Learning to love reading through the funny pages

In a New York Times column the other day, Nicholas Kristof listed his choices for the “Best Children’s books — Ever!†— as he put it, exclamation point and all.

Some of Kristof’s Best Ever! offerings are relatively new, while others are old enough to have been read to me or by me when the last century was barely middle aged: “The Prince and the Pauper,†“Anne of Green Gables,†“Wind in the Willows,†“Little Lord Fauntleroy†and “The Hardy Boys.†Kristof writes the female equivalent of the Hardys was “Nancy Drew,†who made him yawn but “seems to turn girls into Supreme Court justices,†as they were childhood favorites of Sandra Day O’Connor and Sonia Sotomayor.

I remember my parents reading fairy tales and my favorite, “Uncle Wiggly,†but the first stories that turned me into a devoted reader were of a very different genre. They had titles like “The Katzenjammer Kids,†“Barney Google,†“Moon Mullins,†“Maggie and Jiggs,†“Smoky Stover,†“The Gumps,†“Gasoline Alley†and “Harold Teen.†The reader was my grandfather and all of the readings took place before Sunday dinner in my grandparents’ living room just up the street from our house in New Jersey.

These stories were, of course, from the Sunday funny papers in The New York Daily News and The New York Journal-American. My grandfather bought those two very popular Sunday papers of the 1930s and ’40s rather than the higher-brow Times and Herald-Tribune. The Times, then as now, didn’t have funnies and the funnies in the Herald-Tribune, the few times I saw that paper, were anemic compared with those produced by the Hearst and Chicago Tribune-Daily News syndicates.

This was fitting and proper because these mass circulation papers and “The New York World,†which hadn’t survived the Depression, were the inventors of the Sunday funnies and their proprietors fought to own the most popular strips more fiercely than they competed for the most talented writers and editors.

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The funnies, then as now, were in color and to me, the colors were brighter then and the individual strips were larger. My grandfather’s gift kept on giving when I got too big to be read to and read them on my own — along with the more grownup adventure comics like “Dick Tracy†and “Terry and the Pirates.†It was then easy to move from the Sunday funnies to the rest of the Sunday paper because, in truth, The Daily News and The Journal-American weren’t all that hard to read and both papers were always good for a weekly feature story on a great crime of the century, which was nearly as appealing as the funnies.

The first books I found at home and read because they were there also had a newspaper connection. In the middle or late 1930s, The New York Post, which was then a Democratic newspaper, offered its readers daily coupons to buy inexpensively bound volumes of the classics by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens at bargain prices.

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My father, a New York commuter and conservative Republican, liked to tell us how he sacrificed his preference for The New York Sun each evening in order to purchase the Dickens and Twain volumes for his children. At least he did so through the complete works of Dickens, but he ran out of patience with The Post and gave up the project with the first volumes of Twain, so the first work I read by Mr. Clemens was not the usual Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, but “Pudd’n Head Wilson.â€

But the book in those collections that meant the most to me was a lesser work by Dickens, “A Child’s History of England,†which had chapter headings like “England Under King Edward the First Called Longshanks†or “England Under Henry the Eighth Called Bluff King Hal and Burly King Harry†for each king and queen from the ancient Romans and Saxons to Victoria. What boy could resist knowing more about someone called Ethelred the Unready or “Charles the Second Called the Merry Monarch?â€

“Let me try to give you a general idea of some of the merry things that were done, in the merry days when this merry gentleman sat upon his merry throne in merry England,†wrote Dickens before he told how Oliver Cromwell was “merrily torn out of his grave, dragged to Tyburn, hanged there on a gallows and then beheaded.â€

And so, I am indebted to my grandfather and the funny papers for turning me on to reading and to my father and Dickens for a lifelong addiction to reading history.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.