Megan Cook

Dr. Seuss

Eng. 680B

Phil Nel

March 5-07

Fate and the Hand of a Bear

Stan and Jan Berenstain. Down a Sunny Dirt Road: An Autobiography.

New York: Random House, 2002. 202 pp.

            Down a Sunny Dirt Road tells the story, complete with photographs and drawings, of the seemingly fated lives of Janice and Stanley Berenstain, authors and illustrators of the well-known Berenstain Bears. Overall, the book succeeds in making the Berenstains more real to their readers, while sending the message of hard work, perseverance and joy in the journey. The book focuses on the process of the Berenstains becoming successful authors/artists and details their initial struggle to make a career in cartoons, an area of the Berenstains’ work which readers may be less familiar with than their popular bears. The Berenstains also narrate their journey to success as children’s writers under the editorship of the Dr. Seuss, whose positive and negative aspects the Berenstains recount. Down a Sunny Dirt Road provides a good read for teen readers and those interested in the little-known parts of the Berenstains’ life and early career.

            Hard work and perseverance are main message of the book. The Berenstains frankly describe how hard it was for them to break into cartooning for magazines. During their first year of marriage, both submitted cartoons to magazines, with minimal success. The cartoon editor of The Saturday Evening Post, John Bailey, told them to focus on the issues of daily life: “getting the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube, […] ladies’ stockings hanging on the shower rail, kids stealing cookies out of the cookie jar, taking the dog to the vet, burnt lamb chops” (119). So Team Berenstain focused their jokes more on their readers’ everyday lives and they were a hit. This instance of determination and knowing one’s audience serves as subtle advice to future writers and illustrators.

            However, the Berenstains maintain an air of fate in regards to their meeting and marriage which seems to contradict their message of hard work. Down a Sunny Dirt Road highlights similarities between Stan and Jan even before they knew each other, such as learning to draw on walls, discovering the joy of reading, living through their parents’ multiple jobs and moves in Philadelphia throughout the Great Depression, and deciding to draw for a living while still in elementary school. It appears destined that they should meet and fall in love at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art after circling closer and closer to each other. The hand of fate continues to appear when they remember often visiting the zoo to draw bears, animals that would later become their signature characters. Although fate mostly plays a part in the Berenstains’ personal lives and creation of ideas, the concept may contradict the message of hard work that the rest of the book promotes.

            On the other hand, the lack of post-success commentary emphasizes the message that hard work leads to success.  The Berenstains gloss over much of what happened in their lives once they hit success in the world of magazine cartoons and of children’s books. They briefly mention their extensive and popular work with Bright and Early Books, Pictureback books and the Berenstains’ own line of children’s books, First Time Books. The Berenstain Bears’ many television specials and ad campaigns are similarly relegated to side-note status. While this omission may confuse readers who may wonder how the Berenstains went from their first success to a multimillion-dollar enterprise, it also emphasizes the importance of the journey rather than the rewards in life.

            The post-success omissions are most obvious for the Berenstain Bears books. The autobiography focuses more on Jan and Stan’s career in magazine cartoons rather than their more well-known bears, with which the book assumes the reader is intimately familiar; once the Berenstains recount reaching success with their bears, the rest of the book skips over the Berenstain Bears line with only cursory details. Instead, Down a Sunny Dirt Road displays multiple examples of the Berenstains’ “moppet mob scene[s]” (124) printed by Collier’s and describes their series of books about family life more than their more well-known bear books. This focus succeeds in displaying aspects of the Berenstains’ lives of which few readers may be aware, even though it sometimes turns the narrative into a list of books and cartoons published.

            The most interesting and detailed section of the book details the Berenstains’ initial drive to write a children’s book and their relationship with Dr. Seuss over the course of seventeen children’s books. They created a family of cartoon bears based on their own family They were bolstered by the knowledge of Seuss’ success with children’s cartoon books and took their manuscript to Beginner Books at Random House, where they first met Dr. Seuss. The Berenstains’ remembrances of Seuss’s editorship include methods he introduced them to in order to fully realize their story and characters, such as thinking more deeply about the “internal workings” (145) of characters, storyboarding, “casting” the characters, considering children’s books literature and not just “a funny little book” (146) and remembering the beginner reader audience when writing and drawing for children’s books. All of these methods, a legacy of Dr. Seuss through the Berenstains, may be helpful for those readers interested in the world of writing and publishing for children.

            While Stan and Jan relate their indebtedness to Seuss for encouraging them and helping to fine-tune their skills and ideas, they also portray Dr. Seuss’ not infallible nature. During their first collaboration, he almost took over the Berenstains’ book and made it a snowballing adventure a la Seuss instead of the learn-by-negative example plot common in future Berenstain Bears books. For their second venture together, Seuss initially told the Berenstains that the “Worst thing you could possibly do” (157) would be to continue on with bears as characters. Fortunately, the positive reader reception of the book changed Seuss’ mind and the Berenstains’ bears continued.

            While the Berenstains use their typical storytelling style with a dash of wry humor, at times the narrative becomes difficult to follow. This is due mostly to the writing’s (particularly that of Stan) haphazard style. One instance occurs at the very beginning of the book, when Stan references his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary then jumps to a description of the neighborhood he lived in as a little boy. Furthermore, Down a Sunny Dirt Road sometimes includes details of the Berenstains’ early lives that leave the reader asking, “Why did I need to know that?” One example is Jan noting that Stan’s sister Aline’s drawings “were more likely inspired by Brenda Starr” (74). However, written on a down-to-earth level and easy for even middle-school readers to understand, the book includes humorous commentary on Jan and Stan’s early lives. Instances include people mispronouncing Stan’s last name as Bernstein because “there was no such name as Berenstain” (26) and of Stan using his artistic abilities to label Army trashcans. Also, Stan and Jan “speak” alternately in narrative style for the first half of the book, which covers Jan and Stan’s early lives through their courtship and marriage. They speak jointly following the chapter “Team Berenstain,” which begins their married life. Potentially confusing, the alternating voices are so similar that the reader may not even pay attention to which Berenstain is speaking. However, the “team” voice emphasizes how the Berenstains’ success has been a team effort.

            As they describe the process of becoming celebrated children’s authors, the Berenstains make themselves more understandable and real to their readers, especially through the use of pictures. Down a Sunny Dirt Road contains hundreds of pictures, including photographs of Jan and Stan, images from their portfolios and books, and self-caricatures drawn specifically for the book. The readers can associate formerly faceless authors with real photographs and further link the authors with their characters by way of the cartoon self-portraits. The picture portraying cartoon Berenstains meeting their bears best represents this association and the happiness the bears have brought their creators. The pictures give the book a playful “look down memory lane” feel. Jan and Stan bring the reality of the Berenstain family even closer by relating their two sons’ (only briefly mentioned throughout the book) advent into the family business, as well as some of their individual successes. The family nature of the Berenstain business generates feelings of happiness and sharing, on which Jan and Stan end their narrative. The last few chapters focus on happiness, both for the authors and their audiences. The Berenstains emphasize that they do what they do because they love it. Along the way, they try to make as many readers as happy as they can by fulfilling the requests of those readers, the main example being writing chapter books for the kids who had grown up with the bears and wanted to keep reading their adventures. The final chapter drives home the love Team Berenstain has for the work they do and their hope to continue it far into the future (although, since the book was published in 2002, it does not relate Stan’s death in 2005).

            Overall, Down a Sunny Dirt Road represents an informative read, with little known details about the Berenstains’ life and career together. It provides a heartfelt message of hard work and determination while offering a look at the journey to a career in children’s books rather than at the final product(s). Despite small contradictions and confusions, the Berenstains’ autobiography is enjoyable and gives readers a peek into two lives that were not just about the journey to success, but also about the journey to find happiness in their work.