Betsy-Tacy and Tib by Maud Hart Lovelace

It's cute and lovely and peaceful and summery guaranteed to amuse you if you're grownup, and delight you if you're young. Margaret and Hobbie the adorable babies who are too young to understand, and all the mothers and fathers who are too old to understand. Julia and Katie the big bossy older sisters, who can be nice on occasions. Tib with her doll-like appearance and her good-sense and practicality. Tacy with her sweet temper and easy compliance and lovely red ringlets.

But I do hope they have just as much fun as Betsy and Tacy and Tib, and prove to be just as adorable.īetsy with her overflowing imagination, her ability to create entrancing stories effortlessly, and her 'ideas' to divert herself and her friends. If I had children, I'd want them to have a childhood just like this - only I'd rather they not attempt to learn to fly from the rooftop, or give each other haircuts, or mix everything in my kitchen to make an 'Everything Pudding'. Maud once stated that the three couldn’t have been closer if they’d been sisters.Īh, the good old days back when children played outside, used their imagination, and were rarely bored! No TV, iPads or tablets, video games, or computers.

Maud, Bick, and Midge became lifelong friends. Tib’s character was based on another playmate, Marjorie (Midge) Gerlach, who lived nearby in a large house designed by her architect father. Among its many children was a girl Maud’s age, Frances, nicknamed Bick, who was to be Maud’s best friend and the model for Tacy Kelly. Shortly before Maud’s fifth birthday a “large merry Irish family' moved into the house directly across the street. When Maud was a few months old, the Hart family moved two blocks up the street to 333 Center. The street, Center Street, dead-ended at one of the town’s many hills. Maud’s birthplace was a small house on a hilly residential street several blocks above Mankato’s center business district. “That dear family' was the model for the fictional Ray family. Her sister, Kathleen, was three years older, and her other sister, Helen, was six years younger.

She was the middle of three children born to Thomas and Stella (Palmer) Hart. Maud Hart Lovelace was born on April 25, 1892, in Mankato, Minnesota.

Betsy-Tacy and Tib by Maud Hart Lovelace