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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Perky fellows in a gay-looking speedwagon: The Hardy Boys return
At last, a revival of unexpurgated Frank and Joe.
By Steve Burgess
[10/07/99]

She wins bread, he loafs
Raised to be helpless, partial to pipe dreams, this dad sings the praises of the working wife.
By Rob Ryder
[10/06/99]

Make the dough, do the laundry: Life as a breadwinner mom
Dad's at home, Mom's raking in the bucks -- everything's cool, right? Not exactly.
By Dianne Lake
[10/05/99]

Hurting young men put pen to rage
A writing teacher who works with juveniles sees familiar pain in the diary of Eric Harris.
By Jill Wolfson
[10/04/99]

From "Hey Faggot" to "Hey Daddy"
Savage Dan Savage softens up in fatherhood: Now he's a bitch with a burp rag.
By Daryl Lindsey
[10/01/99]

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Also today Hale fellows well writ The original Hardy Boys are back

Not that we liked Nancy. In fact, we loathed her. It is true that she was the closest thing we had to an action hero when serial novels for girls were dominated by romances. But her saccharine perfection made me want to put a tack on the seat of her roadster. She was capable and level-headed to the point of pathology: She could drive cars and boats, ride horses, pilot planes, fix her own car, break out of a closet using a closet rod as a handmade lever, skin dive and tap dance in Morse code. She was always "attractive," never "beautiful." Of course, we knew she was beautiful, but Nancy was far too modest and sensible to be described with such a florid word. In "The Secret of Red Gate Farm" we are told: "Nancy did not like to be told that she was pretty. She preferred to be called interesting."

Nancy was definitely not conventionally sexy -- although she does tear her clothes or get trussed-up in nearly every caper. Ned Nickerson, her beau, had the sexual potency of a Ken doll and is just as peripheral. He first appeared in volume 7, more a romantic prophylactic than a romantic hero. Presumably, readers would have found it odd if their attractive heroine had no romantic interest whatsoever, yet it would not have been appropriate for a young girl from a good family to fall for a new male lead in each of her hundreds of adventures. "For the present," Nancy tells a roomful of girlfriends who are giggling about their fiancés, "my steady partner is going to be a mystery."

Quite simply, we were jealous.

What we loved about our books were the yellowed paper, the neat pen marks where our mothers had checked off each title they owned, the painted dust jackets with dresses and hairstyles we had only seen in black-and-white photographs of our dead grandmother. And we loved the fabulously outdated expressions. We loved the "chums" and we recognized the "shady characters," because it was an expression that our mothers still used in jest. While we wore flared jeans and baseball shirts, we read: "Titian-haired Nancy was a trim figure in olive green knit with matching shoes. Beige accessories and a knitting bag completed her costume." "Why is she carrying a knitting bag?" we asked ourselves. And where does one find olive shoes? We weren't sleuthing out the villains; we were gumshoes on the trail of a much more sinister mystery -- our mothers' childhoods.

Through Nancy, we solved the riddle of why our mothers disliked white shoes -- even sneakers -- after Labor Day; why the proper response to a compliment was a crimson blush; why taste was more important than a trust fund (though Nancy herself had both); why the use of the double negative was evidence of a predilection for criminal behavior and why it was important to stay on your own side of the tracks.

Unfortunately, the Stratemeyer Syndicate -- whose very name sounds like a villain who would have been brought down by the attractive girl detective -- never quite figured out that their books morphed from popularity into pop art. Nancy appeared in 1930, the brainchild of Edward Stratemeyer, whose novel factory (with its stable of ghostwriters) had been cranking out children's serial fiction since 1905. But in 1959, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who inherited Nancy after the death of her father in 1932, decided that if Nancy was going to continue to appeal to the daughters of her original readers, she needed some freshening up.

The roadster became a convertible, the chums became friends. Nancy made her first and last jump into maturity, aging from 16 to 18. Most dramatic of all, her "curly golden bob" became a grandiose titian color -- the only revision that I consented to graft upon my inner Nancy. Titian! Who else has ever had such hair? To this day, all I know about the color titian is that it rhymes with "patrician" and has something to do with the 16th century painter of the same name.

Gone too were historical artifacts of a less pleasant variety: the more egregious examples of Nancy's racism and general social snottiness. (The new, improved Nancy is hardly a Marxist paragon: She continues to be a lawyer's daughter who specializes in cases of misdirected inheiritance; she is always ready to take money and jewels out of the hands of liars, thieves and "flashy"characters and put it back where it belongs, into the hands of those with good social standing. )

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