The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake

Catching up on the April edition of First Things last night, I came across an article by Joseph Bottum which brought me back to the days of my not-always-misspent youth:

In 1961, however, there appeared in the magazine Boys' Life three stories by Bertrand R. Brinley: "The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake," "Night Rescue," and "The Unidentified Flying Man of Mammoth Falls." Four more stories joined them to make up The Mad Scientists' Club, which the publisher MacRae Smith brought out in hardback in 1965--and which Scholastic Books quickly added to its paperback catalogue, along with the five additional stories that formed The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club in 1968.

Boys' Life, Scholastic Books and the Mad Scientists' Club? Talk about fond memories. I loved ordering books at school from Scholastic. Choosing your selections from the catalog, convincing your parents to pony up for a couple (which probably meant all of $5.80), the agonizing wait, and the excitement when the shipment finally arrived in the classroom.

No doubt the foundation of some of the appeal of finding an Amazon delivery on my front steps today was laid by Scholastic Books. And for an adventuresome young lad, it didn't get much better than the Mad Scientists' Club:

What Brinley layers on top of all this, however, is a kind of late 1950s or early 1960s gloss of something that he calls science, though it isn't really. The stories pay ready lip service to the experimental method, the glories of theory, and the high calling of the scientist. But what they are actually after is, instead, the simulacrum of science that is old-fashioned science-boy science--invention, in other words, and the problem-solving of elegantly and cleverly applied technology. Each story is like the latest patent-worthy plan for yet another genuine American apple-peeler, though in the case of The Mad Scientists' Club, the apple to be peeled is some traditional challenge of literary boyhood: adults to be bamboozled, rival clubs to be defeated, adventures to be had, dragons to be slain.

The decline in the later book-length tales is proof, perhaps, of how surprisingly delicate a thing Bertrand R. Brinley pulled off with the early stories. They had comedy, and comradeship, and wish-fulfillment fantasy--and, most of all, they had that science-boy thing of chemistry sets that got used instead of gathering dust in a closet, of walkie-talkies that proved useful instead of being lost in the basement when their batteries died, of junkyards where you could actually find the eight-foot steel bar you needed to bring one of your ideas to life.

Hopefully, no matter how much the world changes, there will always be a place in a boy's imagination to dream about the kind of adventures detailed in the Mad Scientists' Club.

UPDATE: Jeff e-mails to remind me that the Mad Scientists' Club series has been reprinted by Purple House Press and is available for sale.