Homer Price

Summary

Homer Price is a book of six connected comic stories about a resourceful Ohio boy and the small town of Centerburg. Homer lives two miles outside town at a tourist camp, where his father runs the filling station and his mother looks after the cabins and cooks in the lunch room. His hobby is building radios, and he keeps a pet skunk named Aroma. In "The Case of the Sensational Scent," Homer's new homemade radio brings news of a robbery. Walking through the woods next day, he smells bacon and finds four robbers camped in a cabin, all sleeping in one bed so that none can sneak off with the loot. Homer sets Aroma on their case of money, throws their clothes and guns out of reach, and holds them until the sheriff arrives. In "The Case of the Cosmic Comic," Homer's friend Freddy, who worships the comic-book hero the Super-Duper, rides with Homer in his mother's horse and wagon toward town, where the Super-Duper is to appear in person at a movie premiere. They find the hero's car wrecked by the road, where he swerved to miss a skunk, and the mighty man himself caught in a barbed-wire fence, yelping and quite unable to free himself. "The Doughnuts," the best known story, takes place in Uncle Ulysses's lunch room in Centerburg. Uncle Ulysses loves labor-saving devices and has bought an automatic doughnut machine. While he goes to the barbershop, Homer finishes assembling it. A rich lady arrives in a chauffeured car, mixes up a huge batch of batter from her own recipe, and leaves her diamond bracelet behind in it. The machine will not stop, and the doughnuts pile up by the hundreds. Mr. Gabby, a traveling sandwich-board man, advises advertising; Homer's notion of a hundred-dollar reward for finding the bracelet inside a doughnut sells the whole stack, and a customer named Rupert Black finds it. In "Mystery Yarn," Homer's Uncle Telly and the sheriff, rival string-savers who both court Miss Terwilliger, unwind their giant balls of string around the fairground racetrack to decide whose is longer; Miss Terwilliger enters too and wins by unraveling the knitted yarn of her own dress. In "Nothing New Under the Sun (Hardly)," a long-bearded stranger named Michael Murphy rouses the town's suspicions until Homer befriends him and learns that he has perfected a musical mousetrap whose tune draws every mouse in Centerburg after it, a comic echo of the Pied Piper. In "Wheels of Progress," Uncle Ulysses and Miss Naomi Enders, descendant of the town's founder, put up a whole district of identical mass-produced houses in a day, but a union rule delays the street signs, and the residents can find their homes only by counting houses, all during the pageant honoring the founder Ezekiel Enders. The Viking Press published the book in 1943 with McCloskey's own illustrations; Centerburg Tales followed in 1951.

Top Lessons

• Common sense in a crisis

  When the doughnut machine runs wild and the bracelet goes missing, the grown-ups fret while Homer thinks. His sign offering a prize for the bracelet inside a doughnut solves both problems at once. The story shows that a calm mind looking for a simple answer can beat panic and fancy schemes.

• Machines that run ahead of people

  Uncle Ulysses buys every labor-saving device, and in Wheels of Progress he helps build a whole neighborhood the way factories build cars. McCloskey laughs at what happens when no one can stop the doughnut machine, or tell one new house from the next. New inventions are fun, but they still need wise people in charge of them.

• Heroes and ordinary people

  Freddy believes the Super-Duper can do anything, until he sees him stuck in a barbed-wire fence after swerving to miss a skunk. Meanwhile Homer, an ordinary boy, really does catch four robbers with a pet skunk and some quick thinking. The book gently teaches children to admire real courage and good sense more than costumes and posters.

• Judging a stranger

  The townspeople stare at Michael Murphy's long beard and the sheriff tries to judge him by his ears, but Homer gets to know him and learns that he is a harmless, hardworking inventor. The story pokes fun at suspicion built on looks.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The stories contain no illness or medical episode of note.