From 'Egg' to the Kettles, MacDonald left her mark

By Misha Berson
Seattle Times theater critic

	E-mail this article Print this article Search archive

If she had written only the enormously popular "Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle" books, longtime Western Washington resident Betty MacDonald would have become a Northwest literary legend.

But MacDonald did more. For one thing, she also penned "The Egg and I." Her first book, it is a marvelously acerbic memoir about running a chicken ranch on the Olympic Peninsula in the 1920s with her then-husband. A runaway best seller when it came out in 1945, "The Egg and I" was also made into a hit movie starring Claudette Colbert, which in turn spun off a series of "Ma and Pa Kettle" films. (The fictional Kettles were a rustic farming couple loosely based on some of MacDonald's rural neighbors.)

Plucky and productive, MacDonald went on to pen other autobiographical books. They include "The Plague and I," published in 1948, which recounted the author's bout with tuberculosis and her spell in a Washington sanitarium, with rare candor for the time. Also of vivid local interest: "Onions in the Stew" (1955), which focuses on MacDonald's life on Vashon Island with her second husband and two daughters.

But it is the "Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle" series that has found the largest readership over the years. The four Piggle-Wiggle volumes (the first three illustrated by "Eloise" artist Hilary Knight; the last by Maurice Sendak) are easy to find in bookstores and libraries, a breeze to read, and highly entertaining for children and parents.

MacDonald knew just how to balance naughty and nice in these irreverent and instructive tales. And she fashioned her own, quintessentially American version of a Mary Poppins-type adult — the kind who spreads joy and fun to kids, yet won't put up with guff.

Only 49 when she died of cancer in 1958, MacDonald left behind a stack of works to be long enjoyed. Those curious about her can visit the six-acre Vashon Island spread — now called the Betty MacDonald Farm — where she lived and wrote for some years.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company