Tea Partay campaign, but he kind of is. Sperry’s family lived down the street from the guy who literally wrote the rap song to marry “tea can be the Nantucket world” with “alcohol can be this urban world”, which is what marketing turds say instead of “what if a white person did a black thing?”
Armstrong Sperry didn’t do a bad job with Call It Courage: he tells his story, keeps it short, the illustrations are nice. He’s not who I would turn to to tell this story today, it’s easier in this era to find people who are closer to stories like these. But his family inadvertently inspired a different saga, one about the future of communication in a new era, one about an advertisement that commented on an increasingly fragmentary and self-consuming culture, and one in which thots draped in pearls and tennis sweaters grinded their asses on the lacrosse star.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1982 medalist, A Visit To William Blake’s Inn: Poems For Innocent And Experienced Travelers by Nancy Willard.
Of course, many Newbery winners have been adapted into films, but the Disney company, and sometimes Walt Disney personally, took a special interest in many of them. Walt produced the film adaptation of Johnny Tremain in the fifties; more recently, Disney+ premiered the Bryan Cranston-starring adaptation of The One And Only Ivan, before eventually deleting it off of the streaming service to save money on taxes.
Which is easily the best-executed entry in this genre.
And we all knew each other because we played trombone in the marching band.