Have you ever thought about how balloons came to dominate the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade? From this day forward you won't be able to look at them without thinking of Tony Sarg.
Caldecott Honor artist Melissa Sweet (A River of Words) sets her miniature stage with brightly colored wooden blocks, spools of thread and handmade papier-mâché dolls, revealed by a cherry-colored patterned curtain and a pulley system that announces the title of her presentation, Balloons over Broadway. One tiny orange-capped character offers a helpful tip, "Sarg rhymes with aargh!"
Tony Sarg is a born problem-solver, whose solutions brim with wit and an overarching sense of play. He once said he "became a marionette man when he was only six years old," rigging up an elaborate pulley system so he could complete his morning chore--feeding the chickens--while remaining comfortably in his bed. Sweet, who used cut-paper collage and colored pencil so effectively in her Caldecott Honor illustrations for A River of Words, here creates the effect of cartoon panels with her skillful use of cut paper, each framing a scene that contributes to the larger arc of Sarg's story. In The Boy Who Drew Birds, Sweet proved she could pack a lot of information into the illustrations of a picture-book biography, but here she goes a step further, incorporating into her collages the materials that Sarg would have used in the creation of his puppets: fabrics, cord, paper and pencils.
Sweet traces Sarg's rise from London, where he made puppets from wood, cloth and strings, to his performance with the Tony Sarg Marionettes on Broadway in New York City, to the Macy's team commissioning a "puppet parade" for its holiday windows--where he would then invent the now-famous balloons. A climactic spread demands that readers rotate the oblong book for a vertical view of an elephant soaring above the skyline. The author-artist uses spare prose as one might poetry: "And from that day on, every Thanksgiving morning, crowds have lined the sidewalks of New York City to see what new balloons would rise to the skies for Macy's famous parade."
Children will be pleased to meet and also take to heart this unsung hero, whose motto--"I have never done a stroke of work in my life"--models the importance of imaginative play in creative problem-solving. --Jennifer M. Brown