Weird Island

40. HOLIDAY MAGIC: The Polar Express

Episode Summary

The Polar Express has become a Christmas classic, but did you know it was written right here in RI by author Chris Van Allsburg?

Episode Notes

The Polar Express has become a Christmas classic, but did you know it was written right here in RI by author Chris Van Allsburg?

Episode Source Material:

Episode Transcription

I love any place early in the morning. As an introvert, mornings provide a sense of calm and relief. Most people don’t want to be social very early, so for a time you’re freed from the expectation to talk and interact. If you’re alone in the mornings, you’re not weird. You’re exactly what people would expect.
And my favorite thing to do in the early morning hours is wander. I’ll take the dog and wear headphones and stroll up and down random neighborhoods. Just the other day we wandered the streets off Blackstone Boulevard on the East Side of Providence as it started to lightly snow. There, every house is beautiful and stylish and unique and the overall area has the quality of a neat, well-maintained park. And the experience was fairytale-like. We passed in front of an ultra-modern, organic home one moment and a gnomy, little English Cottage the next. And I wondered, what are the stories of these houses? Who lived there? Who designed them? What events have taken place inside their walls?
You might imagine the stories are historical in nature - perhaps some famous figure had once owned a home here, and the walls had heard important conversations taking place. Or maybe you imagine stories more commonplace. First steps, first smiles, warm moments between family. Or perhaps you imagine something more fantastical.
As I stopped in front of a red brick cottage, just a half mile or so from Lippitt Park, that’s what I imagined. I imagined that there was some sort of magic within this ordinary little house, the kind of magic that makes anything possible. Like, if you were to start playing a board game here, the events of the game might start coming to life. You might suddenly find lions in the living room, or a rhino charging out the door. Or the house might even drift off into space.
But I also imagined something more festive. I stopped and listened. I was listening for a sound - a sound a friend had told me I’d never hear - the ringing bells of Santa’s sleigh.
I’m Sara and you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week, I’ll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up, from my tiny little state of Rhode Island. And this week, it’s Christmas, and to get into the holiday spirit I’m sharing the story behind some incredibly well-loved children’s books–The Polar Express and Jumanji, which you may be surprised to learn were both written by Chris Van Allsburg here, in Rhode Island.
Maybe you read The Polar Express as a kid, or you read it to your own children. In the story, a young boy has been told by a friend that Santa doesn’t exist. On Christmas Eve, he lays in bed, hoping to hear the bells on Santa’s sleigh. But instead he hears the sound of a train outside his bedroom window. When he goes outside to investigate, he learns that the train is headed to the North Pole. Unafraid, he climbs on board and journeys North, where Santa and his elves are gathered to give out the first gift of Christmas. When he’s selected to receive the first gift, the boy chooses something simple - a bell from Santa’s sleigh. Proof that Santa is real. But as he rides the train home, he discovers the bell has fallen through a hole in his pocket and is lost.
The next morning, as he and his sister open Christmas presents, they discover a small box, and inside is the bell. The children can hear it jingle, but their parents, who no longer believe that Santa is real, can’t hear anything at all.
The Polar Express was written in 1985 by Chris Van Allsburg and beautifully illustrated with soft, dark pastel drawings that are both hopeful and melancholy. And it became almost an instant classic. And as I stood in front of the East Side home where the author lived for many years, I could almost imagine the Polar Express pulling up in front of this house. It’s a red brick Colonial that’s well-maintained but relatively modest for the area. And you could almost picture it on the pages of the Polar Express, alongside the other brick buildings that Van Allsburg drew. But the truth is, The Polar Express wasn’t written in this house. It was written in Providence, somewhere, but the author and his wife moved into this home sometime after the children’s book had been published. But inside these walls, Chris Van Allsburg brought many other imaginative and surreal stories to life.
Van Allsburg was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and he describes his childhood as uneventful, filled with ordinary, small town midwestern things. His family owned a creamery, where they bottled milk and made butter, cream, cottage cheese, and ice cream. And Van Allsburg liked to make models - cars, trucks, airplanes. While he did some drawing as a kid, he really never took art classes in high school.
When it came time to go to college, he had a unique opportunity to meet with an admissions officer from the University of Michigan. The University would actually send people to his high school to recruit students and accept them on the spot, and Van Allsburg recounts the pivotal moment when he made the decision to enter the College of Architecture and Design.
The admissions officer called him into the guidance counselor's office before he had a chance to finish filling out his forms, and when he handed over the incomplete paperwork, the adviser pointed out that he hadn’t indicated what he wanted to study. Looking at the paper, he saw “College of A&D” and asked what that meant. When the man replied, “It’s the College of Architecture and Design,” it occurred to Van Allsburg that studying art could be a lot of fun. The only problem was, his transcript showed that he hadn’t taken any art classes.
So, he lied and said he studied art privately on Saturdays, rather than taking high school classes. The admissions officer was naturally suspicious of this response, so he gave Van Allsburg a bit of a test. He asked, “What do you think of Norman Rockwell?”
Van Allsburg puzzled over this for a moment. Luckily, he knew a bit about Norman Rockwell and remembered many criticized the artist. But, he guessed on the spot that the man was probably a fan. He said, “I told him something like, ‘I believe Norman Rockwell is unfairly criticized for being sentimental. I think he is a wonderful painter who captures America’s longings, America’s dreams and presents American life with the drama and sensitivity of a great playwright.’
The admissions officer pounded his fist on the table and said ‘Boy, you are absolutely right.’ And he was accepted as an art student on the spot, with no history of art classes and no portfolio.
Van Allsburg majored in sculpture, which allowed him to use his experience making models as a kid to inform his art. And when he graduated in 1972, he came to Providence, to attend the Rhode Island School of Design for graduate school. After graduating from RISD, he set up a sculpture studio on North Main Street and married his wife, Lisa, who he had met at the University of Michigan some years earlier.
In 1977 he began exhibiting his sculptures in NYC and other places around New England. Each sculpture was surprisingly narrative, generally capturing a moment of tension. The Titanic just as it was about to sink. A spaceship mid-collision with an observatory. And a coffee which had just been knocked over and captured mid-spill. Each piece suggested events before and after. They suggested a story.
But his studio wasn’t perfect. In the winters, the landlord would cut the heat at the end of the day, and it would get so cold that he couldn’t sculpt. So instead he began drawing little pictures in his significantly warmer apartment. And like his sculptures, his pictures suggested rich and unusual stories. His wife, who was a school teacher at the time, saw his drawings and encouraged him to consider making illustrations for children’s books. She was so adamant that she took the drawings to Boston, where she showed them to editors at Houghton Mifflin. The editor she met with loved them, but recommended that Chris Van Allsburg write the accompanying stories that were begging to be told.
So that’s what he did. His first book, published in 1979, was done entirely in charcoal pencil, the only medium he really knew how to draw with, since he had used charcoals to sketch out his ideas for sculptures. This story was called The Garden of Abdul Gasazi. It was a bit of a surrealist story, about a young boy and a dog who gets magically turned into a duck.
This first book was critically and financially a success, and Van Allsburg soon began imagining his next story. This one was inspired by a rather relatable sentiment: A frustration with the game Monopoly. So, most people are frustrated with Monopoly because that game takes forever to finish. But Van Allsburg was frustrated with it because the stakes weren’t real. When you won a bunch of money, you didn’t actually get anything from it in the end. But what if… when you landed on a space on the game board, something real happened?
This “What if?” question transformed into the story Jumanji, which you’re probably quite familiar with. I, of course, watched the 1995 movie, but had no idea it was based on a children’s book. When the book was released in 1981, it was another success, and Van Allsburg won a Caldecott Medal for the incredibly whimsical illustrations.
Publishers tend to not expect much from children's books when they’re first published. They generally start off slow in sales, but usually to earn out over time compared to many books written for adults. But in the 1980s, publishing houses found the slow but stable children’s market heating up. The baby boom, and increase in two-parent households and changing marketing techniques meant books could become hits much more quickly. Suddenly, Van Allsburg was releasing about a book a year, and he was teaching himself to use different materials with each book he created.
Then in 1985, Van Allsburg’s publisher released The Polar Express.
The story, though written in Rhode Island, was set partially in Van Allsburg’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. He describes the story as his easiest to write. It took only one draft with minimal changes, and that was because the idea for the story came to him like a memory. He had a mental image of a young boy who hears a strange sound in the night and goes outside. It’s very foggy, but as he walks through the woods he sees a train standing still, just sitting in the fog. Van Allsburg asked himself, where would the train go? Where would a child want to go more than anywhere else on a cold, wintry night? And suddenly he realized the train was going to the North Pole.
“Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection.” He said, “I felt, like the story’s narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up.” And, today, Van Allsburg assures his readers that the book is autobiographical.
Though the story was easy to write, the artwork took around 8 months of work. Neighbors of illustrator and friend David Macaulay posed as the children in the story, and Macaulay posed as Santa. But the train interiors, the landscape and the North Pole were largely imagined. And when Van Allsburg pictured the North Pole, he had to imagine it would look like a vast collection of brick factories. How else would the elves make all of those toys? Looking at the North Pole he drew, it’s easy to think perhaps those brick factories were inspired by all the brick mills scattered around Rhode Island, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in America.
The train itself was inspired by the real life train the Pere Marquette 1225, which was among the last of the steam engines constructed before diesel became the norm for railroads. The specific train that inspired Van Allsburg was in service for only 10 years, after which it was saved from being scrapped by Michigan State University, where it was on display during Van Allsburg’s childhood. He remembered seeing the train on a visit with his father, who had attended Michigan State, and the number, 1225 stood out. He thought - that’s Christmas – and it seemed meant-to-be.
In 2004, the Polar Express was made into a computer-animated film based on the book and starring Tom Hanks. It was written, produced, and directed by Robert Zemeckis, who directed Back to the Future. And the movie was a bit futuristic, in a way, because it was the first one done entirely with motion capture. There are also a couple of BTTF easter eggs throughout, like a flux capacitor hidden on the wall of the train’s engine room. This might provide the answer to the perennial question: “How does Santa deliver presents to kids all over the world in just one evening?”
The Polar Express has become a Christmas classic, and in many places, kids can even take a ride on Polar Express trains. Like in Woonsocket, out of the old train depot where the Hachiko statue is (if you listened to that episode!).
Van Allsburg once said, “The Polar Express is about faith, and the power of imagination to sustain faith. It’s also about the desire to reside in a world where magic can happen, the kind of world we all believed in as children, but one that disappears as we grow older.” Although Chris Van Allsburg’s stories are written for children, there’s something about them that really speaks to adults as well. I was really moved and inspired researching this episode, which was a little unexpected. On the surface, I’m just talking about a person who wrote some children’s books. But, it was the way that Van Allsburg discovered many of his most fantastic stories existing already in the world around him that really moved me.
He once came across his daughter’s Peter Pan coloring book, open on the floor of his east side home and noticed the pained, scared expression on the face of a character who had fallen into a pool of water and was waiting to be saved. And he interpreted that pained expression as resulting from the terrible coloring skills of his daughter. So he wrote the book Bad Day at Riverbend, about characters in a coloring book who were confused about what was happening to them. Another time, he found two ants on the countertop and was inspired to tell their story. Then there’s Zathura, the sequel to Jumanji. Van Allsburg was reading a games catalogue from 1912 and discovered that manufacturers used to put two game boards in the same box, that could be played with the same tokens. And he realized that the two little boys who discovered Jumanji at the end of the story would be playing the game on the reverse side–which he imagined to be a space themed game. The two boys were inspired by and modeled on his daughters, and the house was his east side home, if there was a meteor shower in the living room.
Van Allsburg wrote and illustrated 19 books in the 40 or so years he lived in Rhode Island (he has since moved to Beverly, MA), and all of his stories were inspired by this ability and desire to see the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Van Allsburg has commented that a sense of wonder is tolerated in artists. He says, “the reason it's suppressed in general is probably that parents and society feel it's too risky to let things like that survive. They feel these things are in conflict with the responsibilities of adulthood; they are in conflict with maturely taking over your place in a rational world.''
And I think that could be true. But I also had this feeling, as I researched this episode, that you, whoever you are listening to this right now, you’re the kind of person who continues to feel wonder and seek out the extraordinary. You want to know the stories hidden in the world around us and see the magic in the everyday. At least, that’s the impression I’ve gotten from those of you I’ve been lucky enough to talk to. I’ve been overwhelmed with how interesting you all are. The things you think about and notice and find fascinating.
In accepting his Caldecott Medal for Jumanji in 1982, Van Allsburg embraced being weird, and read a note from a five year old fan that said, “Dear Mr. Van Allsburg, I love the books you write. I am so glad your books are so weird because I am very weird. I think you are weird but great. I wish a volcano and flood would be in my room when I am bored.''
And I just wanted to say to you all, I think you are weird but great. I know I always say “Thank you for listening” at the end of each episode, and it probably just sounds like something to say at the end of a podcast. But, I really am thankful for every single one of you. And whether you’re celebrating Christmas or not, I hope you have an incredible day filled with wonder. And I hope to see you next week as we continue to explore, together, all things weird and wonderful in the little state of Rhode Island. Until next time!