"Just Mary" Reader: Mary Grannan Selected Stories

Just Mary Reader

Mary Grannan, 1949.

Just Mary Reader

Mary Grannan: Selected Stories

Selected, edited, and introduced by

Margaret Anne Hume

Illustrations by

Joyce Evans

Writings by Mary Grannan copyright © University of New Brunswick, 2006

Selection, Introduction and Notes copyright © Margaret Anne Hume, 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Rights to produce, film, or record, in whole or in part, in any medium or any language, by any group, amateur or professional, are retained by the copyright holder. For amateur or professional production rights, please contact David Foord, Director, Intellectual Property, Office of Research Studies, University of New Brunswick, P.O. Box 4400, Fredericton, N.B. E3B 5A3.

Copy-Editor: Jennifer Gallant

Design: Andrew Roberts

Printer: Transcontinental

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Grannan, Mary, 1900–1975

Just Mary reader : Mary Grannan, selected stories / selected, edited

and introduced by Margaret Anne Hume.

ISBN-13: 978-1-55002-598-9

ISBN-10: 1-55002-598-8

1. Children's stories, Canadian (English). 2. Radio plays, Canadian

(English). I. Hume, Margaret Anne II. Title.

PS8513.R3J8198 2006jC813'.54C2005-906954-6

123451009080706

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.

Printed on recycled paper.

www.dundurn.com

Just Mary Reader

Table of Contents

Introduction by Margaret Anne Hume

Part One:Just Mary

A Mouse Called Littlebit (broadcast September 28, 1947)

Susie and the Royal Wedding (broadcast November 16, 1947)

Penny Webb and the Spider (broadcast May 15, 1949)

Biddy O'Bannigan (broadcast May 11, 1958)

Part Two:The Land of Supposing

O'Glanigan's Ghost (broadcast June 18, 1950)

The Wicked Whale Who Wasn't Wicked (broadcast June 25, 1950)

Part Three:Jubilee Road

The Lost Hens* (broadcast October 14, 1953)

Halloween Heroes* (broadcast November 4, 1953)

The Trouble with Hobbies* (broadcast November 11, 1953)

Part Four:Maggie Muggins

The Puppet Show (broadcast April 11, 1962)

Rodeo (broadcast May 23, 1962)

Flying Raft (broadcast June 20, 1962)

Notes

Sources

Acknowledgements

*Mary Grannan did not assign episode titles for the Jubilee Road series. The author has provided them for the purposes of this volume.

Introduction

The collection of radio and television scripts presented in the Just Mary Reader offers a cross-section of works by Mary Evelyn Grannan, who wrote and broadcast children's programs for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, first on radio and later on television, between 1939 and 1962. The former elementary school teacher from Fredericton, New Brunswick, produced some of the most popular children's programs broadcast by the CBC during this period. Although she wrote about twenty different series, the longest running and best loved were Just Mary and Maggie Muggins, both of which were transformed into bestselling books.

With the broadcasts long faded, the books alone do not permit a full appreciation of Grannan's talent for dialogue and scriptwriting. The goal of this collection is to enhance the understanding of her work by presenting to readers the opportunity to peruse and reflect upon her writings in their original script form and to present some scripts from two other series — The Land of Supposing and Jubilee Road — that have never appeared in print. Since the scripts are set in their cultural time period, they offer as well a glimpse into the content of broadcast writing for Canadian children in the forties, fifties, and early sixties.

Just Mary

Mary Grannan conceived the idea for her Just Mary radio program in 1937, while she was still teaching school in New Brunswick. She had begun regular broadcasting on private Fredericton radio station CFNB the previous year, in April 1936, with her programs Musical Scrapbook and Aggravating Agatha. After failing to interest the CBC in Aggravating Agatha in spite of the program's local success, she developed Just Mary in response to the need for children's programs, hoping that the corporation might accept it after she tried it out on the local station. By that point she had gained some experience writing children's stories and plays for her students at Devon School. Grannan said she selected the title Just Mary, which also became her pseudonym, because it was only she writing and narrating the fifteen-minute program, although the name may well have been a literary allusion to Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. With the assistance of CFNB station owner J. Stewart Neill, who was in effect her mentor, Just Mary went on the air in November 1937, in a prominent time slot on Sunday evenings, and immediately gained local favour.

After a successful audition for the CBC in June 1938, Grannan broadcast six Just Mary programs over CBC's eastern network that summer, with an additional ten episodes during the Christmas season. She joined the CBC as a full-time employee in July 1939, moving to Toronto and leaving behind her twenty-one-year teaching career. In October 1939, Just Mary began its twenty-three years of national broadcasting on Sunday afternoons over CBC Radio. Grannan wrote and narrated all of the broadcasts, with Lou Snider as her musical accompanist. Although the intended audience was young children of about four to eight years of age, many older children and adults were among her faithful listeners. She subsequently published a total of thirteen books of Just Mary stories in Canada, one in the United States, and two in the United Kingdom.

The four Just Mary radio stories selected for this volume were originally broadcast in 1947, 1949, and 1958. In A Mouse Called Littlebit, the hero mouse has adventures as a result of reading the newspaper. The address featured as his home was Grannan's own home address in Fredericton — 325 Brunswick Street.

Susie and the Royal Wedding was broadcast on November 16, 1947, four days before the wedding of Princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth II, and the Duke of Edinburgh. The story tells how Susie made a wish to attend Princess Elizabeth's wedding but instead attended a Flowerland royal wedding for the beautiful lily Princess Lilybet, whose name reflects Queen Elizabeth's youthful nickname, Lilibet.

Penny Webb and the Spider was a story Grannan broadcast on May 15, 1949, for a Vancouver girl who had written to say how sad she was to have to miss attending the circus because she had the measles. In the story, little Penny Webb misses a school nature outing because of the measles but is pleasantly surprised to attend a spider fair after Grandmother Spider magically makes Penny the size of a spider — a feat she is able to accomplish only because Penny's last name is Webb.

But the true magic of the story occurred later, when Grannan spoke about it during a guest BBC broadcast in London, England, in August 1949. After hearing the broadcast, Mrs. Ivy Webb of Southampton, England, thought the story might help her daughter, Pat, who suffered from epilepsy after the shock of living through bombing raids during the war. Because of an overdose of medication that Pat had taken in an effort to speed her recovery, she was in a non-responsive state in hospital. On her next visit, Mrs. Webb told her daughter about the broadcast but said that she, Pat, was the little girl mentioned. Pat's positive reaction caused Mrs. Webb to write to Mary Grannan to request a copy of the story. Grannan sent the story with the name changed to Pat Webb. Repeated readings of this personalized story appeared to play a significant role in the girl's eventual recovery. Although Grannan wrote many stories that featured the names of real people — fans who wrote, as well as family and friends — none had such an effect as this one.

The story, with its history of connection to the United Kingdom, gained a new perspective when it was illustrated by British-born artist Joyce Evans, who interpreted daddy-long-legs according to its British definition, a crane fly, rather than the North American spider with long, spindly legs. Undoubtedly, the British Webb girl also would have understood the term that way.

Biddy O'Bannigan, broadcast on May 11, 1958, is one of Grannan's Irish stories. Biddy, surprised to learn that there is a world outside her small town, sets out to explore it on a light, fluffy, flying pancake she has made, delights a king who has been crying for thirty years because he wanted pancakes, and becomes Queen Biddy.

The Land of Supposing

The Land of Supposing was a children's radio drama series that presented fairy and folk tales from around the world in thirty-minute episodes. Grannan adapted some from existing tales, including ones by Hans Christian Andersen, Sir Walter Scott, and Noel Langley, and also wrote some original fantasy tales. The weekly series, broadcast April to June, beginning in 1946 and ending in 1950 (skipping 1949), was produced by J. Frank Willis, a senior CBC producer and a close friend of Grannan's. The actors in the cast were drawn from the pool of talented people involved in CBC drama, with Lou Snider providing the music. Grannan herself narrated some of the productions. The longer broadcast time allowed Mary to develop more complicated plots, with the intended audience appearing to be slightly older children of perhaps six to twelve years. Grannan later selected a few of these dramas and adapted them for her Just Mary broadcasts.

The two stories presented are original dramas written by Mary Grannan, broadcast in June 1950, and include the original cast lists. Both tales involve young princesses and princes finding their true loves, one with the help of a ghost and the other with the help of a talking whale. O'Glanigan's Ghost is an Irish tale in which Grannan depicts the Irish dialect and vocabulary in great style. In The Wicked Whale Who Wasn't Wicked, not only is the lonely girl presented with her prince, but, in true Shakespearean comedy style, the girl's grandfather and the prince's grandmother turn out to be long-lost lovers who are reunited so that all are happy as the drama ends. Humour abounds in both.

Jubilee Road

Mary Grannan's Jubilee Road was a fifteen-minute radio drama series for children featuring the adventures and misadventures of brother and sister Johnny and Patty Little and their neighbour and friend Salty Pickle, all of whom lived on Jubilee Road. The Salty Pickle character was later replaced by his cousin, Crunchy Pickle. The weekly series ran on CBC Radio during the main season from September 1953 until 1956, with an intended audience probably in the range of six to twelve years. Jim Kent and later Lloyd Edwards produced the program, with music by Lou Snider.

The lead characters were portrayed by Billie Mae Richards in the role of Johnny, who also narrated the drama, Maxine Miller as Patty, and Bobby Jackson as Salty. Although the characters were supposed to be seven and eight years old, the actors themselves were in their twenties and early thirties but specialized in doing children's voices. Billie Mae Richards always portrayed boys' voices and was perhaps best known for her role as the Kid in Jake and the Kid. The three actors did a great deal of work for school broadcasts and mental health dramas.

Grannan instilled plenty of humour into the writing, part