Oddly enough, it was a reply from a friend, whom I daily rode the yellow school bus with up on Highway 15 to East Side Elementary that came up with this Pastime.
Jo Ann Castleberry Pyle, now an El Dorado businesswoman, came up with a mention about these reading primer subjects, “Alice and Jerry and their dog, Jip,” in a social media post and my mind went to overdrive.
But, yes, oh yes, Alice, Jerry and Jip were right there along with Dick, Jane and their Spot. And the Dick and Jane pair had a younger sister, her name was Sally.”
Remember them?
Sure, you do. So do I.
There were no Muppets or Super Heroes to build reading skills on – at least not yet ready for introduction to reading real printed words – those squiggly letters and lines on a printed page.
These books were called basal readers – for all my friends who majored in elementary education that phrase has more meaning than just the Merriam-Webster definition, but basal readers they are called.
The Dick and Jane and Alice and Jerry readers were used while I was doing one-half days at Gabe Meyer Elementary School in Pine Bluff for Grades 1 and 2 in the Pine Bluff School System an then we moved over to Stuttgart, where it was a full-day session at Julia Shannon Elementary for two-thirds of my 3rd Grade experience.
My father’s death in the early Spring had me moving to Warren’s Eastside Elementary to finish out the 3rd Grade in Warren with Mrs. Frances Headrick, at the helm.
She was, to my recollection and fantastic reading teacher. It was Charlotte Young, a year later who turned me on to history and how to make exact change from a dollar bill.
But back to Alice and Jerry and Dick and Jane.
The Alice and Jerry books were an educational series published and used in classrooms from the mid-1930s to the 1960s. The books sold nearly 100 million copies worldwide. This series competed at the time with the Dick and Jane educational series.
Both sets of books were about a brother and sister on their daily adventures.
Dick, of the Dick and Jane series, had dark almost blueish-black hair while Jane was a brilliant blonde. Little sister Sally, too, had those golden tresses.
But Alice and Jerry, both brownish red-headed kids. Their facial features and clothing choices were always softer and less focused than the deliberate Dick and Jane kids.
Alice and Jerry were always dressed in muted fall colors, while Dick and Jane were the snappily dressed kids with short, trim collars, neatly pressed shorts and skirts – they were the Baby Gap kids of the basal readers.
While I guess Alice and Jerry were the Sears or JC Penny kids of my childhood, so was I, often in my Levi jeans and pull over tee shirts with a Charlie Brown squiggle or stripe along the mid-section.
Both sets of kids played outdoors – a lot.
But it seemed to me that Alice and Jerry played in the woods where trees and leaves abounded while Dick and Jane stuck to the urban neighborhoods and parks systems were in place.
Alice and Jerry’s dog, named Jip, was fuzzy little brown dog with furry ears.
Dick and Jane’s canine companion was a rather short-haired terrier type – appropriately named Spot – because of the black spots against his white coat.
Both books followed a teaching method of repetition or repeating the same words again and again, to help us remember the words.
The sentences in the “Alice and Jerry” and the “Dick and Jane” readers were short, and used repeating words to build reader’s stamina and familiarity.
For instance, here is the text from the book “Skip Along”:
“One, two, three. Come and see.
“Come and see. See my umbrella.
“Look, Jerry. Up. //
“One, two, three. Come and see.
“Come and see. See my airplane.
“Up, up, up. Down.”
Yes, we would often mass read these books aloud and in unison in class over and over and over.
Teacher’s pay back then across the Nation and certainly in Arkansas was not what it should have been. It was a pittance for what those women should have been paid.
Some, if not all the very most intelligent and talented women in every community were laboring in the public schools. And I say thank goodness – because some of us hard-headed, country kids were certainly a challenge each and every day.
The “Alice and Jerry” books were published by Row, Peterson and Company, which later became part of HarperCollins. Nearly all the books were written by Mabel O’Donnell, who also wrote an Anglicization of the series, named Janet and John for overseas uses.
O’Donnell was a teacher, supervisor and curriculum coordinator for elementary schools in East Aurora, Illinois Public School District 131.
Most of the books were illustrated by Florence and Margaret Hoopes. Both series were widely used in the United States and other English-speaking countries.
The books were often sold as Dick and Jane are the two main characters created by Zerna Sharp for a series of basal readers written by William S. Gray to teach children to read.
The characters first appeared in the Elson-Gray Readers in 1930 and continued in a subsequent series of books through the final version in 1965.
These readers were used in classrooms in the United States and in other English-speaking countries for nearly four decades, reaching the height of their popularity in the 1950s, when 80 percent of first-grade students in the United States used them.
Although the Dick and Jane series of primers continued to be sold until 1973 and remained in use in some classrooms throughout the 1970s, they were replaced with other reading texts by the 1980s and gradually disappeared from school curricula.
The Dick and Jane primers have also become icons of mid-century American culture and collectors’ items.
Well while Dick and Jane and Alice and Jerry might be considered out-of-date, even a little on the puritanical side – few of us actually looked or acted like them.
Heck, on a warm spring day, I got my hot shoes and socks off my feet and stuffed them into my book satchel long before the school bus got to the gravel driveway and I departed the bus in a dead run to see the afternoon cartoons on KATV’s Bozo Show.
Later that day I would repeat for my mom all the adventures of Dick and Jane, or Alice and Jerry of the day. She seemed pleased with my reading skills but not often was on board with my grasp of arithmetic.
A Pastime of Dick and Jane and Alice and Jerry, Spot and Jip, not soon to forget.
