Nearly every American child from the 1940s to today knows and remembers Little Golden Books, a series that began as a joint venture between Simon and Schuster and Western Printing and Lithographing Company. The books in this series are and were loved and treasured, and they have sold millions of copies since their beginning in 1942.
Ten years later, Simon and Schuster published The Christmas Story, written by Jane Werner and illustrated by Eloise Wilkin. Jane Werner's prose and Eloise Wilkin's pictures are tender and sensitive and well suited to children. An example appears on the first page of The Christmas Story:
This is Mary, a girl of Galilee.
She lived long years ago, but such a wonderful thing happened to her that we remember and love her still.
". . .we remember and love her still." The book and the story behind it are stories of love, joy, and devotion. The Christmas story, one of love, is also one that will never end.
Elsa Jane Werner was born on July 11, 1915, in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin High School as salutatorian in 1931 and the University of Wisconsin in 1936. (One of her classmates was writer and biographer Maurice Zolotow.) Elsa Jane Werner taught English and social science in Sheboygan for a year. By 1939, she was working for Western Printing in Racine, Wisconsin, where she would go on to write scores of Little Golden Books, beginning with Noah's Ark in 1943. She was also an editor, and as her brief biography in The Christmas Story reads, she supervised the line of Golden Books from the Walt Disney Studio. In 1954, she married Earnest C. Watson (1892-1970), a very prominent physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The couple lived in Santa Barbara and in India. Jane Werner Watson survived her husband by more than a quarter of a century. She died on April 9, 2004, in Santa Barbara.
Eloise Wilkin was born Eloise Margaret Burns on March 30, 1904, in Rochester, New York. When she was toddler, her family moved to New York City. They moved back to Rochester when she was fifteen, and she graduated from Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute in 1923. She supported herself as a freelance artist in New York City for four years before marrying Sidney J. Wilkin (1899-1964) in 1930. "I was never driven to have a career," she said. "Family life was always my first interest," and so she stopped working full time as an artist in order to raise a family, which would eventually number four children and many grandchildren. (1)
In 1938, Eloise Wilkin's sister, Esther (sometimes spelled Ester) asked her to draw the pictures for a book she had written called Mrs. Peregrine and the Yak. It was Eloise's first children's book and the start of a new career that would carry her through to the end of her life. In 1944, she began illustrating books for Western Printing and had forty-seven titles in all for the company. Jane Werner Watson called her "the soul of Little Golden Books." (2) Eloise also designed dolls and counted Nikita Khrushchev among her fans.
Eloise M. Burns Wilkin, a devout Christian, died on October 4, 1987, in Brighton, New York. Incidentally, her sister, author Esther M. Burns (1902-1985), married the brother of Sidney Wilkin, George A. Wilkin (1901-1987).
Notes
(1) Quoted in "Eloise Wilkin: A Portrait" in the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette (Lancaster, Ohio), December 15, 1979, page 9.
(2) Quoted by Eloise Wilkin's daughter, Deborah Wilkin Springett, in her introduction for Eloise Wilkin Stories (2005).
The fourth and fifth images shown above include depictions of Joseph, the patron saint of fathers. I show it here in the year that my own father has died. This will be our first Christmas without him. St. Joseph is also the patron of happy deaths. I can't say that my father's death was happy, but he died in his sleep, apparently at peace and without pain, and to join my mother, his wife, who went before him and perhaps prepared his way.
Merry Christmas
&
Happy New Year to All!
Copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley
