What Would Joe Do? A Fist for Joe Louis and Me by Trinka Hakes Noble

Every Friday, after he came home from working at the auto plant, my father gave me a boxing lesson.

"Fists up, Gordy." he'd say.

Detroit made two things: great boxers and great cars. But when the Great Depression came, people stopped buying cars. Times got hard in Detroit. But we still had Joe Louis in our corner.

But Gordy's father loses his job and his mother has to take a job sewing for the new neighborhood tailor, Mr. Rubenstein. Ira Rubenstein is in Gordy's class, and Gordy know they had fled the Nazis to come to the United States, but he doesn't really know Ira.

When one day at recess he asks Ira what he likes to do, Ira shyly says he likes boxing. He says that he and his father always listen to the Friday Night Fights on the radio, and the two boys get together after school to practice their Joe Lewis boxing moves. The two new friends nickname themselves "Iron Ira" and "Gordy Steel."

And soon their hero, Joe Louis, the guy from Detroit, wins his World Championship fight over the boxer Max Schmelling from Nazi Germany.

Then one day at recess, Nicky Benkovski starts picking on Ira. At first Ira ignores him. But Nicky suddenly shoves Ira. Then it happened. Ira gets up ...
and puts up his dukes!

And Gordy knows what he has to do.

"I knew Joe Louis wouldn't let Ira go it alone."

Besting the school bully provides the action for Trinka Hakes Noble's latest A Fist for Joe Louis and Me (Tales of Young Americans) (Sleeping Bear Press, 2019), but there's more to this story than standing up to the classroom bully. The two boys combine forces and the lessons in boxing learned from their idol to protect each other and the other kids in the school because it is the right thing to do, in this latest title in the Tales of Young Americans series, which deals with the the issues of the 1930s-urban and international migration, the Great Depression, and the days before World War II. Artist Nicole Tadgell's perceptive ink and watercolor paintings add to this powerful storytelling of a focal point in American history.

Going to California: Ruby's Hope by Monica Kulling

Ruby and her family were slow to leave.

Ruby loved big-sky Oklahoma.

But the stock market crashed, and the rains stopped. The dust storms got worse and worse until it was hopeless to grow anything on their farm, and Ruby sadly joined her parents, her big brother and sister, and two little sisters in the family car, hoping to afford enough gas to make to California.

The Hudson Super-Six was packed tightly with everything needed to live on the road: a lantern, pots to cook in, clothes and tools, two mattresses....

They found work picking lettuce, and when the fields were empty, they followed word of work picking peas. But a sudden freeze had ruined the peas, and Ruby's family had no money for gas to move on. Ruby's dad and big brother went to work sweeping streets in a nearby town, but there was less and less food in the pot over the campfire, and Ruby's family had nothing but hope that somewhere out there they'd find work and someday a home.

Then a strange woman with a limp and a big black box appeared in their camp.

"My name's Dorothea," she said, shaking Ruby's small hand. "This is my camera. The government hired me to take photographs of migrant farm workers."

Ruby had an idea. "Would you like to take my mama's picture?"

And that picture of Ruby's mother, Florence Owen Thompson, is of course the famous photo, "Migrant Woman," which helped prompt private and governmental assistance for the "Okies," over 200,000 American Depression-era migrants from the Dust Bowl to California. Florence Thompson's image, posed with her small children in front of a lean-to tent, remains an iconic image of motherhood in one of America's pivotal times in this story told in Monica Kulling's Ruby's Hope: A Story of How the Famous “Migrant Mother” Photograph Became the Face of the Great Depression (Page Street Kids, 2019).

Young readers see the true story of people displaced by climate problems through the eyes of young Ruby and famed photographer Dorothea Lange, who immortalized a family's hard times and hopes for the whole nation to see. In her retro-styled illustrations, artist Sara Dvojack empathetically depicts the lives of the Dust Bowl "Okie" emigres' in a moment in time which lives on in our national memory in an image of a real mother. A first purchase for school and public library collections.

What IF? On the Blue Comet by Rosemary Wells

Across from me in his seat, Dutch was scanning the paper again. He had it open to the Christmas Eve massacre story. Then it came to me. I glanced leftward to the two ladies in the seats beside us. They were deep in face-to-face conversation. The last time I saw them, they had been thumb-size and made of tin. So had Dutch. He was the metal man with the tin glasses reading his newspaper. And I was the tin boy on the opposite seat, riding around and around forever, staring out the window of the Golden State streamliner at another great big Oscar who might, this very minute, be peering in at me.

I had jumped onto a toy train and escaped into some kind of time and space neverland.

Rosemary Wells, famed for her Max & Ruby toddler tales, has here herself made a huge jump into another literary genre altogether--the young adult time travel fantasy, with great success.

It's 1931. Oscar and his widowed father live happily enough in their little house in Cairo, Illinois, their retreat from fifth-grade arithmetic and trying to sell John Deere tractors to hard-pressed farmers. Oscar and his dad share a love for their elaborate Lionel train layout in the basement and spend most nights down there together. But it all ends when his dad loses his job and their house and is forced to sell their beloved Lionel trains to town banker, Mr. Pettishanks. Oscar is reluctantly taken in by his stoic, penurious Aunt Carmen, who ekes out her living teaching piano and declamation to the town's richest children, while his father tries to find a new life for them in California.

There is no joy in Aunt Carmen's niggardly rules and lima bean and canned cod-cheek casseroles, and Oscar finds brief relief in a chance meeting with Mr. Applegate, a vagrant ex-teacher who secretly coaches him in math, tells him about Einstein's theory of time, and teaches him his private code for memorizing Kipling's "If," a skill which happens to endear him to Mr. Pettishanks, who is duly moved to allow Oscar occasional visits to his former trains on display downtown in the bank.

There after hours on Christmas Eve, the now watchman Mr. Applegate lets Oscar in to run the trains, and when two robbers force their way in and fire their guns at them, Oscar follows Mr. Applegate's last words, "Jump, Oscar!" and leaps into the train layout. When he comes to his senses, he finds himself amazingly inside the Lionel scene, now full-sized and as real as he is, with the train to Chicago just pulling into the station. Still fearful, Oscar bolts onto the train and into a time travel adventures which takes him to Los Angeles in 1941, back east to New York City before the Crash in 1926, and eventually back to his own time with his life forever changed.

Along the way Wells has her resilient eleven-year-old hero meet up with many celebrities of that time and future times, including Ronald Reagan, as the cheerful recent college graduate "Dutch" who travels with him to Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock, intrigued by the bank robbery mystery, and Joan Crawford, whose own elaborate train layout helps Oscar, now 21 and reunited with his older (and balder) father, escape a team of draft-dodger hunters by jumping onto a train to the New York City of 1926.

On that train is a willful ten-year-old runaway rich girl, Claire, who takes Oscar, now six years old, back to her wealthy life with her stockbroker father, where the young Oscar tries to warn a meeting of financiers--including Joseph Kennedy, Sr., accompanied by his young son Jack--of the coming stock market collapse three years in the future. And when Claire's father decides to pack Oscar off to an orphanage, Oscar jumps once more, this time into Claire's train layout which takes him back toward Cairo, again eleven years old but this time with knowledge that will enable him and his father (now with his youthful full head of hair temporarily restored) to have a new and better life together.

It's an absorbing read, with plenty of adventure and a delightful mix of history thrown in, in a real change of pace for the versatile Wells in her latest, On the Blue Comet, 2010. Her publisher, Candlewick Press, has gone all out in this beautiful edition, complete with creamy page stock and charmingly nostalgic, absolutely gorgeous illustrations by the prodigiously talented Bagram Iboutalline who adds much to a tale in which Lionel trains become the means and metaphor for Einstein-inspired time travel.

As School Library Journal says, "The sheer beauty of this winning book will attract many readers; the magic of the story and its likable protagonist will hook them."