Fred's Book Club: Ms. Plow.

Welcome to another edition of the Humpback Writers, the book feature that has "hump" in its name for neither medical nor prurient reasons, but only because it appears on Wednesday. And keep your minds out of the gutter, boys, because today we have a kids' picture book, the first book I ever read... OR DID I?

Katy and the Big Snow by Virginia Lee Burton was first published in 1943 and has never been out of print. Burton was an illustrator as well as a writer, and I love her drawings on this and other stories. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is probably her most famous book, but she had others like this one and Maybelle the Cable Car, Calico the Wonder Horse, and The Little House, which was adapted as a cartoon by Disney, the first cartoon about urban sprawl I know of.

I always remembered, and not without some pride, that Katy and the Big Snow was the very first book I read all by myself, without help.

OR DID I?

Now, to tell this story, I guess I need to say SPOILER ALERT! If you don't want to hear about what happens to Katy when the humongous blizzard socks in Geoppolis, then close the screen! Don't keep reading!

Okay, here's the deal.

I borrowed the book either from our nearest city library or from the library at school; I'm not sure but it was probably the local library, which was very small. I don't recall the elementary school library lending books, and I don't know that they would have to kids just learning to read, but the teacher may have lent them out. I remember standing in the hall of the house in which I grew up, trying to read the story aloud. It was very dramatic, you know, full of Burton's stylish and colorful art. The story was about Katy, a bulldozer in the summer and a snowplow in the winter, who was turfed out because of her age and replaced by new snowplows. Then the town gets whaled on by snow, and all the new plows break down, and Katy emerges from the garage to show she's still the strongest and toughest plow there is. Katy's heroic feat in the face of disparagement was inspiring to me, and I remembered it for decades.

Except that was not the story.

When I got the book as an adult, I was stunned to find out that the story had changed. Katy was stuck in the garage when the snow started, but only because the snow was not deep enough -- something I understand now but wouldn't have as a child. Plows usually don't clear snow until it's at least a couple of inches deep. So only when the snow gets really deep do they send out Katy, who frees the streets for emergency services and saves the town, as the Highway Department knew she would. No drama.

Whuh?!?!?

One of two things happened: Either they changed the story in later editions to make it less combative, more friendly, or I just thought I was reading the book and made up my own story by ripping off a plot from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and all the other misfit-saves-the-day stories that were so popular for children. (By the time I was reading, the Biblical prophecy that "The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone" was so well-ingrained that, if I'd been a builder, I would have probably started my projects with the least-appropriate stones I could find.)

So I don't really think that they changed the story of Katy, although if anyone knows otherwise, please pass along the information. I give myself marks for writing my own story, as a means of covering up the fact that I actually could not read, or not much. I may have stolen some plot points, but that made me perfectly suitable to write for television.

But now I wonder what the first book I actually did read on my own was.

Katy beats the ever-lovin' crap out of the snow, no prob

Anyway, hats off to Katy, who of course does save the day in the book. The book's lesson of quiet determination in the face of adversity is even better than the one I made up. Plus, it's got a great town map.

And I'll tell you one last thing -- to this day, whenever we have a blizzard, I think of this book, and how the snow got up to the second story windows and nothing in town could move.

Nothing, that is, except Katy! Chug! Chug! Chug!