Welcome to our twelfth year of publication. Perhaps you are one of our many readers who were dismayed last May to read that The Five Owls would cease publication. I was one of those readers, too.

Hearing the news that Hamline University could no longer publish the magazine was bad enough. But that notice on the back cover of the May/June issue--good grief! It had the finality of a death certificate.

What needless upset it would cause--and all the extra work!

Unlike other readers, I already knew that The Five Owls would never cease to be. When I heard of Hamline's decision to quit publication, I'd written a letter to Hamline's president, suggesting we find an alternative to letting the magazine die. At the time that you were reading our death notice, I'd already heard back, and a meeting was scheduled.

You see, The Five Owls is my late wife Holly Ramsey's legacy, and there was no question in my mind that the magazine would live on. There was just no way I'd ever let her down. An old friend in one of the publishing houses told me they'd always wondered how the magazine ever made any money (it never has). Why would I want to take The Five Owls on again? A Hamline dean asked me if I sure about this, if I really knew what I was doing (yes, I do).

I remember the summer night that Holly shook me awake at 3:00 a.m. saying, "Dan, Dan. I've just had this great idea for a magazine." That was in 1977, in the months immediately following the diagnosis of Holly's multiple sclerosis. She was being treated with Prednizone, a powerful steroid that kept her awake at night, her mind racing with all sorts of new ideas. "Can't this wait 'til morning?" I groaned. "No. Just listen," Holly replied and then painted a picture of the publication in such length and detail I had no doubt that she could see the magazine's cover and spreads in her mind. Besides ruining a perfectly good night of sleep, that vision for The Five Owls stirred around in Holly's mind for eight more years before we finally turned it into a reality.

Those years were defined by the course of Holly's disease, the adoption of our son Henry, and the creative and determined manner in which Holly dealt with both. Hers was not a mild case of M.S.; the early prognosis was dismal. In the early months of 1978 she lost the use of her hands and legs, and her vision began to fail. Confined to a wheelchair, she had to rely on others for her every need. Before the disease struck her down, Holly had been so independent. A longblade ice skater. An artist and graphic designer. These losses ripped away the anchors of her identity, her work, her main sources of friends and satisfaction. Yet she never lost faith or courage. In May of '78, she entered the hospital for ten days of chemotherapy which, it was hoped, would shock her system into remission. It did. Her vision returned and she began to laboriously write and draw again. And then, through a regimen of vitamins, diet, and physical therapy, she surprised me. One day while my back was turned doing the dishes, she rose from her wheelchair and walked towards me. As I turned and saw her standing there, my first reaction was "Omygod, Holly, sit down before you hurt yourself!" Then, in the next instant, the enormity of it hit me. Against all odds, Holly had trained new nerves and bypassed the damage of the permanent neural scarring that had occurred. We began crying with relief that the tide had turned and laughing at my idiotic reaction. In the following months Holly learned to walk againfirst with crutches, then a cane, and eventually without!

The next challenge was how to pursue our dream of having a family. We'd heard of pregnancy triggering M.S. exacerbations that result in new impairments, so natural childbirth was out of the question. Holly and her brother had been adopted--why shouldn't we adopt? Yet nothing comes easy. I'll never forget a devastating interview at our town's mainline adoption agency, shortly after Holly had begun walking again with crutches. Her doctors were surprised at Holly's progress. We were elated and riding a wave of optimism. But the interrogator at the adoption agency was pessimistic. I think we forgot that woman's name the moment we left the agency, but over the years we've called her "Big Nurse." Big Nurse told us bluntly that anyone with M.S. had no business adopting. What cruel ignorance! Big Nurse had no idea what we'd been through and how far Holly had come. Nor how determined Holly was to become a mother.

We adopted our son Henry in 1980, after a worldwide search that brought us to an orphanage in Taiwan. Holly was a loving and attentive mother, and Henry never lacked for anything. Holly spent so much time reading to him, and even before Henry could speak would explain things to him as if she expected him to understand everything. Which he did. Now seventeen, Henry is a writer, reads a lot, and is multilingual. Language is his greatest gift. He learned the love of language from his mother. Whenever there was a special day--when he became a U.S. citizen, his first bus ride to school, a piano recital--Holly always made a celebration. She always found the perfect little gift or learning token. And as often as not, the gift was a book. Even before The Five Owls, there were so many books. Henry thinks she was the greatest mom, even if she did have to rest a lot. He was much-loved. And he says he's learned to take care of himself better than most other kids.

After parenthood, the next great trial was Holly's lost career. In 1979 she was forced to quit her job as a publication designer. Holly had tried several times to return to work, but always found the regular schedule and deskwork too physically difficult. She lived with constant fatigue and pain. She once told me that her limbs felt like they had lead weights strapped to them. Sometimes her torso felt like it was being squeezed in a vise, though she never complained much. For Holly, the worst thing was the loss of contact with the publishing field.

In 1981 she enrolled in a children's literature research course taught by Dr. Norine Odland at the University of Minnesota. Holly wanted to research great children's book design at the Kerlan Collection of Children's Literature, and decided to make an in-depth study of Helen Gentry, a self-taught book designer who was a pioneer in producing fine books for children. "Before the mid '30s," Holly wrote, "children's books were, almost without exception, being wretchedly produced in relation to the standards of good printing. Helen Gentry was one of the first people to consistently employ the highest standards of typography, illustration, printing and binding in the production of children's books that could be preserved and treasured for years." As an artist and a founder of the legendary publishing firm Holiday House, Miss Gentry was a continuing source of inspiration to Holly: "The strength of Helen Gentry's design work is in her exquisite use of type and the interaction of type with illustration," she wrote. "Helen Gentry's design does not shout at the reader. It makes the reader aware of how well the book reads, feels, and works as a whole. Her design gives her books a sense of order, and yet at the same time provides a sense of visual interest that draws the reader into the page. This is the skill of a truly gifted designer."

When Henry entered preschool, Holly had more time to herself and she found that she desperately missed her old job. She missed the creative outlet and the contact with editors, writers and illustrators. Holly bought a large floor-loom and tried, without success, to weave away her frustrations. Holly was in a black mood as we watched Henry playing on a Florida beach in early 1985. "I just hate the thought of going back home," Holly said with a sad and bitter edge to her voice. "There's nothing waiting for me there." Waiting? Like what? I asked. "Well," she answered pensively, "like that idea from years ago for the magazine about children's books. I want to design something like that." Then do it, I replied. I told her I'd bankroll it to the best of my ability and do anything else to help her. "Do you think I could?" she asked. And I replied yes, just do it! Holly did do it, and I've been helping ever since.

When we returned from Florida, Holly visited the children's collection at the Minneapolis Public Library, where she found a copy of The Three Owls, by Anne Carrol Moore, the head children's librarian of the New York Public Library. It was a compilation of articles that had appeared in Miss Moore's newspaper column "The Three Owls," which appeared in The New York Herald Tribune between 1924 and 1930. It was the first regular review of children's books in the U.S. "Look at this, Dan," she said. "These ideas are just like Helen Gentry's," and then she read to me how Miss Moore decried the flood of "cheaply decorated editions" that were then appearing, leaving "bookseller and book buyer equally bewildered." Holly read to me how Miss Moore had been approached by a friend at the newspaper about doing the column, and how she spent a taking charge of the Bacon Memorial Library in Old Westbury, New York, thinking about whether she felt equal to the task of editing a weekly critical review. One day while walking and reading and thinking of the need to defend "the real treasures among children's books," she looked up at the five iron owls that roost on the library's weathervane. The weathervane swung to a new direction as the wind shifted, and Miss Moore took this as a sign that she was to accept the Herald Tribune's offer. Miss Moore called her column "The Three Owls." Her three owls signified the author, the illustrator, and (with ruffled feathers) the critic. "Let's have the other two owls represent the editor and the book designer," said Holly. "Let's call our magazine 'The Five Owls.'" And that's what we did. Shortly after, Holly invited Susan Stan over for coffee and asked her to be our editor--the fifth owl on the vane.

I had always viewed owls--Wise Owls--as a symbol of reading and learning. However, in the Egyptian system of hieroglyphs, the owl symbolizes death and the dark realm of the "dead sun" when it sets below the horizon and makes its nightly journey through the Underworld. As these dozen years have played out, sometimes my superstitious side tells me that placing owls in our masthead may have been a particularly unwise thing to have done.

In the spring of 1991, after five years of publication, Holly was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. After she recovered from an initial surgery, she underwent an eight-month series of chemotherapy treatments. But several months later, despite our greatest hopes and efforts, the disease returned again. At least three other courses of treatment followed, but all for naught. As we were only told much later, the cancer cell was a particularly fast-growing type that had been found to be resistant to every known treatment. But when the first treatment failed, we knew the odds had turned against us. And we began planning for a different kind of future than we'd ever imagined: a future apart from one another.

One major question was what would become of The Five Owls without her? Holly was the magazine's keystone, its principal steward and visionary. We felt it would enhance the magazine's survivability if we were to affiliate The Five Owls with a larger institution that plays a significant role in the professional development of teachers. Holly envisioned the creation of a reading room, a resource center for teachers, that could make her extensive collection of children's books available to all. So we approached Hamline University, which provides in-service training to more teachers than any other institution in our home state of Minnesota. They would be delighted to receive Holly's library, which consisted of over 6,000 volumes, and offered to create a suitable room in their library to house the collection. On February 12, 1993, we met for lunch with Hamline's president, Larry Osness, and signed papers making the gift. That day, little did we know that her cancer was raging out of control, and that less than two weeks later Holly would be in the hospital for emergency surgery.

As we sat again in that too-familiar hospital room, we just knew the outcome would be bad. Holly was terrified. Terrified of running out of time, of not accomplishing all her goals. Of really, actually dying. She asked me to go home to fetch her a copy of William Steig's Brave Irene, a book we had reviewed in the premier issue of The Five Owls. It told the story of a little girl who crossed a mountain and braved a raging winter storm to deliver an important package for her mother. Holly wanted to see that book before surgery. Like the little girl in the book, Holly was facing daunting odds that would require steady courage. The story reassured her, and somehow helped her draw forth strength from deep within.

The months following the surgery were a bittersweet time of growth and loss, of great joy and immense pain. A paradoxical time in which many events seemed to happen in slow-motion, in which little coincidences and miracles became almost commonplace. Of all the miracles that occurred during this time, the materialization of the Reading Room was the most extraordinary. A beautiful room was created with hand-made furniture, oriental rugs, and a colorful, inlaid floor. Holly was involved in every decision. The room reflects her refined tastes exactly. In July 1993 the Five Owls Reading Room was completed, and was dedicated in a lovely ceremony which Holly was able to attend. What a remarkable gift, we thought, for Holly--for both of us--to be spending her last months creating such a concrete legacy!

In those summer months we could see the shadows lengthening as our days together drew to a close. Holly's job was to focus on living; mine was to research what comes next.

I realized a windfall in my quest when a beautifully illustrated copy of Charles Mikolaycak's Orpheus had arrived in the mail. It told the story of Orpheus, a mythic musician whose music was so beautiful that "wild animals ceased hunting and even trees bent near to listen when he sang." It also told the tragic love story in which Orpheus' new bride Eurydice is bitten by a snake and dies. In an attempt to return his bride to the land of the living, Orpheus descends into the underworld, but ultimately fails. Forever after, Orpheus blames himself and is mute in his grief. The story comes to a poignant end when Orpheus encounters mob of drunken revelers who murder him for refusing to make music. Though dismembered and thrown into a river, Orpheus was never been forgotten because the gods honored him by casting his lyre into the heavens, where it became a bright constellation of stars: "to tell his story and to shine on forever, for all eternity." Through this book, I discovered a whole genre of literature called catasterisms: tales in which humans or animals achieve immortality by becoming stars. These stories excited my imagination, and drew me into a study of man's earliest spiritual beliefs. Catasterisms suggest that the greatest old souls are those who, for thousands of years, have been remembered as constellations.

Holly and I vowed to remember one another, even after death. "I'll haunt you if I can," she said. In the end we adopted the African belief that there is a dynamic relation between the living and the dead; that the ancestors rely on the memory of the living for their personal immortality. As long as the ancestors are remembered by those who know and succeed them, their personal coherence is maintained in the spirit realm. I visualize souls as being like currents in an ocean. When the ancestors are properly honored, they live on in the thoughts and deeds of the living. With growth, the current grows stronger. Through the sharing of stories and memories of the departed, the current is stirred up and passed on from one generation to the next. If in time, however, an ancestor is forgotten, that personality (like molecules of water) just dissipates into a great sea of souls.

Holly died at home on September 6, 1993, at age 44. Some people say they feel her presence in our house and garden. Others feel her spirit in the Reading Room. But where Holly is most alive is in the pages of The Five Owls, in the celebration of "the real treasures among children's books."

While the magazine will perpetuate Holly's values, it will not become frozen in time. The Five Owls must grow and change if we are to effectively promote the love of reading among young people. Please see the announcement in this issue of our 1997-98 Editorial Calendar, and let me know what you think. We are always so pleased when our readers write or call to share an idea or a bit of feedback.

We are all here for the love of books and children. So if you want to know why The Five Owls lives on, it is to honor Holly, the great love in my life. And if you're wondering why a small star has just appeared in our masthead, it is a star of remembrance for her.

8/19/97
(Our 25th wedding anniversary)