Pennies for Elephants Book

In 1914, three trained elephants were offered for sale: two adult females, named Mollie and Waddy, and a young male named Tony. A campaign was started in Boston, Massachusetts to raise the $6,000 required to buy the elephants. The fund-raising was run by a now-defunct newspaper, the Boston Post. The campaign was designed to finance the purchase mainly with contributions from local children. This did raise enough money to pay for the elephants and, after a celebratory party at the Fenway Park baseball stadium, the three elephants became residents of Boston's Franklin Park Zoo.

I grew up in Boston and frequently visited that zoo. This story was celebrated by a plaque there. It has also been the subject of three children's books, The Adventures of Mollie, Waddy and Tony by Paul Waitt, published in 1915, the year after the purchase, The Further Adventures of Mollie, Waddy and Tony, also by Paul Waitt, published in 1919, and Pennies for Elephants by Lita Judge, published in 2009.

In the Waitt books, the elephants talk to each other constantly. The first book is mostly about their lives before coming to Boston. The second volume, which I have not yet read, is evidently also about the elephants' lives before they came to the zoo. Pennies for Elephants is set entirely in Boston, and the elephants do not talk, even to each other. This book is principally about how the local children raised $6,000. They shovel snow, they charge admission to parties, they run errands, some donate their entire life savings ($1.14)! Movie theaters have special showings in which all the money goes to the elephant fund.

The story is narrated by Dorothy, who was a little girl at the time. She and her brother Henry are involved throughout the fundraising, and they become friends with the elephants. (Did the three elephants actually live in Boston while the money was raised? It makes a nice story, whether true or not.)

The main difference between the Waitt books and Pennies for Elephants is that Waitt's books are children's books with some illustrations and Pennies is a children's picture book. This has very little text, mostly a sentence or two on every page. Pennies is also much larger: The Adventures of Mollie, Waddy and Tony is approximately 4.75" by 7"; Pennies is about 8.75" by 11.5."

The few illustrations in Adventures are by Clara E. Atwood; they are charming and, understandably, old-fashioned. Lita Judge illustrated as well as wrote Pennies. Her illustrations are lively and funny, with small features that repay closer examination - the snowball in Henry's hand on the title page, the two dogs looking at each other in the picture of Dorothy and Henry crossing the street, the many appearances of the children's dog and of Beatrix the cat, the monocle in the eye of the man outside the movie theater, and much more.

There are also wonderful and well-chosen reproductions of newspaper pages throughout the book, which culminate in a fine joke on the final page about the (literally) dizzying amount of research that went into this.

When I reviewed The Adventures of Mollie, Waddy and Tony, I said that I would not try to assign a rating because I am too old to be part of the intended readership. That is even more true with Pennies for Elephants, so I will just say that I did enjoy it.