Eleanor Clymer’s “The Trolley Car Family” offers a light-hearted, endearing story that fits well with summer vacation. The story follows the Parker family through the upheavals of job loss and a temporary move. Imbued with youthful optimism, the tale is relentlessly cheerful. But there is nothing in it that seems beyond the bounds of possibility. Clymer’s is an optimism one can believe.
The New York Times noted, “Whether set in the city or the country, Mrs. Clymer’s stories were grounded in reality, despite a children’s book industry enthralled with fantasy.” “The Trolley Car Family” begins in the city and moves out to the country for adventures in husbandry.
“The Trolley Car Family” shares some of the whimsy of “The Boxcar Children” with much more satisfying characters. Where “The Boxcar Children” seem like seriously traumatized young people robotically fulfilling duty and hiding from adults who can help them, “The Trolley Car Family” is an integrated whole. Within that functioning family, the children are free to behave as real children, making mistakes, behaving foolishly, letting the rabbits into the vegetable patch even after being warned a dozen times that if they did the family would be eating rabbit stew for dinner.
The dynamic between Pa and Ma Parker is wonderfully realistic. The banter and tension of a man trying to stand on principle and set up a homestead and a woman strained by changing circumstances and brought to the edge of sanity by the purchase of yet another farm animal is literary gold.
Of her books, Ms. Clymer said in a 1984 interview, ”No ‘Star Wars’ and dungeons or dragons and fairy tales.” She explained, ”I wanted to tell stories to little children, like my own son and his friends who were beginning to find their way in the everyday world of family, play, work, pets, familiar things that they experienced and understood.”
That’s exactly what Clymer succeeds in offering with the Parker family. The stability of the parents’ marriage is without doubt, but the stressors of life and the strain from their differences in personality certainly show. The children are delightful and win much praise but are also loud, hard to control, messy, and prone to errors. Her description of a difficult day is viscerally believable: the eggs are dropped and broken, the toddler is unattended, the clean laundry is blown off the line and through the dust and will have to be rewashed. A bad day in family life involves a level of tedium and mess that feels utterly hopeless.
But, of course, a day with children is never without hope. The parents invite their children to be part of the discussion of what to do when their father loses his job driving the retired trolley car. The children inspire the whimsical move out to the country to live in an out-of-service trolley car. The inherent adventure of summer vacation is a time to embark on a trial run. Committing to a radically different way of life all at once might be too daunting, but anyone can do about anything for three months.
The summer interlude becomes a way of life the family wants to keep exploring. From a children’s experiment comes a new beginning. The story is easy summer reading for the family that can inspire or simply entertain. As one woman who revisited the book as an adult noted, “This is one of those stories that apparently made an enormous impression on me as over the years I’ve often thought of particular parts or phrases or illustrations over and over again.”
Clymer, who aspired to live in the country and spent many years living in the city before getting there, takes the wonder and possibility of the classic school summer vacation to make dreams come true. It’s a simple story with lasting power.
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