A Master of the Tall Tale

M y parents love to tell people that, when I was very young, I turned my nose up at VeggieTales. The clever show amused my parents, but my two-year-old self would have none of it. Thankfully, my sense of humor has improved since then, but it’s still hard to make me laugh aloud while reading a book.

Enter Glen Rounds’s delightful character Mr. Xenon Zebulon Yowder, “The World’s Bestest and Fastest Sign Painter,” which had me chuckling page after page.

My mom recently rescued a large number of books from a local Catholic school that was shutting down. She divided most of them into seven piles, one each for my siblings and me, and then asked us to go through the rest and decide what we wanted. So down to the basement I went, intending to skim through the boxes quickly and head home. But books have a way of luring me in, and suddenly I was sitting down, slowly paging through chapter books and picture books, assessing artwork and writing quality.

Mr. Yowder and the Train Robbers, with its understated cover art, didn’t capture my attention at first, but after reading the dust-jacket blurb, I was hooked. When someone promises you a story about 27 rattlesnakes capturing train robbers, you jump on it. Mr. Yowder is a sign painter (as we’ve noted), and he travels around the American West looking for jobs. After a particularly long stretch of painting elephants (an advertisement for an overalls company), Mr. Yowder takes a well-deserved vacation by going on a little fishing trip. This expedition starts off a chain of events wherein Mr. Yowder makes the acquaintance of a polite rattlesnake, is captured by train robbers, is rescued by the polite rattlesnake and his associates, and then captures the train robbers with their help.

A very straightforward tale, if you ask me. Rounds’s storytelling style is a fantastic mix of matter-of-factness and absurdity, painting a rollicking tale for the reader in a perfectly understated manner. Of course Mr. Yowder speaks rattlesnake. Why would he not? Of course rattlesnakes can learn to tie themselves in a square knot. They need something to do to pass the time.

Glen Rounds, born in a South Dakota sod house in 1906, was a true child of the American West. His family moved to Montana not long after his birth, and he tried his hand at all sorts of odd jobs (including sign-painting) during his life. Rounds had a knack for art, and he studied at the Kansas City Art Institute. There, he made friends with Jackson Pollack and spent a summer traveling with him and Thomas Hart Benton. In the 1930s, Rounds went to New York City to shop his artwork around to various publishers. This formative time helped him develop his storytelling style and led to his writing and illustrating his own books. Eventually he settled in North Carolina, and according to the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, Rounds “was known as the last of the great ‘Ring-Tailed Roarers,’ for his sixty-year career publishing tall tales, colorful narratives of the West, and nature books.” All in all, Rounds has over 150 books to his name.

I am in love with well-drawn pen-and-ink sketches, so Rounds’s minimalist, suggestion-style pictures were fascinating to me. Earlier, I said that this book’s cover was understated, and it is. But upon closer inspection, each train robber has a distinct personality — and that’s without any figure’s having even a discernable nose. There are a few other Mr. Yowder adventures, each more ridiculous than the last, and they all contain this style of simple pen-and-ink illustration. Sometimes the images are spare, and sometimes they are wonderfully detailed, but each is full of life and wry humor.

A prime example of this humor is in Mr. Yowder and the Steamboat, where our intrepid protagonist finds himself in New York City and itching to go fishing. If you pay very close attention, you’ll notice that the name of the rowboat he rents changes in each picture, starting with Alicia and ending with Poil. Details such as this, paired with Rounds’s singular voice, make these tales especially entertaining as a read-aloud.

Rounds wrote other series-type books, including ones about a cowboy named Whitey, and he was known to retell famous fairy tales and songs. I found his version of There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly to be rather gruesomely entertaining, and his account of the three little pigs is also properly morbid (and true to the original tale).

So gather ’round, friends, and listen to the tales of Mr. Yowder, Whitey, and all the rest. Did these adventures happen for real? We’ll never know. But we can certainly hope they did.