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Cheaper
by the Dozen
(1948) describes a family of 12 children growing up in the early
twentieth century. Frank B. Gilbreth Sr., the children’s father, played the part of
a prankster by asking each of his children, in turn, to look for the “birdie” inside
the engine of the family’s new car. While the child waited, the father blew the
car’s horn loudly. Bill, Frank Jr.’s younger brother, impulsively decided to play
the same prank while his father had his head inside the car’s hood after a break-
down. When the horn suddenly sounded, Frank Sr. jumped, striking his head
against the car’s hood and burning his wrist against the engine’s exhaust pipe.
Later, after recovering from the shock of the unexpected prank, he enjoyed telling
others “the story about Bill and the birdie” (15), which demonstrated his son’s
prowess as a prankster.
Pranks and other kinds of children’s folklore emerge in the remarkable auto-
biography
Th
ey Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood
in Poland before the Holocaust
(2007), by Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara
Contexts 127
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. During his early years in the village of Apt, Mayer Kirsh-
enblatt played pranks on girls. One day he and his friends covered themselves in
white wrapping paper from a grocery store and stood on their school’s steps, pre-
tending to be ghosts. Girls ran away from them, shouting “Demons! Demons!”
(265). Kirshenblatt also enjoyed playing a prank practiced by Polish schoolboys
for generations: gluing their teacher’s beard to the table with melted candle wax.
Although children in the village of Apt spent many hours in school during the
1920s and 1930s, they enjoyed a rich and varied set of games. Kirshenblatt ex-
plains, “Mostly, we made our own fun” (307). Boys’ games included
palant
(a game
similar to baseball, played with two sticks and two rocks) and
fusbal
(soccer). Girls
played jacks with neck bones of geese that had been boiled to remove all the flesh.
During Passover, children played nut games similar to games played with marbles.
Among the delights of summertime were fly and snail races. Children recited tra-
ditional rhymes to tease snails out of their shells, including “Snail, snail, show us
your horns. We will give you bread on the floor” (291). They also enjoyed making
toys, including bows, arrows, guns, willow whips, and two kinds of slingshots.
Another intriguing autobiography of a European childhood is
Th
e Wheel of
Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying
(1997) by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, founder
of the contemporary hospice movement. Born a triplet in Switzerland in 1926,
Kübler-Ross shared a room with her sisters Eva and Erika, whose beds, chairs,
and clothes were identical to her own. Although she spent many hours playing
with her sisters, Kübler-Ross wanted to find a way of life that differentiated her
from the rest of her family. Being a sensitive and affectionate child, she did her
best to help others. At school, she energetically protected children tormented by
bullies:
My fists pummeled the backs of the school’s bullies so often that my mother was accus-
tomed to the butcher boy, the town gossip, passing by our house after class and saying,
“Betli will be late today. She’s beating up one of the boys.” My parents never got mad,
since they knew I only protected those who could not defend themselves. (35)
Since Kübler-Ross became a physician who devoted herself to patients struggling
with serious illness, these antibullying incidents foreshadowed her future career.
Other recollections of childhood emphasize imaginative play. The Chilean au-
thor Isabel Allende, born in 1942, lived with her grandparents in Lima, Peru.
Her favorite place was the cellar, where she “used to read by candlelight, dream
of magic castles, dress up like a ghost, invent black masses, build forts out of an
entire series of books that one of [her] uncles wrote about India, and then fall
asleep among the spiders and mice.” The richness of Allende’s solitary play gave
her immense satisfaction. Because the cellar was “a beautiful world where the
imagination knew no limits,” it nurtured her development as a teller and writer
of stories (Rodden 54).
128 Children’s
Folklore
Comparable reflections about mid-twentieth-century childhood in the United
States appear in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “An Idyllic Childhood” (2001) and
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