"Your hands are too little to hold these baby bunnies," the manager of the petting zoo told him.
"I'm sorry," said the man operating the carousel. "I cannot let you on. You need a grownup to ride with you."
"Maybe next year," said the man taking tickets at the roller coaster.
But after a good meal and a good dessert, George began to feel better. When the dishes were finished, the man said, "George, I have a surprise for you," and they went into the living room.
The surprise was a movie. George was glad to watch a movie—that was something he was not too small to do!
George was enjoying the movie, but it had been a full day and now he had a full stomach. Soon he could not keep his eyes open.
The next thing George knew,
he was back at the petting zoo! But this time something was different: the petting zoo was very small. In fact, everything was small.
George looked around. Then he looked at himself. Maybe everything wasn't so small after all, he thought. Maybe he was...
BIG!
Uh-oh! This is not right, thought George. Then he remembered the bunnies. Why, he was not too small to hold a bunny now. He was not too small to do anything! What fun! George thought, and he went
to the bunny hutch. Now George could hold LOTS of bunnies, and he cuddled them to his face.
The bunnies liked George...
but the manager of the petting zoo did not. "Put those bunnies down," she said. "You'll scare them. You are too big!"
George didn't want to scare the bunnies. He put them down and turned to go.
Then George saw the roller coaster.
He was curious.
Was he big enough to ride it now?
Of course he was big enough! If only he could find a seat big enough for him...
But the man taking tickets made George leave. "You cannot ride this ride," he said. "You are too big!"
George was sad he could not ride, but he did as he was told.
"Catch that monkey!" someone yelled as George was leaving the roller coaster. "He's dangerous!"
People in the park became frightened. They began to run. They ran in all directions; but mostly, they ran AWAY from George.
George felt awful. He didn't want to frighten anyone.
He just wanted to hide. But where could he go? He was too big to fit anywhere. Then George saw the carousel. He wouldn't need a grownup to get on with him this time.
But this time George wished he had a grownup with him...
he wished his friend were here.
George sat on the carousel feeling lonely. Suddenly, someone called his name. "George? George?" It sounded like the man with the yellow hat! Could his friend be here to take him home?
George heard his name again.
It was his friend!
George wanted to jump into his friend's arms, but the man with the yellow hat was too small. How could he ever take George home now?
The man called his name again...
"George," he said. "Wake up. It's time for bed. You fell asleep watching the movie."
George looked at his friend. Why, he wasn't small after all.
George looked at himself. He was not big!
Now George could jump into his friend's arms—and that is what he did.
As the man with the yellow hat tucked him in, George was happy to be in his little bed. It was not very big, he thought. But he fit in it perfectly.
George was just the right size.
* * *
Margret and H. A. Rey
Among children, Margret and H. A. Rey were best known as the parents of Curious George, the hero of their most famous books. "I thought you were monkeys, too," said a little boy who had been eager to meet them, disappointment written all over his face.
Not all of the Reys' children's books are about George, but they are all about animals. The Reys both loved animals, and one of the first things they would do when they came to a new town was visit the zoo. In Hamburg, Germany, where both were born, H.A. lived close to the famous Hagenbeck Zoo and, as a child, spent much of his free time there. That's where he learned to imitate animal voices. He was proudest of his lion roar, and once he roared for 3,000 children in the Atlanta Civic Auditorium, thus making the headlines in the Atlanta Constitution for the first and last time.
Over the years the Reys owned an assortment of animals: monkeys in Brazil, which unfortunately died on a trip to Europe; alligators, chameleons, and newts in New Hampshire; and dogs. They always had a cocker spaniel, and H.A. generally managed to get him into one picture in each of their books.
H.A. also wrote and illustrated two books for adults on astronomy. The books were, in a way, a by-product of the First World War. H.A., as an eighteen-year-old soldier in the German army, carried in his knapsack a pocket book on astronomy, the stars being a handy subject to study in those blacked-out nights. But the book was not much help for the beginning stargazer, and the way the constellations were presented stumped him. So, many years later, still dissatisfied with existing books on the subject, he worked out a new way to show the constellations and ended up doing his own books on astronomy.
H.A. started drawing in 1900, when he was two years old, mostly horses. At that time, one could still see horses all over Hamburg. He went to what in Europe was then called a humanistic gymnasium, a school that teaches Latin in the fourth grade, then Greek, then French, and then English. From this early exposure to five languages, H.A. developed a lasting interest in linguistics. He spoke four languages fluently and had a smattering of half a dozen others.
After school and the First World War, H.A. studied whatever aroused his curiosity—philosophy, medicine, languages—but he never attended art school. To pay the grocery bills while studying, he designed posters for a circus, then drew them directly on stone to make lithographs, an experience that came in handy in later years when he had to do the color separations for his book illustrations.
Margret received a more formal art education. She studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau, the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, and an art school in Berlin. She even had a one-person show of her watercolors in Berlin in the early 1920s. Then she switched to writing, did newspaper work for a little while, and later became a copywriter in an advertising agency. At one point she wrote jingles in praise of margarine, an experience that left her with an undying hate for commercials. Always restless, Margret switched again to photography, working in a photographic studio in London for a short time, then opening her own studio in Hamburg just when Hitler came into power.
H.A. decided to leave Germany in 1923, when the country's postwar inflation had become so catastrophic that the money he received for a poster one day would not be enough to buy lunch a week later. He went to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and became a business executive in a relative's firm. Among other things, he sold bathtubs up and down the Amazon River. He pursued this rather uncongenial activity until 1935, when Margret showed up in Rio, too.
They had met in Hamburg just before H.A. went to Brazil. As H.A. told the story, he met Margret in her father's house at a party for her older sister, and his first glimpse of her was when she came sliding down the banister.
With Hitler in power, Margret had decided to leave Germany and work as a photographer in Brazil. The first thing she did when she saw H.A. again was to persuade him to leave the business firm. He did, and they started working together as a sort of two-person advertising agency, doing a little of everything: wedding photos, posters, newspaper articles (which Margret wrote and H.A. illustrated), and whole advertising campaigns. Four months later they married. The Reys went to Europe on their honeymoon, roamed about a bit, and finally went to Paris, where they planned to stay for two weeks. They stayed for four years, in the same hotel in Montmartre where they first took lodging. They might have stayed permanently had the Second World War not started.
In Paris the Reys created their first children's book. It came about by accident. When H.A. did a few humorous draw
ings of a giraffe for a Paris periodical, an editor at the
French publishing house Gallimard saw them and called the Reys to ask whether they could make a children's book out of them. They did—Cecily G. and the Nine Monkeys. After that they wrote mostly children's books, and it agreed with them. H.A. was always surprised to get paid for what he liked to do best.
In June 1940, on a rainy morning before dawn, only a few hours before the Nazis entered the city, the Reys left Paris on bicycles, with nothing but warm coats and their manuscripts tied to the baggage racks, and started pedaling south. They finally made it to Lisbon by train, having sold their bicycles to customs officials at the French-Spanish border. After a brief interlude in Rio de Janeiro, their migrations came to an end when they saw the Statue of Liberty as they landed in America.
The Reys took a small apartment in Greenwich Village, rolled up their sleeves, and were ready to start from scratch. Before the week was over, they had found a home for Curious George at Houghton Mifflin.
H.A. illustrated and Margret wrote, turning her husband's pictures into stories. Margret sometimes wrote her own books, such as Pretzel and Spotty, and H.A. did the illustrations, at times changing the story a little to fit his pictures. Doing a book was hard work for them and frequently took more than a year. They wrote and rewrote; drew and redrew; fought over the plot, the beginning, the ending, the illustrations.
Ideas came from a variety of sources: an inspiration while soaking in a hot bathtub; a news item in the paper; a piece of conversation at a party. Once they heard a biochemist tell how, as a boy, he had made a bargain with his mother to give the kitchen floor a thorough scrubbing in order to get money for a chemistry set. So one day, while his parents were out, he sprinkled the contents of a large package of soap flakes on the floor, pulled the garden hose through the window, and turned the water on. In Curious George Gets a Medal, George emulates this experiment with spectacular results.
The Reys' books were eventually translated into more than a dozen languages, and Margret loved leafing through copies of these foreign editions. It did not matter that she couldn't read some of the languages, such as Finnish and Japanese—she happened to know the story.
Based on Margret Rey's August 1994 essay for
THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES OF CURIOUS GEORGE
THE END!
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