Harold's Purple Crayon

      A common question that comes up from time to time, especially in conversations with children is “Who was your favorite teacher?” Well, my favorite teacher was my grade school librarian. I can remember her name, but I'm not sure of the correct spelling – she was Miss Rubright. She was young, tall, brunette – stately looking, is how I would describe my memory of Miss Rubright now. I did not get the impression she was a spinster, because she seemed so young, I guess, but I did feel like she was alone at the school – as if she was submerged in the book world rather than the social swirl of the Faculty Lounge which was just past the door across the hall.

     The thing I remember most about Miss Rubright is that after we checked in books and looked for more books to check out, she would read to us. And the one thing I specifically remember Miss Rubright reading to us, probably in my younger grades, was Harold's Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson. I think the message I got from Miss Rubright's example was that it is okay to take the time to sit and read – to go on adventures in a book, to take the time to share these adventures with other children, to share one's love of reading with others. Classrooms were always one extreme or the other – hectic or boring, not being challenged or doing every single blasted thing wrong. But in a library, you and your purple crayon can go anywhere, do anything, unconditionally – and it was Miss Rubright who showed us that.

     My Mom told me once that she asked her brother not that long ago, my Uncle Jim, who his favorite teacher was. He mentioned his third grade teacher – the only one he remembered, and he remembered her because when the students arrived for school every morning, instead of having busy work for the kids to do, the teacher sat at her desk and read out loud – the students would come in and sit down and be quiet because they did not want to miss what was next in the book the teacher was reading! Mom said she had the same teacher – and she was her favorite also for the same reason.

     These days, whenever I am invited to a baby shower, the gift I bring is invariably Harold's Purple Crayon. And in 2009, when I found out that Mike and I would be traveling to Buffalo to sight-see and visit relatives, I contacted my old grade school and asked if I could read to the kindergarten classes? The librarian, who was fresh out of the University of Buffalo, said “of course.” 

     As I sat there in front of the kindergartners of 2009, I told them that I went to that school when it first opened fifty years earlier (founded in 1959), and my librarian, Miss Rubright, read Harold's Purple Crayon to the us. And I wanted to read the same book to them that day to make it something special for all of us. And then I asked them to promise that at least one of them will return to the school in fifty years, during the school's 100^th year, and read Harold's Purple Crayon to the kindergartners. They looked at me like I was crazy – but that's okay – may be one of them will remember, and it could happen!

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