On March 26, revered Portland writer Beverly Cleary passed away at the age of 104. But Cleary wasn’t just a Portland writer—she was a Beaumont-Wilshire writer.
As she tells in her 1988 memoir, A Girl from Yamhill, Cleary’s family moved from a struggling farm in that small Oregon town to the big city of Portland in 1922, when Beverly was six years old. After living in a series of rental houses on the east side, they bought a home that still stands on NE 37th between Stanton and Wistaria Drive, at the southwest edge of the Beaumont-Wilshire boundary. She attended Fernwood Elementary School on NE 33rd (now named for her) and graduated from Grant High School in 1934. Heading south to live with a relative while attending junior college in California for free, she later graduated from UC Berkeley with a library science degree.
Cleary was a children’s librarian when a little boy asked her, “Where are the books about kids like us?” That inspired her, she said, to write about “ordinary kids playing in the neighborhood”—a mode of writing that very well may have been the secret spark of her enduring popularity, since so many young readers have found themselves reflected in her stories of the everyday dilemmas of kids growing up in regular working-class families like hers. The father of Cleary’s most famous character, spunky Ramona Quimby, loses his job as a bank guard in downtown Portland and sinks into depression as Ramona’s mother goes to work—something that happened in Cleary’s own family during the Great Depression. Ramona has to wear hand-me-down clothes, and, in another book, the family of her character Henry Huggins can’t afford to buy him a bicycle. These aren’t sad books, however. Things often work out with luck and pluck and family love, but sometimes they don’t, and young readers can find plenty of relatable situations in these stories penned long ago.
As Laura O. Foster wrote in her terrific little 2016 guide Walking with Ramona: Exploring Beverly Cleary’s Portland, “Not all children’s books are readable by adults … But Beverly Cleary’s books are an exception, and that’s perhaps why each generation finds her books fun to read: they’re full of sparely crafted scenes packed with details from a kid’s (or dog’s) point of view. Each chapter stands alone, with satisfying endings to the quandaries and perplexities kids experience. The chapters are sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, often gently satirical, and always respectful of even the youngest child’s personhood.”
Cleary wrote over 40 much-loved books—mostly for young readers (and their parents and teachers)—that have sold over 90 million copies around the world. I can personally attest to the long span of her success, as I read her first novel, Henry Huggins (published in 1950) when I was in third grade and delighted in the hilarious, resonating misadventures of third-grade Henry and his rascally dog Ribsy. (I remember even asking my parents if I could dig up earthworms like Henry does at Grant Park.) My sons also read the book when they were growing up on NE 38th Avenue in our house just kitty-corner behind Cleary’s old house, and I’ll share it with my grandchildren in a couple of years.
Best of all is that eighteen of Cleary’s books are set in our neighborhood. Henry and Ramona live on Klickitat Street—because, the author wrote, she liked the sound of it. There is a wonderful walking tour in Foster’s book that can take young fans and their families to many neighborhood sites associated with those beloved novels, and the Hollywood branch library has a map on its lobby wall of Cleary’s settings. In Grant Park, the Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden has life-size statues of Ramona, Henry, and Ribsy for young readers to enjoy.
Beverly Cleary immortalized our neighborhood with her wonderful novels, all written with a simple but profound goal in mind: “I hope children will be happy with the books I’ve written and go on to be readers all of their lives.”