This year is the 50th anniversary of Scarry’s 1974 Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, which strikes me as a commemoration worthy of ballyhoo, especially now that, as a dad myself, I’ve spent so much time ferrying my own daughter to and from school and birthday parties in various cars that—well, mostly goed. (I’ve owned five automobiles in my life, all of them cheap, one of which smoked and required the driver’s side door to be kept shut with a bungee cord hooked to the opposite armrest, stretched across both driver and passenger. What can I say? I was a young cartoonist on a cartoonist’s budget.)
Unlike those budget vehicles, however, the new deluxe Penguin Random House anniversary edition of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go is lavishly well-made, attentively reprinted with sharp black lines and warm, rich, watercolors. It includes an especially lively afterword by Scarry’s son Huck, in which he explains, using language even a kid can understand, how his dad wrote and drew the book, as well as hinting at what it was like to grow up as the son of arguably the world’s most popular and successful children’s book author.
Richard McClure Scarry was born on June 5, 1919, in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. His Irish-American father, John James Scarry, ran Scarry’s Department Store so congenially and cannily that even during the Great Depression the whole family—his mother, an aunt, four brothers, and one sister—lived comfortably. According to Walter Retan and Ole Risom’s The Busy, Busy World of Richard Scarry, when Scarry was a boy and his mother asked him to go to the store to get provisions, he would write his grocery list not with words but with pictures. So his mother signed him up for drawing lessons at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where she also brought him to see the paintings and sculptures.
It took Scarry, who was uninterested in school, five years to receive his high school diploma, in part because he spent a fair amount of his time lazing around at the public library and visiting burlesque shows (this time, one assumes, without his mother). This disappointed his father, who pressured him into going to a local business school, a fate to which Scarry acceded but loathed so deeply he soon withdrew and re-enrolled at the Museum of Fine Arts. “You will live in a garret and eat nothing but spaghetti,” his father warned. But Richard’s mind was made up. Then, after a few classes and December 7, 1941, he was drafted.