When I was very little, one of my favorite books was Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by
Virginia Lee Burton. It was published in
1939 before I was born, and has remained a children’s classic. There’s even an animated version produced by
HBO, and still popular (you can see it on YouTube), and it inspired a T Shirt.
The story
is about Mike Mulligan, an independent contractor, and his faithful steam
shovel, dubbed “Mary Ann.” By 1939,
steam shovels had been replaced by much more modern machines, and Mike was out
of work. So he left his city with his
machine and set out to look elsewhere.
He finally landed in the remote town of Popperville, where the site for
a new town hall was being prepared, and volunteered that he could dig the
foundation in a single day: “She [Mary Ann] can dig as much as a day as a
hundred men can dig in a week (but he was never really sure if this was true)!” Though the town fathers scoffed, they took
him on, with the proviso that if he couldn’t do the job in a day as he
promised, he wouldn’t be paid.
Well, of
course he did, but there was one problem: they had been so busy digging that
they forgot to provide a ramp so that Mary Ann could go topside again, so they
were stuck in the soon-to-be basement. A
little boy provided the solution: build the town hall around them, and leave
Mary Ann in the basement, to be converted into a boiler to heat the
building. And that’s what they did--and
Mike stayed on as the building’s janitor.
This
synopsis is very dry--you can have fun with it, less in the animated version,
but on another YouTube video, where the story is actually read, and you can see
all the pictures. There’s a lot of humor
and whimsy in the story telling.
The story
came back into my mind a few days ago, but in a very different and grown-up
way. I usually find that scholarly
analyses of fairy tales and kid’s books are both tedious and silly, because all
sorts of things are read into them, and these are so far away from the simple
joy and satisfaction that kids get out of them.
I have to admit, though, that I can see an adult interpretation that has
interesting relevance to events of the last few weeks.
Mike and
his Steam Shovel are successful in what they do--better and quicker than a
whole pile of electric or diesel machines or a big bunch of diggers. But, he doesn’t quite think things through. He makes the claim that he can do this--but he’s
never quite sure that this is true.
Well, in Popperville both the quick solution and its inherent stumbling
block are revealed, with the consequence that yes, Mike does what he bragged,
but then gets trapped by his own hubris.
Does this
somehow sound familiar? Will we all be
reduced to being a janitor in the hole into which we’ve dug ourselves? Stay tuned.
The HBO cartoon version of Mike Mulligan is athttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZtXtbZn5f0
The Complete book read aloud is athttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvhN5T4XaU8
And here's an image of the kid's t-shirt (but it's now out of print):
