A Year Down Yonder

                      by

                 Richard Peck

 

                           Newbery Medal Winner (2001)

Peck, R. (2000). A year down yonder. New York, NY:

Scholastic, Inc.

If you look at almost anyone’s list of “The 100 Most Authentic American Plays” you’re sure to find one called The Old Homestead.  A man named Denman Thompson, who lived in a little town called Swanzey Center, NH around a century ago, wrote it.  The good folks of Swanzey Center put on a re-enactment of this show for three days every summer to raise money for the local churches.  The reason I know this is that I grew up there and I was part of that annual production for most of my formative years.  The reason I mention this here is that reading A Year Down Yonder was like a homecoming for me.

           

The Old Homestead focuses on a simple country senior named Josh Whitcomb who proves to be unusually wise, caring, comical and loveable.  That characterization has a female counterpart in A Year Down Yonder’s Grandma Dowdel.  When a teenager named Mary Alice needs to leave her Chicago home while her parents try to find work during the Great Depression, she dreads having to go to live with her grandmother in the country.  But she gradually realizes that her Grandma Dowdel is like a barnyard menagerie all rolled into one old lady: she’s as sly as a fox, as caring as a mother hen, as adorable as a puppy, and as wise as an owl.  By the story’s end, a post-World War II Mary Alice gets married on her grandmother’s porch to a young man that Grandma Dowdel introduced her to during that “year down yonder” when Mary Alice lived at “the old homestead.”

One reason why Denman Thompson’s play is a beloved classic is that he filled it with sight gags.  Richard Peck did the same thing with his book.  As the story unfolds, readers are treated to such literary images as Grandma rigging up a trap that sends a shower of hot glue down upon a boy who is trying to tip over her outhouse.  Or Grandma bilking the rich town banker into paying five dollars for a ten-cent cup of stew. And that time when grandma’s pet snake got loose and scared a woman who was modeling nude for an artist renting a room in Grandma Dowdel’s house, sending the terrified lady running buck-naked down the streets of town.  Whether on stage or between the pages of a book, sight gags are a sure-fire success.                

PICTURE SOURCES:

nysoclib.org

amazon.com

etc.usf.edu

nocaptionneeded.com