Don Freeman, creator of such popular children’s books as Corduroy, Norman the Dorman,Mop Top, and Dandelion, was born in 1908 in Chula Vista, California. After graduating from high school in St. Louis, Missouri, he attended summer art school in San Diego. There he met his future wife, Lydia Cooley. They married in New York in 1932. Don struggled to earn a living playing trumpet in jazz bands. After losing his instrument on the subway one night, he turned to drawing. Soon his sketches of New York City appeared in the Herald Tribune, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and other publications. He was also an illustrator for William Saroyan and Brooks Atkinson. Between 1945 and his death in 1978, he wrote and illustrated over thirty children’s books, and was the illustrator for over a dozen other titles.
A small boy takes fishing lessons from a pelican on a wind-swept beach. His first fish, caught by accident in one of his new red boots, goes to the teacher as a reward for retrieving the other lost boot. The story, told with simplicity, humor, and originality, and the illustrations make the perfect blend of text and art that distinguishes a true picture book. The changing pattern of light on sky and water from early morning until night is caught in some of Mr. Freeman’s loveliest pictures. Excellent.
Library Journal
An author and illustrator of many delightful books here presents one of the most lucid pictures of the ocean's tidal movements and their effect on one little fisherman. In the company of a friendly pelican who demonstrates his own skill as a fisherman, Ty parks his boots on shore and himself on a pole and waits for a bite. As the tide rolls in, it carries the red boots out and Ty with hook, line, and sinker retrieves one, enclosing a perfect fish. But the trick of the day is performed by the pelican, for as the tide rolls out and Ty walks back to his trailer, the delightful bird perched on a dune opens its mouth and returns to him the other boot.
