More Sci-Fi Babe Polling And A Denture-Loosening Literary Segue

Yes, you read that right. Allow me to explain.

First, our pal JohnL at TexasBestGrok has got his latest Sci-Fi Babe Poll up. (Go to John's main page to vote. Also, be sure to click on the Gallery of Space Beauties for winners from past polls, although I see it is still reporting the blatent lie that Ardala beat Col. Deering.)

This time around, the contest is between two characters from a show I've simply never heard of: Land of the Giants.

I clicked over and discovered that the show was about a band of space castaways. (Where have I heard that idea before?) But what tickled me is that the name of their ship is the "Spindrift".

Por qua? Because I was just thinking of a book I used to read a lot as a child called The Spindrift. It was the story of a boy who joins a group of rebel privateers operating in the shallows of Long Island Sound during the American Revolution, focusing in particular on a point of land called the Devil's Anvil or something like that. I can't seem to find the book on Amazon, which is not surprising. Sound at all familiar to anyone?

The Spindrift was part of my first big blossoming as a reader. When I was in third or fourth grade, I started to participate in those school-based book sales. You know - kids would get a catalog from Scholastic Publishers (or whoever it was) to take home and pick whatever they wanted. It seems to me now that I used to order fifteen or twenty books at a go and my parents, bless them, never ever objected. In fact, I trace my love of reading back to these events.

Looking back, I can't remember many of the books I got, but a few stand out.

One was "Griese/Csonka - The Miami Dolphins' One-Two Punch". Okay, not exactly litterchure. But I had been a 'Fins fan ever since about 1970, so of course I had to have this.

Another was a story about a group of children in Nazi-occupied...Norway, I think, that smuggle some gold out of a town by hiding it on their sleds and sledding past the troopers. I can't remember the name of this book.

Yet another was about a couple of Jewish children who escape Nazi-occupied Austria and smuggle out their family's diamonds in the water bottle of the little girl's doll. Again, I can't remember the name of the book. At one point, the children are searched by a German Army matron on a train. I remember that as being one of my first tastes of literary suspence.

Just so you don't get the idea of a theme emerging here, I'll also mention a book I was very fond of about a boy from Boston who runs away to the Gold Rush. The family butler, proper to the point of idiosycracy, decides to follow in order to protect the boy. They stow away on a steamer going round the Horn, are discovered and barter their passage in return for shovelling coal in the boiler room. The rest of the book is about their adventures in the California mining fields and culminates in the butler wedding the boy's (widowed) mother, who had come in search of him.

Again, I can't remember the name of this book. But it was made into a Disney movie starring Suzanne Pleshette. I was very excited about this because I had a crush on her at the time (from watching too much Bob Newhart). But I was bitterly dissappointed when I finally saw the movie because it completely revised the plot of the book, which I practically had memorized at the time. (Does this rant sound familiar? You can see that my hatred of this sort of thing goes way, waaaay back.)

How about you lot? What are some of your early reading memories?