When I look back on my childhood, I am especially grateful for the bachelor uncle who lived with us and contributed so much to the upbringing and education of me and my siblings. Uncle Doug was always there to encourage and stimulate us to be curious about ideas and the world around us. When I was only five or six years old, he took me to the State Fair of Texas when I took a passenger train from Groesbeck to Dallas and back, which was an adventure in itself. He took my brother and me to see our first few movies and he bought us a microscope to look at tiny creatures in the pond water and a telescope to give us a closer look at the stars in the night sky.
What I remember now is in the early 1950s when a full-page ad ran on the Dallas Morning News that offered bargain prices for “Little Blue Books” and hundreds of titles for a dime apiece. Uncle Doug helped me go through the list of books and order and read several dozen. It took at least another decade before I understood the story behind the man named E. Haldeman-Julius and his great idea of selling classic books by great authors at extremely low prices. I bet some readers of this column might remember reading some Little Blue Books in the 1940s.
To refresh my memory, I suggested “E. Haldeman-Julius ”in Wikipedia. It was there that I learned that the Little Blue Books were published and sold by the hundreds of millions from the 1920s through the 1970s. The writer Louis L’Amour discovered them when a tramp gave him a book with which he stole a ride on a freight train from El Paso. There were about three thousand different titles, and L’Amour began to carry a dozen or more in his pockets and read them whenever he could: “I’ve read several hundred of them. It included poems and plays by Shakespeare, collections of humor and short stories by classic writers such as Mark Twain and Jack London, and books on the history of music, philosophy and painting and the principles of electricity. “
Unfortunately, Julius became an enemy of J. Edgar Hoover in 1948 when he published a book critical of the FBI, and after extensive investigations, he was convicted of income tax evasion in 1951. He died soon after, and maybe that was what caused the Little Blue Books sell-out advertised on the Dallas Morning News, which caught my uncle’s attention and resulted in him buying dozens of the little books that made me fascinated.
In the thirty years of teaching older adults to remember and write their life stories, I have learned that small details and seemingly small influences in childhood often become determining factors in shaping career choices. In my case, that was the case with Little Blue Books and a bachelor uncle.
My love of reading and talking about ideas was instigated by my bachelor uncle, and my very satisfying career as a college professor was a natural outgrowth of the seeds he had sown and nurtured, as was Louis L’Amour’s writing career Little. Blue Books was sponsored by E. Haldeman-Julius.
Jerry Lincecum is a retired Austin College professor who now teaches courses for older adults looking to write their life stories. He looks forward to your memories on any topic: jlincecum@me.com.
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