‘Judy Moody’ author returns

Ross native Megan McDonald comes back to her childhood haunts

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Before Megan McDonald was a best-selling children’s book author, she was an amateur Harriet the Spy, notebook in hand, imitating her favorite heroine on the streets of Ross. Still in elementary school, her top spy target was Bruno Sammartino, star of “Studio Wrestling” and WWWF World Heavyweight Champion, whose house was within walking distance.

Her mission didn’t go well — even almost five decades later she prefers not to provide specifics, saying only that going forward, she would duck down in the car, embarrassed, when her family would drive by his house.

Her relationship with children’s books has gone much better.

Ms. McDonald, 58, has 35 million books in print, including the popular Judy Moody franchise. She also has written the Julie Albright series of American Girl books, as well as dozens of others.

A longtime California resident, she’ll be back in the North Hills Thursday at the Northland Public Library in McCandless, where she once worked as a teenager. Her speech at 7 p.m. is not open to the public but will be webcast at goo.gl/1iNxfq. She also will be speaking at Cornell Elementary School in Coraopolis at 3 p.m. Wednesday, webcast at goo.gl/ zB6s5a. Questions for both events can be submitted in advance.

Books were central to Ms. McDonald and her four older sisters. Her father, an ironworker who worked on the Fort Duquesne and Andy Warhol bridges, dropped out of school at 14 to help support his family after his father died. Books filled in for him where formal schooling left off.

There was one rule in their house: no books at the dinner table. And when her father suspected that rule was being broken, the sisters knew the threat: “If I catch you reading, I’m going to tear out the last page and you’ll never know the ending.”

Other than the one prized hardback book each girl got for Christmas, their reading material came from weekly trips to the big green bookmobile that would visit the neighborhood from the Carnegie Library.

Eventually, a small Northland Library opened (it has since moved to the larger library on Cumberland Road), and Ms. McDonald started working there at age 14. Although she was technically a book shelver, the librarians who worked there let her and other teenagers put on magic shows for kids, run a book club and test out books they were considering ordering.

That experience set Ms. McDonald on route to becoming a children’s librarian.

After graduating from Oberlin College, she enrolled at library school at the University of Pittsburgh. She got a job in the children’s section of the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland, where she would sometimes use puppets from the Lovelace Theater to put on children’s storytimes.

One day she borrowed a hermit crab puppet for a storytime but couldn’t find a hermit crab story to go with it. So she made up her own story. After storytime, the parents came up and asked if they could borrow the book — and when she told them there wasn’t one, they told her she should write it.

That book, “Is This a House for Hermit Crab?” was Ms. McDonald’s first children’s book, published in 1990. It won several awards and led to many other books, several based on her Pittsburgh childhood — such as “The Potato Man,” from her father’s tales of the produce vendors on the North Side; “The Bridge to Nowhere,” about the notquite-complete Fort Duquesne Bridge; and even a Judy Moody book based on the claw machine at Ritter’s Diner in Shadyside.

And it was a cashier at Kaufmann’s who was instrumental in developing Ms. McDonald’s love of writing.

Possibly from having so many older sisters that she couldn’t get a word in edgewise, Ms. McDonald had begun developing a stutter. Her mother, who worked Downtown, went into the bookstore at Kaufmann’s to look for a book on stuttering.

And while the Kaufmann’s cashier didn’t have anything that specific, she recommended that her mother buy “Harriet the Spy” and a notebook where the young Ms. McDonald could write her thoughts down, uninterrupted.

Thirty-five million books later, she’s still writing.