My Hero, Nancy Drew

I just watched this short biography on PBS about Mildred Wirt Benson. That name is probably not familiar to anyone so let's try Carolyn Keene. If you still can't figure it out how about Nancy Drew.

My new best friend Mildred wrote the first 23 of the original 30 Nancy Drew books. It's really an interesting story about where the ideas for the books came from and how they were published. I'll spare you the details but I was hooked. Probably because Nancy Drew was my hero when I was growing up.

I always loved mysteries. It started with the Boxcar Children, then it was Nancy Drew, and finally anything written by Agatha Christie. I don't know exactly why. Maybe it has something to do with figuring stuff out or as we teachers like to say "problem solving." That's probably the same reason that I like math.

So this show about Mildred brought back all of my delightful childhood memories of Nancy Drew. It has also sparked an interest in one of Mildred's other characters that she wrote about under her own name, Penny Parker. Mildred said that Penny Parker was a better Nancy Drew than Nancy Drew was. This intrigues me! I want to read a Penny Parker book.

It probably won't happen though. They are hard to come by and I'll probably forget all about this soon especially with this Russia trip. But for right now it's fun and exciting and I'll go to bed tonight wishing once again that I was Nancy Drew just like it did when I was 10.