Before you head to Flanagan’s, a favorite stop for the adult John Updike, spend some time at The John Updike Childhood Home for a special St. Patrick’s Day event featuring Charles J. Adams III, editor of The Historical Review of Berks County and a member of The John Updike Childhood Home Advisory Board.
Philadelphia-based cultural reporter and critic Julia Klein recently spent several hours touring The John Updike Childhood Home and wrote a review for The Wall Street Journal that was published on Sept. 4, 2023.
“For such a clear-eyed chronicler of America’s angst-ridden middle class, John Updike was surprisingly sentimental about his Pennsylvania roots. Here, one of his narrators declared, ‘the basic treasure of his life was buried,'” Klein wrote.
“In the short story ‘The Brown Chest,’ Updike’s narrator recalls ‘the house that he inhabited as if he would never live in any other’ and the ‘strange, and ancient, and almost frightening’ wooden chest that served as a repository of family memories.
“Both its hold on the author and the allure of its intimate artifacts, from that chest to Updike’s earliest drawings, make the John Updike Childhood Home a worthy site of literary pilgrimage.
“The house museum, opened in October 2021, recently added seven vitrines, with artifacts including the Remington rifle of Updike’s short story ‘Pigeon Feathers’ and the Olivetti manual typewriter he used for four decades. After a summer hiatus, it reopens Saturdays from 12-2 p.m. starting Sept. 9.”
Klein observed that the museum’s emphasis is on how Shillington “formed him as a writer,” but that the museum “deals less fully with other aspects of his life, failing even to mention his second wife, Martha Bernhard.” She noted too that some of the object labels were a bit small to read, but that was a “defect corrected in the newer vitrines.”
Klein said the museum’s thematic approach “pays off particularly well in his mother’s writing room,” where images and artifacts suggest the complicated mother-son relationship with each other and their shared goal of becoming a writer. “The relationship seems to have been at once close and embattled, with the son vaulting to the literary success his mother craved.”
Read “The John Updike Childhood Home Review: Rabbit’s Roots” (subscription required).
It’s that time of year again! John Updike’s first love was art and his first ambition was to be a cartoonist. In that spirit, the John Updike Childhood Home will sponsor an annual holiday ornament competition, with the winners ornaments displayed on the house Christmas tree. Spread the word!
John Updike Childhood Home director Maria Lester welcomed another group of schoolchildren to the house recently, which resulted in a YouTube video documenting the visit.
Education Series—John Updike Childhood Home offers a nice account of what goes on when young people visit the house to see how important Updike was as a writer and how influential Shillington and Reading were, how they helped to shape him as a person and helped to shape his fiction as well.
The John Updike Childhood Home features 10 rooms of exhibits plus an education room that is used for small groups. The museum is owned and operated by The John Updike Society, a 501 c 3 non-profit organization consisting of professors, teachers, Updike family and friends, proud Pennsylvanians, and the kind of just-plain-readers that Updike most appreciated. Membership is open to anyone with an interest in Updike. At present, the Society has 270+ members from 18 different countries and 37 states.
The house restoration and conversion to a museum was made possible by generous donations from the Robert and Adele Schiff Family Foundation, the PECO Foundation, the John and Gaye Patton Charitable Foundation, American Family Insurance Dreams Foundation, and numerous private donors. Many of the items on display were also donated. Donations are tax deductible. The museum also seeks volunteers for the docent program.
TLC Fore Reading PA is a community development organization that uses golf as a foundation and sponsors in-school and after-school programs, and education series. Odds are that the young golfers may have enjoyed seeing Updike’s golf scorecards, photos, golf balls, and links attire on display.
If your class would like to visit the house, contact Dr. Lester (mlester@albright.edu) for more information.
On September 14, 2022 the Reading Education Foundation announced their grant awards for the year. Among the approved projects was one proposed by John Updike Childhood Home director Maria Lester titled “Teaching Berks County’s Native Son, John Updike.”
The grant will allow Lester, who teaches at Reading High School, to bring literature classes to the house in the fall and will cover transportation and admission costs. Congratulations to Maria and any thanks to the Reading Education Foundation for their support of area youths, literature, and the legacy of one of Berks County’s two literary giants (the other being Wallace Stevens). The John Updike Society, which owns and operates The John Updike Childhood Home, hopes that the young people who visit as a result of this grant will be inspired by the museum and their study of Updike to follow their own dreams, literary or otherwise.
Alexa Freyman put together a nice feature on The John Updike Childhood Home, 117 Philadelphia Ave., in Shillington, using shots from an expertly controlled drone. Even those who’ve seen the house in person will find the drone shots interesting for the way they contextualize the house in relation to its surroundings.
Freyman, born and raised in Berks County, started Berks Nostalgia “to research and build a collection of the places, things and stories I have heard about my entire life.”
“Berks Nostalgia: John Updike’s Childhood Home” (with YouTube link)
Students use it, and if truth be told, so do teachers. And recently, Wikipedia added an entry on The John Updike Childhood Home. Thanks to some civic-minded Berks Countians, the house-museum is now searchable (and findable) on the biggest and best-known database of Internet knowledge.
If you’re a fan of John Updike, make sure you don’t miss anything Updike related by not only following the blog-websites of The John Updike Society and The John Updike Childhood Home. You should also like/follow The John Updike Society Facebook page and The John Updike Childhood Home Facebook page. Sometimes there are Facebook posts that don’t appear on either website, like this visual update on how the Victory Garden is growing at the house, thanks to Gov. Mifflin students!
The John Updike Childhood Home is looking for volunteers to help with weeding and maintaining the flower beds. Contact Maria Lester if interested: mlester@albright.edu.
As part of the continuing partnership between Governor Mifflin School District and The John Updike Childhood Home, students under the direction of Intermediate School teacher Damien Drago planted four raised beds with vegetables that were either mentioned by Updike as having been grown in his family’s garden during his years in the house (1932-45), or were commonly grown in Shillington victory gardens during the World War II years.
The Reading Eagle reports that about 45 fifth graders from Governor Mifflin Intermediate School took part in the project, which offers “kids a chance to learn some unique lessons and the historic site a chance to reclaim part of its past.”
Updike complained about having to sell the family’s asparagus and other vegetables door-to-door during the Depression years, but students who work on the victory garden will be spared that experience. Their crop will be donated to local charities.
According to the Eagle, “Drago said the project is presenting a lot of learning opportunities for the students. They’ve used their math skills to figure out how much soil they needed to buy, they learned about the process of growing plants and they got a chance to find out a bit about one of the county’s historical figures. The kids even took a three-mile historical walking tour of Shillington, taking in sites that showed what the borough was like while Updike was growing up there. And they read some of Updike’s poems that the author wrote for children.”
Drago told the Eagle he hopes to expand the project in the future and plans to enlist local students to tend the garden over the summer.
Director of Education Maria Lester was the Updike house liaison for the project.
For the full article, see “Gov. Mifflin students plant victory garden at The John Updike Childhood Home.”
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The John Updike Childhood Home 