Title: Holiday Mountain
Author: Lloid and Juanita Jones
Date: 1949
Publisher: Westminster
ISBN: none
Length: 200 pages
Quote: “There’ll be no shortage of fun at the Campbell place...Get in thirty-five cords of wood, clear half a mile of timber for a ski trail, finish eight cabins, harvest a few hundred sacks of kinnikinnick, wind a ton or so of evergreen wreaths, and wait on the tourists in our spare time.”
That’s pretty much the plot of this story. Mr. Campbell is injured, so instead of only helping him with the “fun” of running the dude ranch as they usually do, the children have to do it all. They go to school, too. They have fun along the way. And although no 1950s novel about teenagers would have been allowed to go on for 200 pages without a Teen Romance, this was still 1949, and Holiday Mountain manages to reach a cheerful ending without a single smooch.
Is this a wild parental fantasy? I don’t think so. I remember the summer my brother and I got involved in helping relatives rebuild a house that had burned down the previous winter. His first construction job, my first teaching job, real money, plus our usual gardens to tend, errands to run, pets, chores, and of course we still wanted to be in the Summer Reading Club, in which we were competing against each other for the grand prize...best vacation we ever had. I remember, too, the special form of chronic fatigue that permeates the body of an adolescent who’s been ordered to do something for the convenience of other people...but mostly I remember the energy that surges through the same body when the same adolescent gets a chance to do real, rewarding, challenging work. We put in eighteen-hour days of what most people would have called work, and loved it.
To balance the joy the Campbell children find in hard work, the Joneses give their characters a friend who doesn’t enjoy the work his hard-bitten aunt demands from him. Poor Les has so much “less” that he’s not even sent to school! The parents try not to be judgmental; the children use their surplus energy to help Les.
It’s not hard to see why so few libraries have kept copies of Holiday Mountain. The Campbell kids’ division of labor might be considered sexist, and it’s realistic, but not politically correct, that everyone in their neighborhood is Anglo-American. More importantly, lazy people don’t want to read about how much teenagers can accomplish, and how much they can enjoy doing it, if their time is not being consumed by TV, computers, endless chatter, “hanging out,” and Teen Romance.
If you want inspiration to unplug yourself and your family, and get things done, Holiday Mountain may still supply it.
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