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THE CAMPFIRE GIRL SERIES |
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From Eudora Welty's "A Sweet Devouring": "Then this Christmas was coming, and my grandfather in Ohio sent along in his box of presents an envelope with money in it for me to buy myself the book I wanted. I went to Kress's. Not everybody knew Kress's sold books, but children just before Christmas know everything Kress's ever sold or will sell... Kress's also had its version of the Series Books, called, exactly like another series, "The Camp Fire Girls," beginning with The Camp Fire Girls in the Woods. I believe they were ten cents each and I had a dollar. But they weren't all that easy to buy, because the series stuck, and to buy some of it was like breaking into a loaf of French bread. Then after you got home, each single book was as hard to open as a box stuck in its varnish, and when it gave way it popped like a firecracker. The covers once prized apart would never close; those books once open stayed open and lay on their backs helplessly fluttering their leaves like a turned over June bug. They were as light as a matchbox. They were printed on yellowed paper with corners that crumbled, if you pinched them too hard, like old graham crackers, and they smelled like attic trunks, caramelized glue, their own confinement with one another and, over all, the Kress's smell -- bandannas, peanuts and sandalwood from the incense counter. Even without reading them I loved them. It was hard, that year, that Christmas is a day you can't read. What could have happened to those books? -- but I can tell you about the leading character. His name was Mr. Holmes. He was not a Camp Fire Girl: he wanted to catch one. Through every book of the series he gave chase. He pursued Bessie and Zara -- those were the Camp Fire Girls -- and kept scooping them up in his touring car, while they just as regularly got away from him. Once Bessie escaped from the second floor of a strange inn by climbing down a gutter pipe. Once she escaped by driving away from Mr. Holmes in his own automobile, which she had learned to drive by watching him. What Mr. Holmes wanted with them -- either Bessie or Zara would do -- didn't give me pause; I was too young to be a Camp Fire Girl; I was just keeping up. I wasn't alarmed by Mr. Holmes -- when I cared for a chill, I knew to go to Dr. Fu Manchu, who had his own series in the library. I wasn't fascinated either. There was only one thing I wanted from those books, and that was for me to have ten to read at one blow. Who in the world wrote those books? I knew at the time they were the false "Camp Fire Girls" and the ones in the library were the authorized. But book reviewers sometimes say of a book that if anyone else had written it, it might not have been this good, and I found it out as a child -- their warning is justified. This was a proven case, although a case of the true not being as good as the false. In the true series the characters were either totally different or missing (Mr. Holmes was missing), and there was too much time given to teamwork. The Kress's Campers, besides getting into a more reliable kind of trouble than the Carnegie campers, had adventures that even they themselves weren't aware of: the pages were in wrong. There were transposed pages, repeated pages, and whole sections in upside down. There was no way of telling if there was anything missing. But if you knew your way in the woods at all, you could enjoy yourself tracking it down. I read the library "Camp Fire Girls," since that's what they were there for, but though they could be read by poorer light they were not as good." This series follows the adventures of Bessie King, an (apparently) orphan waif. She and her friend, the motherless Zeta, whose father is in jail on trumped-up charges, run away from their cruel guardians in order to avoid being blamed for a fire that was set by Bessie's guardian's son. They fall in with a group of Camp Fire girls, with whom they join and have many stirring adventures. Throughout the series, they are pursued and periodically captured by ruffians sent by the folks they ran away from. At the end of the sixth book, all the loose ends are tied together: Bessie is reunited with her parents, Zeta's father (who turns out to have invented the cellular telephone) is freed and will become rich from his invention, the Camp Fire leader is to be married, the rich girls repent of their snooty ways, and the various malefactors are captured by the authorities. All very satisfying.
Excerpt from A Camp Fire Girl's Happiness: Trenwith and Jamieson, laughing a good deal, and enjoying themselves immensely, insisted on doing the heavy work of setting up the ridge poles, and laying down the floors of the new tents, but when it came to stretching the canvas over the framework, they were not in it with the girls. "You mean well, but I never saw anything so clumsy in my life!" declared Eleanor, laughingly. "It's a wonder to me how you ever come home alive when you go camping by yourselves. "Oh, we manage somehow," boasted Charlie Jamieson. "That's just about what you do do! You manage -- somehow! And, yet, when this Camp Fire movement started, all the men I knew sat around and jeered, and said that girls were just jealous of the good times Boy Scouts had, and predicted that unless we took men along to look after us, we'd be in all sorts of trouble the first time we ever undertook to spend a night in camp!" Charlie shook his head at Trenwith in mock alarm. "Getting pretty independent, aren't they?" he said to his friend. "You mark my words, Billy, the old-fashioned women don't exist any more!" "And it's a good thing if they don't!" Eleanor flashed back at him. "They do, though, only you men don't know the real thing when you see it. You have an idea that a woman ought to be helpless and clinging. Maybe that was all right in the old days, when there were always plenty of men to look after a woman. But how about the way things are now? Women have to go into shops and offices and factories to earn a living, don't they, just the way men do?" "They do -- more's the pity!" said Trenwith. Eleanor looked at him as if she understood just what he meant. "Maybe it isn't so much of a pity, though," she said. "I tell you one thing -- a girl isn't going to make any the worse wife for being self-reliant, and knowing how to take care of herself a little bit. And that's what we want to make of our Camp Fire Girls -- girls who can help themselves if there's a need for it, and who don't need to have a man wasting a lot of time doing things for them that he ought to be spending in serious work..." She stood before them as she spoke, a splendid figure of youth, and health and strength. And, as she spoke, she plunged her hand into a capacious pocket of her skirt. "There!" she said, "that's one of the things that's kept women helpless. It wasn't fashionable to have pockets, so men got one great advantage just in their clothes. Camp Fire Girls have pockets!" |
Original titles:
Re-issued in 1927 with slightly modified titles:
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Source: WorldCat Holdings |