Holiday Wishes!
 by Ann Mulloy Ashmore

Ann Mulloy Ashmore 1999

         Christmas came early to the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection in 1999. At the beginning of the year boxes began arriving from Boston—boxes containing the literary estate of Margret and H. A. Rey. As staff unpacked and documented treasure after treasure, it was clear the Reys and Curious George had given the University of Southern Mississippi an unbelievable gift—the legacy of 42 years of creative collaboration. By fall semester it was time to share the Reys’ gift with the university community and the public at large.  “Curious George Comes to Hattiesburg: The Life and Work of H. A. and Margret Rey” opened September 1, 1999. The exhibit, designed and mounted by curator, Dee Jones, displayed more than 400 illustrations, manuscripts, photographs, diaries, letters, books, pottery, and needlepoint, as well as the original drawings for Curious George, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1941.

One could say that Curious George was quite the Santa in 1999 and as the holidays approached, Jones, an accomplished seamstress, decided the collection’s 6-foot tall stuffed Curious George needed a make-over. Previously owned by the public library in Clarksdale, Mississippi, George came to the collection wearing a pair of print overalls. After many years of children crawling into his lap for story time, the pants were a little grimy. “I thought it would be neat to have him dressed as Santa for our Holiday Book Fair that year,” Jones responded. “So I put my sewing skills to good use and whipped up his outfit.”  It took nearly five yards of red velvet and a size 4X tee shirt for a pattern, but thanks to Jones’ skill, George was dressed as Santa in time for the November event.  “The nice part was that after Christmas, we took off his hat and he was good for Valentine’s Day.”

After working 23 years at de Grummond, Jones moved to Louisiana in 2003. Today she is head of cataloging in the Department of Medical Library Science at LSUHealth in Shreveport. Still, she remembers her tenure at de Grummond with fondness. Like the day she and archives director Toby Graham had to carry George across the courtyard from the McCain Library to the Cook Library for an event, or the time the she asked him to “introduce” one of the librarians dressed in a Curious George costume handing out bananas to members of the audience at the first de Grummond Seminar funded by the Mississippi Endowment for the Humanities. “No one ever told me when I was in library school that I’d be carrying a giant monkey around,” Jones recalled the director’s remark. “At de Grummond, we always considered George things as “other duties as assigned.”