Frank Vaughn

Sometime in the 1980s, I found a few books from the We Were There series in our local public library, and loved them. Already at that time, it was hard to find these older books, so when I found a few recent reprints, I was delighted to purchase them for our library. This one about the Pony Express turned out to be an exciting story, and it really brings that service to life. There are two main characters, a boy and a girl, so the book should appeal to both; there is more about the boy than show more the girl. Both the dangers and the joys of the Pony Express are described here. This is a great book for any middle-grade reader who loves stories about the Old West, about cowboys, and about horses. show less

At bedtime Johnny and Janie are unexpectedly visited by Tom Corbett in his spaceship Polaris and are taken on a trip with him to the moon, a place they’d always wanted to visit. It’s an airless place of high mountains and deep craters where the sky is black and there’s no sound, because there’s no air to carry the sound. The gravity is so light that, “With every step they took, they jumped up into the air and came down like rubber balls.” Seeing the “big blue ball of Earth” show more the children long for home, to which Tom rapidly returns them.

Rereading this childhood treasure from 1953 in 2021 there are a few discrepancies from what is now known from lunar exploration since it was published. Vaughn’s color illustrations tint the moonscape with a yellow glow different from its actual gray and the Earth appears larger in the sky than it does from the lunar surface, and, alas, not quite as wonderous as it does in NASA’s color photos. Nevertheless, the book conveys a sense of wonder about space exploration to its young audience who would undoubtably overlook a copyeditor’s slip about air. Martin, the pen name of Marcia Lauter Obrasky Levin, teacher turned lawyer, author of beginning readers and math textbooks, and later creator of the Donna Parker girls’ mystery series, presents the children, “jumping up into the air” on the moon’s surface when just two pages before she explains that there was no air to jump in there. show less