When I was in the sixth grade at Gresham Park Elementary, one of our teachers, Miss Crawford, would read a chapter from a book to us each day for about the last thirty minutes of class. Miss Crawford was young and pretty with a remarkable ability for reading aloud that kept kids engaged and enthralled. The books she read to us were all from the school library, such as Homer Price, Charlotte’s Web and Pippi Longstocking, to name a few. But my favorite was Big Red, the story of a champion Irish setter and a young trapper named Danny Pickett. Written by Jim Kjelgaard and set in the fictional Wintapi wilderness in upstate New York, the book captured my imagination like nothing before. I checked it out of the library whenever it was available on the shelf, which was not very often. I would read the adventures of Danny and Red, envisioning myself in the wilds of the forest, hunting and exploring with my big Irish setter at my side. When school would let out in the afternoon I would ride my bike home, change clothes, strap my Boy Scout hatchet and knife to my belt, grab my Daisy BB gun and head for the woods. I would walk out of our back door and follow the lower trail, walk the creek all the way down to the flood plain that was our football field, climb back up the hill going east and walk the ridge back to the creek behind our house. Sometimes I would climb the hill first and walk the eastern ridge down to where it overlooked the flood plain. Then I would go down the hill and walk the trail along the creek. Or, I would take the top trail that led from the entrance at the left of our house and wound to the right along the top of the western ridge past our big foxhole and follow the trail down the hill to the creek. Those woods seemed as big as the Wintapi wilderness itself. I would spend hours there, sometimes with my neighborhood friends, but usually by myself on the weekdays after school. I longed to be exploring with Red at my side, sniffing out chipmunks, treeing squirrels and flushing out flocks of blue jays. The problem was that my parents would not hear of an Irish setter, due to the fact that we already had a Boston terrier named Bozo. Bozo was a good dog and I loved him, but he was not a hunting, tracking or retrieving dog by any stretch of the imagination. There was no comparison between him and a regal Irish setter. Besides, Bozo had a propensity to run off, so if I had taken him to the woods I would’ve spent the afternoon chasing a runaway Boston terrier through various neighborhoods.
They made Big Red into a movie and I was thrilled when it ran for a week at The Madison Theatre in East Atlanta. I went to see it by myself and was thoroughly disappointed. The movie was terrible and nothing like the book. It’s probably one on the worst book-to-film adaptations of all time. That was my first experience of a movie being nothing like the book and the book being better than the movie. I read Old Yeller. I saw the movie Old Yeller. Fred Gipson wrote the book and the screenplay, thus the movie was pretty much faithful to the book. It has one of the most devastating endings in cinematic history. If you don’t cry at the end of Old Yeller, you simply do not have a heart or a soul. I don’t remember the ending to Big Red. I don’t remember much about the movie at all, except that the main character was not seventeen-year-old expert woodsman Danny Pickett, but some kid about ten with blonde hair and a French accent.
After grammar school, high school and life happened. I never read Big Red again, although I never completely forgot it. A few months back, I was talking with a good friend and mentioned Miss Crawford to him and the profound affect her reading to us had made on my young life, Big Red in particular. I told him that I had neither seen nor read the book since 1968, but it was one of my favorite and lasting childhood memories. A week or so later, I went to the mailbox and inside was a box from Amazon. I opened the box and pulled out a 75th Anniversary Edition of Big Red. I was thrilled and speechless. The book was exactly as I remembered it, complete with the beautiful pen and ink drawings by Bob Kuhn at the beginning of each chapter. I called my friend and, after first pretending to know nothing about it, he eventually admitted to sending me the book. I thanked him profusely and after finishing my reading project I was working on at the time, I settled down with Big Red. I had forgotten parts of the book, but once I started reading I could hardly put it down. I was immediately taken back to my childhood, my dreams of owning an Irish setter, and the pictures in my mind’s eye where I imagined our woods as the Wintapi forest. I finished the book in a week. I’m thrilled to have it in my small library and I will read it again someday. There is one thing I won’t be doing, though. I won’t be watching the movie.