MARY DICKERSON DONAHEY

Almost Royal Historian of Oz

by Anil Tambwekar

Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 64, no. 1 (Spring 2020), pgs. 19–22

Citations

Chicago 17th ed.:

Tambwekar, Anil. “Mary Dickerson Donahey: Almost Royal Historian of Oz.” Baum Bugle 64, no. 1 (2020): 19–22.

MLA 9th ed.:

Tambwekar, Anil. “Mary Dickerson Donahey: Almost Royal Historian of Oz.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 64, no. 1, 2020, pp. 19–22.

(Note: In print, this article was supplemented with photographs and illustrations that have not been reproduced here. However, typographical errors have been left in place to accurately reflect the printed version.)

 

In his afterword to the 1990 reprint of The Magical Mimics of Oz, former Baum Bugle editor Michael Gessel brings up an intriguing possibility. Before Jack Snow was hired to continue the series, Reilly & Lee considered a writer named Mary Dickerson Donahey.[1] Always hungry to learn about Ozzy authors, I naturally wanted to know more. What made Donahey uniquely qualified to take over the Oz series? What talents could have made her the Royal Historian of Oz?

Gessel’s source was a conversation with founding Oz Club member Fred M. Meyer, who heard it from the former president of Reilly & Lee, Frank J. O’Donnell. A second source surfaced after he wrote his afterword: a 1949 letter written to Snow by Louis Ellsworth Laflin, Jr. Laflin, a college lecturer and playwright, told Snow:

. . .At any rate, when no more Oz books appeared, after the ‘Mimics,’ I feared that you had become discouraged, or indisposed, or perhaps had ceased to exist,  and so I went to see Mr. Frank O’Donnell, armed with a letter from Mrs. William Donahey.  Mary Dickerson Donahey had been asked to write Oz books, some years ago, but had turned it down because she felt that the research involved (in becoming familiar with the many many characters) was too great. . . .[2]

This is curious, as the phrase “some years ago” makes it sound like it might have been longer than the six years since Neill’s death in 1943. Meyer had specifically mentioned her as a successor to Neill, but could she have been offered the series at an earlier date? To form a theory, it’s worth taking a deeper look at her work and career. While Donahey also wrote a number of realistic juveniles for older readers and some work for adults, it’s likely Reilly& Lee would have been primarily looking at her children’s fantasies when considering her as their new Oz author.

Born Mary Augusta Dickerson in 1876, she—like Ruth Plumly Thompson—first gained prominence doing newspaper work. Starting in the late 1890s, she wrote for a variety of papers and magazines until she landed a full-time job writing for the children’s pages: first, at the New York Journal and then, later, at the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio. For Baum Bugle readers, this era is mainly notable for one reason: while at the Plain Dealer, she met and married one of the paper’s cartoonists, William Donahey, changing her own name to Mary Dickerson Donahey.[3] William was not widely known when they married in 1905, but in 1914 he rose to fame after creating “The Teenie Weenies,” a cartoon about a group of elfin people only two-inches tall who live beneath a rose bush.[4] “The Teenie Weenies” quickly grew popular enough to spin off into licensing deals and, more importantly, a book series for Reilly & Britton.[5] His debut novel for the firm, The Teenie Weenies, came out in 1916, shortly before the death of L. Frank Baum. Reilly & Lee’s follow-up, Adventures of the Teenie Weenies, was published in 1920, the same year as Baum’s final book, Glinda of Oz.

By this point, Mary Dickerson Donahey had also built a solid name for herself as a children’s author. The beginning of her first novel, The Wonderful Wishes of Jacky and Jean (1905), is reminiscent of Baum’s Twinkle Tales series from the same year. Just as in “Mr. Woodchuck,” Baum encourages kindness to animals by having Twinkle successfully convince her father to retire his traps, the release of a fairy prince in the form of a trapped sparrow starts The Wonderful Wishes of Jacky and Jean. Once released, however, the sparrow and the adventures derived from the wishes he grants more closely resemble the Demon of Electricity from Baum’s The Master Key (1901); Donahey’s mermaids and pirates stand in for Baum’s rocs and buccaneers.[6]

The theme of kindness to animals is also a major plot point in Down Spider Web Lane (1909). Baum’s Tin Woodman takes care not to step on ants in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)[7], and denies Ojo‘s quest in The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913) because it would cause pain to a butterfly.[8] Similarly, the fact that Donahey’s Davy has never hurt an insect allows him to speak to the inhabitants of Spider Web Lane and see their magical hidden world. The book climaxes with Davy fighting to save the Lane from being devoured by the invading Major-General Toad, but when the boy hears the spiteful rose-bug Roxy conspiring against him, he throws her down the toad’s throat in anger and breaks the enchantment that brought him to the Lane: “It seemed to Davy that he could feel a little hard lump growing in his heart. There was a singing in his ears, a mist before his eyes. The little bug voices grew further and further away.”[9]  While he loses his magic vision, he keeps his kindness, taking the now ordinary-looking toad away as a pet so his old friends will no longer live in fear.

Donahey also shared Baum’s interest in modernizing fairy tales. In 1914’s The Magical House of Zur, the fairy Zur hides his wings under modern suits and runs a business office to promote fairies out of his magical house:

He made the fairies stop dressing in rose leaves and trains of morning mist and other impractical old-fashioned things like that…Zur’s gone into the world and learned how to teach children and grown-ups. How to do business in a real business way. He’s put in all the modern improvements, and he’s learned to advertise![10]

A comment from one of the office fairies indicates that Zur can use his powers to get fairy plays written. “Who’s responsible for ‘Peter Pan,’ do you think? And ‘The Blue Bird’ and lots more? Why, Zur! He put the notions into the heads of the men who wrote them. ”[11]  This is very similar to Popopo and his fellow knooks using their powers to change fashion trends in Baum’s “The Enchanted Types”:

. . .There was not a publication in the last that had not a “new fashion note” in its pages. Sometimes Popopo enchanted the types, so that whoever read the print would only see what the knook wished them to. Sometimes he called upon the busy editors and befuddled their brains until they wrote exactly that they wanted him to.[12]

Donahey and Baum were actually labelmates for a brief period of time. In 1908, Edward Stern & Co. released both Donahey’s The Castle of Grumpy Grouch and Baum’s pseudonymous adult novel The Last Egyptian. However, much of Donahey’s book more closely resembles Ruth Plumly Thompson’s work. In The Castle of Grumpy Grouch, an entire kingdom is actively affected by one little girl’s moods This would be fertile ground for Thompson in stories  such as “The Story of the First Brown-Haired Princess” or “The Princess Who Could Not Dance” (both 1916) where similar kingdoms are also thrown entirely into disarray by the foibles of a young girl. On the other hand, Grumpy Grouch’s ambivalence to the increasing industrialization Floria witnesses when she is forced to leave her kingdom and venture out into the “everyday world” may demonstrate a greater debt to Baum. At the beginning of The Enchanted Island of Yew (1903), he writes:

In the old days, when the world was young, there were no automobiles nor flying-machines to make one wonder; nor were there railway trains, nor telephones, nor mechanical inventions of any sort to keep people keyed up to a high pitch of excitement. Men and women lived simply and quietly. They were Nature’s children, and breathed fresh air into their lungs instead of smoke and coal gas; and tramped through green meadows and deep forests instead of riding in street cars; and went to bed when it grew dark and rose with the sun–which is vastly different from the present custom.[13]

Compare that with Dickerson’s descriptions of the “everyday world”:

. . .She saw the most wonderful things—carriages without horses, big black things which rushed along sending out great clouds of smoke, and dragged other long narrow things, full of windows, behind them. Strange boats upon the rivers, strange noises from the streets, and as the dark came on, strange and very wonderful lights within the houses, and shining from tall poles outside.[14]

And:

A dreadful shrieking had come from the valley. Every big black building there—the buildings with the chimneys—seemed to be alive and shrieking with pain…All that day they traveled along the little narrow path, and every hour the cities beneath them grew bigger and nosier, and the great black mountain of smoke drew nearer.[15]

The eponymous Grumpy Grouch is at home there as he needs the smoke and black clouds to build his castle, but it is a relief to the reader when Floria leaves this place to return to her warm and comfortable fairyland.

All told, Donahey released seven full-length juvenile fantasies and a collection of short stories by the time of Baum’s death in 1919; her husband had just signed on as an author with Reilly & Lee. Could Laflin’s letter mean Donahey was considered in lieu of Thompson? While it’s only speculation, in 1921–the year Thompson made her uncredited debut as Royal Historian with “The Royal Book of Oz”–Mary also made her first entrance on the Reilly & Lee stage, writing the introduction “A Little History of the Mother Goose Rhymes” for the compilation The Children’s Mother Goose (reprinted later the same year as The Teenie Weenie Man’s Mother Goose), illustrated by William.

Two years later, Donahey did finally author a full work for the company. However, in a strange twist, it wasn’t a children’s fantasy or any kind of fiction – it was a cookbook. Reilly & Lee had landed a major success in 1918 with a book called Diet and Health with Key to the Calories by Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters, an early advocate of calorie counting as diet technique, and Donahey’s The Calorie Cookbook (1923) was created as a companion to Peter’s work. It was described on the title page as “a bright, interesting and valuable Cook Book with economical recipes giving value of foods in Calories and naming food rich in Vitamins,” with “Menus for Reducing–for Upbuilding–for Maintenance.” Each recipe clearly lists the exact calories for every ingredient.[16]

There seems to have been a major shift during this time. When her next fantasy novel, Peter and Prue, came out in 1924, it had only been a year since The Calorie Cookbook. Yet it had been eight years  since her last fantasy novel, 1916’s The Prince Without a Country. While fantastic in its premise of a young prince journeying with magical guides to save his kingdom from a mysterious spell–shades of Thompson’s Kabumpo in Oz (1922) or Grampa in Oz (1924) –the book spends most of its pages on more ordinary activities, with the prince weeding yards and selling newspapers to learn the values his country needs to survive.[17] Some of Donahey’s earlier works were rereleased superficially with new titles around this time–1905’s The Wonderful Wishes of Jacky and Jean as The Talking Bird and Wonderful Wishes of Jacky and Jean in 1920, and 1915’s Tales to Be Told to Children as Best Tales for Children in 1924–but Donahey transitioned her new output completely to realistic work. Peter and Prue turned out to be her final work in the fantasy genre.

This is a shame; Peter and Prue is really a fun book and shows Donahey at her best. Two children offend their home’s household fairy and are sent by the Four Winds on a quest through the solar system looking for a way to appease her. In an adventure that mixes mythologies, they meet King Jupiter holding court on his planet, which is also home to the Norse gods of Asgard. On the moon, they find the Man-in-the-Moon holding the goddess Diana captive, forcing her to milk the Cow that Jumped Over the Moon and keeping her from taking her throne as queen. On Mars, a race of Edgar Rice Burroughs-esque aliens take the children captive, holding them in a zoo-like area for study until their planet’s namesake and ruler notices his people’s mischief.[18] The journey through a variety of strange landscapes and humorously bizarre cast of eccentrics across these and other interplanetary locations gives the book a delightfully “Baumian” quality. It’s unfortunate that Donahey chose to quit writing children’s fantasies just when she seemed to be hitting her high-water mark.

Even though Donahey herself veered away from the fantasy field, she would have stayed on the Reilly & Lee radar, thanks to her husband William’s continuing relationship with the company. He continued publishing new Teenie Weenies books with them through 1927’s Alice & the Teenie Weenies, and he illustrated numerous releases for other authors on the company’s roster.[19] William continued to do work for the firm until at least 1940, when he illustrated an unofficial sequel to Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinnochio (1883), Josef Marino’s Hi! Ho! Pinocchio! The American Boy. This would be the same year that John R. Neill was introduced as the new Royal Historian with The Wonder City of Oz.

Could Laflin’s letter have meant that Mary Dickerson Donahey was considered to replace Thompson? We can but wonder. During the key years when a new Oz book was an annual tradition, Donahey was likely to have visited the Reilly & Lee offices in person on multiple occasions. Were there casual discussions when Thompson told the company she was tired of the job and had run out of ideas? Could it have been when Neill’s Wonder City manuscript underwent its rewriting crisis, or following the disastrous reception by Neill?

Unfortunately, we may never know details of any offers made by Reilly & Lee, or if Donahey was offered the role more than once.  Laflin’s letter indicates that  Donahey was uninterested in managing the Oz books’ many pre-existing characters and plot points, which grew with every new release. Her own release schedule slowed as the years went on and the Oz books had a punishing annual timetable. Ultimately, both the Oz series and Reilly & Lee went into a state of decline, continuing only fitfully through the mid-century. As the only person known to have been offered and turned down the job and turned it down, it’s still fun to wonder what might have been if Mary Dickerson Donahey had chosen to be the Royal Historian of Oz.

The author would like to thank Cathy Egerer and the Grand Marais Historical Society, Michael Gessel, and Michael Patrick Hearn for providing research and materials for this article.

 

Notes

[1] Michael Gessel, afterword to The Magical Mimics in Oz, by Jack Snow (Kinderhook: The International Wizard of Oz Club, 1990), 246. Reprint.

[2] Letter from Louis E. Laflin, Jr. to Jack Snow, July 18, 1949.

[3] Who Was Who in America with World Notables, vol. 4, 1961-1968 (Chicago: Marquis Who’s Who, 1968), 256.

[4] The first “Teenie Weenies” cartoon ran in the Chicago Tribune on June 14, 1912.

[5] “William Donahey’s Teenie Weenies – Image Gallery Essay,” Wisconsin Historical Society, accessed May 26, 2020, https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS3881.

[6] Mary A. Dickerson, The Wonderful Wishes of Jacky and Jean (New York: A. Wessels Company, 1905).

[7] L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Chicago: Geo. M. Hill Co., 1900), 71-72.

[8] L. Frank Baum, The Patchwork Girl of Oz (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1913), 327.

[9] Mary Dickerson Donahey, Down Spider Web Lane (New York: Barse & Hopkins, 1909), 127. This is one of the first books illustrated by Gertrude A. Kay, who later illustrated a number of Ruth Plumly Thompson’s pamphlets for the Royal Baking Company.

[10] Mary Dickerson Donahey, The Magical House of Zur (New York: Barse & Hopkins, 1914), 29.

[11] Donahey, Zur, 30.

[12] L. Frank Baum, “The Enchanted Types,” in American Fairy Tales (Chicago: Geo. M. Hill Co., 1901), 212.

[13] L. Frank Baum, introduction to The Enchanted Island of Yew (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1903), 1-2.

[14] Mary Dickerson Donahey, The Castle of Grumpy Grouch (Philadelphia: Edward Stern & Co., 1908), 127.

[15] Donahey, Grumpy Grouch, 128.

[16] Mary Dickerson Donahey, The Calorie Cookbook (Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1923).

[17] Mary Dickerson Donahey, The Prince Without a Country (New York: Barse & Hopkins, 1916).

[18] Mary Dickerson Donahey, Peter and Prue (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1924).

[19] Notable to Oz fans are the seven books he illustrated for Emma Speed Sampson, who took over Baum’s Edith Van Dyne pseudonym to posthumously continue his Mary Louise series, as well as Ruth Plumly Thompson’s The Wonder Book (1929). For the latter publication, Reilly & Lee recycled many of the color plates from William’s Mother Goose book, even though those rhymes are not included anywhere in Thompson’s text.

 

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