“It was difficult, later, to think of a time when Betsy and Tacy had not been friends.” This is the first line of the first book in a series that Maud Hart Lovelace wrote between 1940 and 1955, about the enduring friendships of Betsy, Tacy and Tib, growing up in fictional Deep Valley, Minnesota, at the turn of the last century. The stories span their school years through young adulthood when, in 1914, Betsy travels to Europe on her own and realizes her dream of becoming a writer.
From the beginning, their world was my world, and Betsy’s dreams mirrored my own, as a youngster growing up on a family farm where I could run free and my imagination could run with it. Looking back, it’s hard to remember a time when these stories of friendship, adventure and a restless eagerness to grow up, coupled with the bumps and hard truths that come with leaving childhood behind, weren’t part of my life.
I still treasure my own enduring friendships with two schoolmates, Sandy and Carolyn. Like Betsy, I was invested in family and small-town life, while at the same time knowing, as Betsy did, that there was a greater world I yearned to experience.
I read my first Betsy-Tacy book as an 8-year-old, growing up in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, about an hour north of Mankato, where Maud Hart Lovelace grew up. Mankato inspired Lovelace’s stories about Deep Valley that, in turn, motivated my own youthful storytelling.
While Betsy wrote on a trunk found in the family’s attic, my own desk was a steamer trunk on our sunny back porch. I commandeered my mother’s clunky Underwood typewriter to plonk out adventure stories and a play about Martha Washington that my second-grade class performed. I played Martha, of course, battling British soldiers in a standoff that, well ... could have happened. Betsy was chastised for not sticking to historical facts, too.
My own stand-in for Tib’s glamorous Aunt Dolly from Milwaukee was my tart and alluring Aunty Pat, who wore White Shoulders perfume, played poker with the fellas and worked in a downtown Minneapolis bridal shop. She’d arrive at the farm with armloads of shopworn castoffs in tulle, velvet, satin and lace that my own band of neighborhood playmates — much like Betsy’s friends — recycled for endless games of dress-up and impromptu plays, pageants and parades.
Neighborhood children had the run of our farm, with a hill for sledding in winter, a creek with cattails and tadpoles, and the ruins of a cottage in the woods that we were sure was haunted by a wicked witch. Betsy’s world of horse-drawn buggies and rowdy sing-alongs at the local Majestic Motion Picture Theatre did not seem a half-century away.