1960: ONION JOHN by Joseph Krumgold with illustrations by Symeon Shimin
Up until I turned twelve years old the kind of friends I had were what you'd expect.
“Who’s that?”
“That's my friend, Ken, he's an albino, he's real and he does improvised hip-hop."
“How old is he?”
"He's 28!"
“You can't have a 28 year old albino friend.”
“Yes I can!”
-Bob’s Burgers
I never ran away from home as a kid, or really wanted to, but also, where would I have even gone. I had no money and couldn't drive. Everyone I knew lived in Park Ridge, Illinois. Eleven-year-old Tony was not going to hide out in a major art museum like the protagonist of a different Newbery winner; he could have made it to the end of the block and then turned around and come back home. I couldn't even walk to a restaurant and had never ridden my bike past the train tracks. With a little gumption and a willingness to steal cash from my parents, I could have maybe gotten on the Metra line, ridden downtown to Ogilvie Station, and then have had no plan after that. Some of this is just the nature of growing up in suburban sprawl, which does not prepare you very well for running away, but of course the other part of it is that I never felt a need to run away from home, despite that being a not-uncommon trope in children's novels. From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is obviously the most famous example, but Bud, Not Buddy is in there too, and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and Dealing With Dragons, and The Boxcar Children, and Maniac Magee, and to some extent A Series Of Unfortunate Events. Kids are somewhere with some people and they want to get the hell out. Claudia in Frankweiler just does it because she's bored with her parents and desperate for intellectual stimulation; other protagonists are legitimately trying to get themselves out of danger, or find someone they've lost.
The appeal of this a runaway story, to an young reader, seems obvious to me: you're reading stories, you're starting to think independently, you have this story that you're putting into your head that the people you're close to, including the members of your immediate family who would be the people you've spent the most time with by far, may not be putting into their head at the same time that you are. This is an early experience with independence, and seeing a character that reflects your growing independence would be resonant. In a low-stakes scenario, you start to believe that you can also be a cool independent kid and think for yourself and start to develop your own senses of curiosity and initiative and self-confidence. In a medium-stakes scenario, you start to feel more independent enough to seek out more books and more voices to answer your questions, rather than just believing what the first person tells you. In a higher-stakes scenario, you may be in an unsafe situation at home or school, because of who you are, and you realize that you are not going to be at the mercy of other people forever.
I grew up in a loving family (and didn't identify as any group that would be excluded or marginalized) and was never in danger, and although I was extremely pretentious like Claudia, I was not ever at a point where I was ready to run away to a museum, or anywhere else, fun though runaway stories are. As for the weirdest, most convoluted reason why a pre-teen child would want to run away from home, well, we'd have to go to Onion John, the second Newbery medalist by the Newbery medal's first-ever double-dipper, Joseph Krumgold.
The climactic moment, the conflict at the height of Onion John's tension, is when our protagonist, Andy Rusch Jr., decides that his only way forward is to run away from his home in the small town of Serenity. Running away, as Andy sees it, is his only option, since the people of his town refuse to stop rebuilding a repeatedly-burning-down house for the lovable town vagrant.
I probably need to back up here. The town vagrant is Onion John, who is not technically unhoused since he did build himself a little home out of stones on the hill over yonder, but it wasn't really a home so much as it was a lean-to full of five old bathtubs that John had salvaged from the town dump and used for storage. Also, John speaks some sort of weird gibberish language that nobody can understand because he clearly doesn't have his full mental faculties, but Andy wakes up one morning at the beginning of the novel and finds that he can suddenly understand Onion John perfectly so they become best friends. With me so far? Great.
Andy's new friendship with Onion John inspires the town rotary club to get everyone together and build John a new, more real house, one with a stove and plumbing and everything. John is very moved by the gesture, although a little uncomfortable that he won't have his bathtubs with him anymore, and unable to communicate any of this except through Andy.
Anyways, John ends up accidentally burning the house down because he doesn't know how to use a stove, and the rotary club ends up kind of shrugging their shoulders and saying "I guess we'll just build the house again, we've got nothing else going on." But things start getting tense when Andy starts to wonder if the town of Serenity is being too nice to the town weirdo, since they seem to be upending his life and messing with things far more than Onion John actually wants. This turns into an argument between Andy and his dad (Andy Sr.), and Andy Jr. decides that his only sustainable option is to run away from home, convince Onion John to come with him, and spend the rest of his life riding the rails with this guy he's kind of been friends with for three months. Also contributing to this drastic decision is the fact that Andy feels too much pressure from his dad to become an astronaut.
Still with me?
The actual conflict behind the conflict of Onion John is a more conventional father-son tension, best described as a "reverse Varsity Blues" situation in which Andy Sr. had dreams of becoming an engineer but eventually had to drop out of school to raise a family, and puts his expectations on Andy Jr. to get the engineering career he never had, especially in light of the accelerating Space Race:
“‘Twenty-four thousand miles an hour,’ he said that’s how fast the rocket’d go. ‘Think of that.’ When I put my mind to it all I could think was - whoosh. ‘And in two years, Andy, after they land their first focket, they expect to send a human being up there. A man!’ He looked from the paper up to where I was on top of the ladder. ‘Man alive, it’s coming a lot faster than anyone ever expected. If you want to be in on it, Andy, you’d better grow up fast…it’s never going to happen in the hardware business. There’s no future here.’”
That’s the thing: Andy Sr. runs a hardware store, and does a great job doing it,and is well-respected in his community, but he doesn’t think that’s a good enough job for his son. He talks all the time about how his son is going to go to MIT and become an astronaut, and even works on getting Andy Jr. the hookup to a summer job at the radio factory next summer, about which Andy Jr. feels extremely uncomfortable. He does not want his life to be set on a track this early, he’s not grown up and is still, in many ways, just a kid, the kind of kid who spends all of his time with the weird old onion man who lives with his five bathtubs on top of the hill over there. So it’s not just the back-and-forth about what’s best for Onion John that drives Andy to plan his big running away, it’s the back-and-forth about what’s best for Andy. And eventually, Andy Sr. comes clean:
“My father’s voice was quiet. ‘What I think you ought to know about your father is this. He’s nothing but a hardware storekeeper in a small town in New Jersey…he wanted to be an engineer, somewhere else…I don’t have to go into it, the kind of a failure I am. Or was, until you started coming along. And I thought I’d get there yet, up to M.I.T. and out into the world where the big things happen - I thought I’d get there yet through you.’ He looked into his cup. ‘That sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? Using you to make up for how I lost out…the worst, was how I wanted to be sure. How anxious I was to get you started. The hurry I was in. Someone was bound to get run over in the rush. And that’s why I say, now, I think we ought to slow down a bit and wait, take it easy…If you keep up in your studies, all of them, when the time comes you can go whichever way you want. But for a while, forget you’re grown up.”
So, this Runaway Story ends up not being a runaway story; Andy Jr. ends up not running away, his father ends up encouraging him to seek his own way. Onion John is a story about the pressure sons can feel from their fathers when it comes to things like achievement and careers. But also it’s the story of a weird guy who speaks in gibberish and refuses to have a new house built for him - and, eventually, who runs away from town because he’s so weirded out by the local rotary club and wants to burn oak in order to fumigate the evil spirits out of Serenity, NJ. So, yeah, this is a weird one.
Krumgold’s first Newbery medalist was …And Now Miguel, which we’ve already read, and which I actually liked quite a bit. But Miguel arose out of Krumgold’s earlier career as a documentary filmmaker, and in fact was literally adapted out of a real documentary film, for which Krumgold had shacked up with a New Mexico shepherding family for months. Miguel feels very authentic and very grounded in how a child actually thinks - and also, for its time, focused on a type of family and part of the country that not a lot of children’s authors made time for - because the story is very simple and Krumgold spent all of that time talking to that very real child and understanding how he thinks. Onion John is relatively simple on one layer: the father-son relationship, which is well-written but kind of feels like it’s aimed more at an audience of fathers than an audience of sons. And then everything outside of that is bizarre. The world is bigger than you think, and you’re not alone in it: it’s a message that can mean a lot when you’re a kid who just doesn’t want his parents to set his life for him, or when you’re trying to build a house for your friend who’s decades older than you and is still trying to oak-fumigate the town.
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 1941 medalist, Call It Courage by Armstrong Sperry.