The Hardy Boys and Me

I got the polio virus just after turning nine years old, in the summer following my third grade. I was hospitalized for a month. Within two days after my admission to the hospital and unknown to me, my mother also caught polio and died.

While I was in the hospital, my father visited me but said nothing about my mother’s death until the day before I was brought back home. I don’t remember what my father said, but I remember the curtains being drawn around the bed for privacy, and I remember crying my eyes out.

Our family was turned upside down. I had a sister six years older than me, and a baby brother six years younger. My father did a considerable amount of business travel, which now meant that visiting aunts would stand-in as babysitters, or hired live-in housekeepers would be the babysitters.

While I had been in the hospital I received numerous get-well cards and gifts. One of these gifts consisted of two books: The Tower Treasure and The House on The Cliff. I was not much of a reader, so the books remained untouched until my sister took it upon herself to begin reading the first book to me. It wasn’t long before I was hooked on the stories! Would the Hardy Boys find the Applegate treasure? Would they be able to vindicate a classmate’s father falsely accused of the theft? 

I did not immediately return to school in September of that year as I continued to rest at home and do physical therapy. My sister was too busy with high school and boyfriends to continue reading to me. So, anxious to find out what happened next in the books, I forced myself to read a few chapters. Eventually, I read the rest of the two books. As I returned to school and struggled through fourth and fifth grades, I begged my father to buy me additional books in the series. I also branched out and read other books. My father often urged me to read less and go outside and play or do chores, but I wanted to read.  By the end of the fifth grade I had read at least 15 of the first books in the Hardy Boy series.

Reading the Hardy Boys help me escape the feelings of loss of my mother. Furthermore, there were additional stresses: I had a small but noticeable tremor about which classmates often made jokes. Sports was not a thing in my family, and I had no athletic skills which meant I was the last to be chosen in recess games. Instead, I had Frank and Joe Hardy.

After being sent to bed, I would read. When told to put out the lights, I would lie in bed thinking about the Hardy Boys. Not infrequently, I held imaginary conversations with them. Very often I imagined them taking care of me, like I was a little brother. These fantasy scenarios continued for many nights.

In the fifth grade I became friendly with a boy my age living down the street. Sometimes we would “play Hardy Boys.” This was taking on roles similar to the more generic play-games of cops and robbers.

At the end of my fifth grade, my father decided to sell our large house and to move to a smaller house in the next town. At that time the town assigned all sixth graders to a single old wooden school building. It was meant to be a transition into junior high school the following year. Since it was a new school for me with new teachers and classmates, I asked them all to call me Frank. I began to write Frank Goutal on all my schoolwork instead of Richard Goutal. Somehow my teachers went along with it. By the time I entered junior high school everyone thought my name was Frank! I was Frank until our family moved again at the end of the tenth grade.

In the sixth grade, I not only re-read the Hardy Boys books, but tried to outline some of them. I studied the books carefully and attempted to construct a map of Bayport based on the stories. My father had given me an 8 mm movie camera. I used it to try to make a short detective story, in which a friend and I played the parts of the police detective and the “bad guy.” That was 63 years ago, I still have that “movie,” now reformatted as a digital film.

In the seventh grade, I was the editor of a boy scout troop “newspaper.” In this mimeographed “paper,” I started (but never finished) an unoriginal continued story called Diamonds to Bombs featuring two brothers called the Hartig Boys.

By the end of the seventh grade, thanks to Raymond Burr on TV, my mystery reading had shifted to Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books and my career goal changed from private detective to trial lawyer. 

Mystery books were put aside after high school due to college reading and a teaching career. Sadly, my original Hardy Boys books were somehow thrown out.

Happily, I got a few replacements when my kids came along so that I could read to them The House on the Cliff — a great favorite ever since I first read it at 9 years old.

The Hardy Boys…

• Helped fill an emotional hole in my young life.
• Helped me learn to read.
• Instilled a life-long interest in justice, or what fictional cop Harry Bosch (in Michael Connelly’s best selling police procedural series) would refer to in his mission statement: “Everyone counts or no one counts.”
• Instilled me with a love of mystery books which has been a major hobby during my last 30+ years.  I am now 77.