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Cleary, the children's author, on whatmakes a good readBEVERLY Cleary, who's enticed generations of children into reading with her adventures of Henry Huggins, Ramona and a motorcycle-riding mouse named Ralph, turns 90 on Wednesday.
So much for the good news. The bad news? She isn't writing any more books.
"I got rid of my typewriter," she tells The Post from her home on California's Monterey Peninsula. "I've always hated to type."
When the one-time children's librarian sat down to write her first Henry Huggins tale 57 years ago, "I didn't know how to write a book," she recalls. "But I had done storytelling in the library, where we studied a story and then told it. We didn't read it aloud, we told it.
"And so, I mentally told 'Henry Huggins,' and wrote it down."
Ironically, this prolific author had trouble learning to read. In first grade, Cleary says, the teacher "literally whipped us into shape - she once whipped my hand with a metal-tipped bamboo pointer. I didn't understand what I'd done wrong."
At one point, she came to the word "city," which she pronounced "kitty" - "and was roundly chastised by the teacher."
It wasn't until a boring, rainy Sunday afternoon in the third grade that reading finally clicked. Bored, she picked up a book - "to look at the pictures" - and discovered she was reading and enjoying what she read, finishing the book that day.
So how can parents and teachers get youngsters interested in reading?
"Find the right books. My books," she laughs.
Cleary's always written what kids want to read. For that, generations of readers can thank an urchin who visited her library years ago in Yakima, Wash.
He was in a group of fourth- to sixth-graders, boys who didn't like to read. "They were a nice bunch of grubby little boys who parked their baseball mitts on my desk in the summer and their earmuffs in the winter," she says.
"There wasn't much in the library they wanted to read. And one of them said to me, 'Why doesn't somebody write books about kids like us?' And that stuck with me for years, until I started to write."
Over the next two dozen books, Cleary wrote about what was familiar to her. One Henry Huggins episode - when he caught a salmon with his bare hands - is based on the true story of her cousin.
And Ramona? "I wasn't a pest, but I often had Ramona-like thoughts," she admits, adding many girls have probably felt like Ramona.
"I've had girls write and say that I'm really writing about them."
The mother of twins, Cleary wrote about twins, too - Mitch and Amy. Her own kids' reaction? "One of them said, 'I love it, I love it, I love it!' And the other said, 'Make it a thousand pages long!'"
In all her books, Cleary says, she's always stuck to one rule: "I never reform anybody. Because when I was growing up, I didn't like to read about boys and girls who learned to be better boys and girls."
bheller@nypost.com
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