![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
In passing...
I was surprised to see an obituary for Ernestine Gilbreth Carey today. I doubt anyone else will recognize her name, but she was the author of Cheaper By The Dozen - the book, not the movies.
I have a fondness for that book. You don't see that sort of novel any more. I first read it as a Reader's Digest condensed version when I was staying in a cabin on a lake in Maine. There were hundreds of old Reader's Digests shelved all over the walls of that cabin, and I read like mad. Of course all of them were popular novels from the 1940s through the late 1950s, and most of them are forgotten now. But I remember that Cheaper By The Dozen really put a lump in my throat, several times. It was well-written and very affecting, and it stuck with me. I picked up a complete copy of the book when I ran across it in a used book shop.
It was also interesting to find that much of it was based on fact, something that I discovered several years after I first read it. Although apparently the mother of the family was probably the more capable of the two parents.
Ernestine Carey was 98, by the way. I only hope that she managed to die unaware of the utterly vile Steve Martin remake of the movie based on her book. Maybe she finally saw it, and that was what killed her.
But I hope not.
I have a fondness for that book. You don't see that sort of novel any more. I first read it as a Reader's Digest condensed version when I was staying in a cabin on a lake in Maine. There were hundreds of old Reader's Digests shelved all over the walls of that cabin, and I read like mad. Of course all of them were popular novels from the 1940s through the late 1950s, and most of them are forgotten now. But I remember that Cheaper By The Dozen really put a lump in my throat, several times. It was well-written and very affecting, and it stuck with me. I picked up a complete copy of the book when I ran across it in a used book shop.
It was also interesting to find that much of it was based on fact, something that I discovered several years after I first read it. Although apparently the mother of the family was probably the more capable of the two parents.
Ernestine Carey was 98, by the way. I only hope that she managed to die unaware of the utterly vile Steve Martin remake of the movie based on her book. Maybe she finally saw it, and that was what killed her.
But I hope not.