oregonlive.com Beverly Cleary, beloved Portland author, dies at age 104 By Amy Wang | The Oregonian/OregonLive 7-8 minutes Beverly Cleary wanted to be a writer. But first, she needed a story. She had thought she would begin her writing career with a story about a girl like the one she had been, growing up first in Yamhill County and then in Northeast Portland. “But when I sat down to write, no ideas came,” she told The Oregonian/OregonLive in 2016, shortly before her 100th birthday. “And then I got to thinking about … a little boy when I was children’s librarian in Yakima who faced me and said, ‘Where are the books about kids like us?’ And he was right. There weren’t any,” she said. Back then, “kids in children’s books had adventures and went to sea and all that sort of thing, but there was nothing about just ordinary kids playing in the neighborhood.” She decided she would write about those ordinary kids – and the rest is literary history. Cleary, who became one of America’s top-selling and most-loved authors and whose books have become classics read by countless children, parents and teachers, died Thursday, her publisher announced. She was 104. Cleary was perhaps best known for her books featuring Ramona Quimby, who first appeared as a highly opinionated, stubborn preschooler pestering her big sister, Beatrice “Beezus” Quimby, and their neighbor, Henry Huggins, on quiet Klickitat Street in Northeast Portland. The Quimby sisters and Henry ended up appearing in a dozen books, a 1980s Portland Saturday morning television series and a 2010 movie. Ramona and Henry are depicted in bronze in the Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden in Northeast Portland’s Grant Park, as is Henry’s dog, Ribsy. A standalone book, “Ellen Tebbits,” also is set in Portland, with its title character – the Cleary creation who most resembles the author, she has said – living on Tillamook Street. In keeping with her desire to write about everyday kids, Cleary didn’t shy away from subjects that were once considered too touchy for children’s books: Over the course of the Ramona series, her father loses his job, her mother starts working, and Ramona ends up going to a neighbor’s home for afterschool care. Cleary won the 1984 John Newbery Medal, America’s top award for children’s literature, for “Dear Mr. Henshaw,” in which a young boy copes with his parents’ divorce and his loneliness at school. Readers responded enthusiastically to her frank, sympathetic portrayals of American families: Her books have sold more than 90 million copies. She received a National Medal of Art in 2003 and was named a Library of Congress “Living Legend” in 2000, 50 years after publishing her first book, “Henry Huggins.” Making her success all the sweeter was the fact that her initial relationship with books was a rocky one. As a first-grader, she recalled, she struggled with reading, stymied by phonics, word lists and dull textbooks. “Until the third grade, reading was just something I had to do in school,” she told The Oregonian/OregonLive. Beverly Atlee Bunn was born April 12, 1916, in McMinnville, the only child of Chester Lloyd Bunn, a farmer who was the descendant of Oregon Trail migrants, and Mable Bunn, a former teacher from the Midwest. She spent her first six years on the family farm in Yamhill, where she developed the sharp observational eye every storyteller needs – “I remember every blade of grass,” she told an Oregonian interviewer in 2008. Then her father, exhausted by the daily demands of running a farm, gave it up and the family moved to Portland, where he became a bank guard. Young Beverly attended Fernwood Elementary School, now part of Beverly Cleary School, and Grant High School. Once she became a convert to the idea of reading for pleasure, she went through books at a rapid clip. They provided an escape from the deprivations of the Depression – as a Grant student, she recalled in her 1988 memoir, “A Girl From Yamhill,” she cringed at wearing hand-me-down dresses in the face of “snobbish” cliques. Books were also an escape from tense relationships with her mother and longtime boyfriend, both of whom Cleary described in her memoir as judgmental, critical and controlling. Her writing began to gain her notice in high school. English teachers singled out her work for praise both in the classroom and on the page, one of them writing in response to one story, “This is very funny. I hope it is original. You show talent.’' But the woman whose books are now classroom fixtures didn’t expect to attend college – her parents simply didn’t have the money. Then a relative in southern California wrote to suggest that she attend a tuition-free junior college there and offered a place to stay. Cleary’s father insisted that she go. Cleary went on to study English at the University of California at Berkeley, which later named a dormitory after her, and library science at the University of Washington, which later honored her by establishing the Beverly Cleary Endowed Professorship in Children and Youth Services. In 1940, she eloped with Clarence Cleary, whom she had met while they were students at Berkeley. They were married for 64 years, until his death in 2004. She worked briefly as a librarian, first in Yakima and then at an Army hospital in Oakland, California. She and her husband settled in Carmel, California, where she lived until her death. By the time the couple became parents to twins Malcolm and Marianne in 1955, Cleary was an established author and had to figure out how to juggle motherhood and writing. “It wasn’t easy,” she told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “I was very fortunate. There was a woman in the neighborhood who liked to take care of children … she came four mornings a week so I could write.” Her children were among her sources of inspiration. She credited her book “The Mouse and the Motorcycle” to her son, who became ill during a family trip and had to stay in bed for a couple of days. She bought him a few toys, including a little red motorcycle. Back at home, she saw a mouse that had fallen into a neighbor’s garden bucket. “It crossed my mind that that mouse was the right size to ride that little toy motorcycle,” she said. “So I said to the children, ‘I think maybe I could write a book about that’ and they said, ‘Oh, write it, write it!’ I wrote it very fast because every day when they came home from school they wanted to know what Ralph (the mouse) had done next.” All told, she published 39 children’s and young adult novels, which have been translated into more than two dozen languages, as well as two memoirs. She stopped writing after publishing her second memoir, “My Own Two Feet,” in 1995. “I didn’t want to get to the stage where I would repeat myself,” she said. But for numerous young and young-at-heart readers, the joy of her books is in that familiarity. In the characters who have feelings like theirs, and experiences like theirs. Who are “just ordinary kids playing in the neighborhood.”
The first “big boy” book I ever read was Henry And Ribsy. After that I was hooked. And it was very cool reading about kids like us that actually lived in our town. Those funny, made up sounding street names actually existed. Beverly Cleary was a genuine treasure.
I honestly had no idea she was still alive. My favorite book of hers was Are you there God, it's me Margaret, and "then again, maybe I won't" Spoiler Yes, I know those weren't written by Beverly Cleary, shut up
One year in Oswego I won the city championship for children's reading but I never heard of her before now.
Those books are set in our neighborhood. We live between Klickitat and Siskyou St. Growing up, she came to our elementary school to read to us and we had an annual parade for her. She will be missed.......
