PITTSBURGH — In the late 1980s and early 1990s, my daughter, Shannon, and my son, Glenn, loved a book at the Carnegie Library on the North Side of Pittsburgh called Proud Pumpkin, a 1953 children’s book written and illustrated by artist Nora S. Unwin.
It was not a big book. It was not a famous book. You would not have found it in a store window at Kaufmann’s at Christmas or on a spinning rack at the drugstore. But in our house, it was the book that told us fall had arrived.
The book was never sold to the public and was available only in libraries, so I had to reserve a copy in August to ensure we’d have it for Halloween and harvest time.
August. Think about that. The air in Pittsburgh in August hangs on you like a wet wool coat. The tomatoes are splitting on the vine, the children are counting the days until school starts with equal parts dread and longing, and nobody, absolutely nobody, is thinking about pumpkins.
Except me. Because I knew that if I waited, the single copy the library carried would be gone. So every August I went, and every fall it was ours.
I remember walking the mile and a half to the library with Shannon and Glenn, up Kennedy Avenue, around the winding curves of Perrysville Avenue, and down Federal Street. Our destination was the original library Andrew Carnegie paid for in 1886 — the first public library he ever funded in the United States. Shaped like a castle, it felt magical and special.
The North Side is a place built on hills, and every walk there is a negotiation with them. Up Kennedy, little legs working hard, someone always asking how much farther. Then Perrysville, bending and curving along the ridge, past the porches and the brick and the frame houses stacked close together the way they are in every neighborhood in this city that was built by people who worked for a living. And then the long slope down Federal Street, the whole of the Allegheny flats opening up below you, and there it was.
That library was an imposing stone building, built by people who believed knowledge belonged to everyone, not just those who could afford it. Carnegie gave the money in 1886. It opened in 1890, and President Benjamin Harrison came for the dedication. Nearly a century later, a mother and her two children walked through those same doors to find a pumpkin.
I did not think about any of that history at the time. I thought about whether Glenn’s shoes were tied and whether Shannon would let go of my hand at the crosswalk. But I think about it now. That building was struck by lightning in 2006 and never reopened as a library. The North Side branch moved to a new building on Federal Street in 2009, and the old Carnegie building is now the New Hazlett Theater. The doors we walked through are still there. The children’s room we sat in is not.
The book’s simple illustrations capture the attention of parents and children alike. In truth, it is not just a children’s book but a classic moral lesson about pride, usefulness, and purpose, all wrapped in an autumn narrative.
The story is simple: there is a pumpkin in the patch who is very proud of himself. His brothers are going to be pies. Not him. He is chosen to be a jack-o’-lantern — for one night, he glows, and everyone admires him.
Then Halloween is over, and he is thrown out, knocked over, and nibbled by mice. Lonely and empty, he loses all the vanity he once took in his looks.
That was always the part where the room went quiet. The pumpkin with the big grin, sitting cold and caved in, wondering where everyone had gone. Children feel that page in their stomachs.
So did I.
But when winter comes, a chipmunk finds him and makes a home in him. He finds his purpose after all, just not the one he expected.
Shannon and Glenn loved the pumpkin, and the mice, and the chipmunk. I loved it because the lesson was there for the grown-ups, too. And in those years, in this city, it was a lesson a lot of grown-ups needed. The mills along our rivers had gone quiet. Men and women who had spent their lives being useful, who had been proud of what they made, were suddenly told they were not needed anymore. Every one of them knew how that pumpkin felt on Nov. 1.
Nora Unwin was born in England in 1907 to a family of printers and publishers. She came to New Hampshire in 1946 to visit her friend, the children’s author Elizabeth Yates, and she stayed for the rest of her life. She loved New England in the fall, and you can see it in the book: the soft lines, the gentle color, the sense that even when things are ending, they are not ending badly.
Proud Pumpkin was published by E.P. Dutton in 1953, and it was never reprinted.
Shannon and Glenn grew up. The book went back on the shelf one last time, and I suppose I thought that chapter was closed.
When my grandchildren, Eleanora, Milo, Louisa, and Rocco, were born, and reading books became part of our routine, I longed to find the book. I would bring it up every fall, the way you bring up an old family friend you have lost track of. Do you remember the pumpkin? Do you remember the chipmunk? It was not enough to remember it. I wanted to hold it and share it again. I wanted to sit with the little ones, turn those pages, and watch their faces at the part where the room goes quiet.
I finally did find it on eBay, a rare copy.
The book was from the Sylmar Branch Library in Los Angeles. The last time it was checked out was in 1969. It is a first edition, though there were no subsequent editions.
When it arrived, I just held it for a while. The library markings, the worn corners, the card that said someone, some child in Sylmar, had carried it home in 1969. Somebody’s mother had probably reserved it, too. Two thousand miles away from Perrysville Avenue, another family had waited for that pumpkin.
What I really want to focus on is how an allegory in a children’s book can endure. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel offers a similar lesson about no longer being useful, about technology passing you by, and about finding a new purpose. Mike and his steam shovel, Mary Anne, are replaced by the new gas, electric, and diesel shovels. But they find one last job in a small town, and in the end, Mary Anne becomes the furnace for the new town hall, and Mike becomes the janitor. She never digs another canal. She keeps a town warm instead.
Or consider The Wizard of Oz, which many read as an allegory about the 1896 election, free silver, and the everyman. Dorothy’s silver shoes on the yellow brick road, the Scarecrow as the farmer, the Tin Man as the worker, the Cowardly Lion as William Jennings Bryan. Historians still argue over whether L. Frank Baum meant it that way, but people keep finding it there, and that tells you something about the story.
Proud Pumpkin belongs with them. It is about pride, and about what happens when you are no longer useful, and about finding a purpose anyway. The pumpkin didn’t get to be admired again. He got to be a home. And being a home, being needed, turns out to be the better ending.
These timeless books are treasured because children grow up and understand their profound meaning. That’s why reading is so important.
Shannon and Glenn didn’t know what that pumpkin was teaching them back then, walking down Federal Street with it tucked under someone’s arm. Eleanora, Milo, Louisa, and Rocco won’t know this fall either. They will love the face, the mice, and the chipmunk, the way their mother and uncle did.
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But someday they will be grown, and something they were proud of will be gone, and they will wonder what they are good for now. And somewhere in the back of their minds, there will be a pumpkin in the snow, and a chipmunk making himself at home.
The moral lesson still holds true.