"One Saturday morning when I was about twelve years old, I woke with a wonderful plan. The evening before, I had finished rereading my very favorite library book. It was Downtown (later retitled by the publisher as Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown) by Maud Hart Lovelace. It was the third time I had borrowed the book from the library, and when the two-week lending period was over, I would have to part with this treasured book once again. Hence my plan: I would copy the words of the story for myself.

"This was the era before inexpensive paperback editions of popular books for children. And this was the era before the existence of photocopy machines (and laws forbidding the copying of entire books). My father was an ardent bibliophile, and so I suppose I might have thought to ask for my own copy of Downtown. But my father’s idea of going to a bookstore was browsing in dimly lit and dusty secondhand shops. I often went with him and had the thrill of buying one or two old books for a nickel or dime each. Yet, somehow, I could not imagine a copy of Downtown in one of those shops.

"So I took a large notebook and a freshly sharpened pencil, and carefully, in my best cursive writing, I began. The second paragraph that I wrote was less neat than the first. By the time I completed copying only the first page, my hand was very tired. I looked at my smudged paper and compared it to the clear print of the real book. I realized that even if I ever finished this monumental task which I had set for myself, it would not truly resemble the bound book I held in my hand. Nor would there be any of the charming drawings by Lois Lenski to accompany the text.

"I tore the page from my notebook and gave up. I would just have to wait my turn and continue to borrow Downtown from the library whenever I could find it on the shelf.

"Downtown was not my only favorite book. I loved the entire series about Betsy-Tacy. I had discovered them by chance on the library shelves and at once had fallen in love with Betsy (who was just like me!) and her friends. Betsy’s friends were not like mine. My friends squabbled constantly. Three was not a good number for best friends in the Bronx where I grew up. In fact, very little in the Bronx resembled the idyllic community of Deep Valley. Betsy’s parents never lectured her about the dangers of speaking to strangers. In fact, some of Betsy’s best adventures took place when she spoke to strangers. She even went inside their homes. But more than the refreshing vacation from my own city tenement life, the books offered me a new best friend who was myself and yet not myself.

"At twelve, I already knew that I wanted to be a writer—just like Betsy. At twelve, I entertained my friends with original stories that I wrote out and tried submitting to magazines—just like Betsy. I didn’t have freckles and my teeth weren’t parted in the middle, but I was chunkily built like Betsy and I think I had her "perky smiling face." That forty years separated my childhood from hers seemed immaterial. We were just alike in every important way.

"I read the Betsy-Tacy books in order as they were published—with one important omission. The New York Public Library did not own Heaven to Betsy when I was growing up. This I later learned (when I was a children’s librarian, working for NYPL myself) was because the matter of Betsy and her sister Julia changing religions was considered too controversial at that time.

"I was in college and employed part time in the public library when the last book in the series was published. I happened to be browsing in the children’s room when I discovered Betsy’s Wedding. I stopped, stunned at the news. If my own sister had gotten married without telling me, I could not have been more surprised (or delighted). I grabbed the book from the library shelf and checked it out. If the children’s librarian was amazed to see someone of my advanced age borrowing the book, she didn’t say. Probably it happened all the time, anyhow.

"The bond I felt with Betsy and Maud Hart Lovelace, her creator and alter ego, was strengthened by personal contacts over the years. In 1949, shortly after my eleventh birthday, I wrote a letter to Mrs. Lovelace. Writing letters to authors was not a classroom assignment in those days, and I don’t remember how I figured out that if I wrote to her in care of her publisher, she might in time receive my letter. In any event, she did, and her response, written in her own hand, made me feel, more than ever, that we were personal friends. In time, I received several other handwritten notes from her.

"Our bond was reinforced one evening when I was glancing at the newspaper. The New York World Telegram, a paper for which my father wrote, had recently merged with the New York Sun. I noticed an article written by Delos Lovelace. I recognized the name immediately because in the front of all the Betsy-Tacy books was a listing of other books by the author, including a couple which she co-authored with Delos Lovelace, her husband. Iran to my father to show him this wonderful new link with my favorite author.

"He reported to his new colleague about my recognition of his name. And that year, at holiday time, I received a gift-wrapped and autographed copy of Maud Hart Lovelace’s newest book, Emily of Deep Valley. I never found out if Mrs. Lovelace sent the book to me via my father or if my father purchased the book and asked her husband to have it signed for me. I think I preferred not knowing so I could pretend to myself that it was the former.

"Growing up in an era when creativity was not praised or fostered in schools, I know that Betsy/Maud was the mentor I needed to encourage me to continue writing. There must be hundreds of writers who can point to the Betsy-Tacy books as a source of inspiration. But it is not just writers who owe a debt to Maud Hart Lovelace. What about the librarians and teachers who grew up reading these books and went on to become as important to the young people they worked with as the librarian and teachers who encouraged Betsy and her friends? And what about the parents who aimed to make their homes as open, warm, and hospitable as that of the Rays? These books gave us goals, consciously and unconsciously.

"Let me mention one last thing: as an adult, I bought myself a copy of Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown."

— Johanna Hurwitz