by Moe Zilla

Created on: January 25, 2009

"Little Toot" is a classic children's story about "the cutest, silliest little tugboat you ever saw" - complete with a candy-stick smokestack. The pictures show him scowling when his whistle makes only a tiny "toot-toot" sound, but the tugboat smiles proudly when he leaves a trail of enormous smoke balls behind him. His father is "Big Toot," the biggest tug on the river - and there's also a delightful drawing of "Grandfather Toot," with whiskers and sad eyes, riding low in the water while describing the mighty ships he's towed.

This book is remembered for its gorgeous illustrations, capturing lots of personality and even some martime atmosphere with just grey, red, and black paints - or sometimes just the black and white of the dark waves and the smoke from the mighty boats. Author Hardie Gramatky had an artist's studio in New York where he could watch the tugboats passing along the East River. (One of the tugboats is headed for Hoboken.) It was natural to give personalities to the ships he saw in the harbor. Maybe the story came to him when he spotted a little tugboat that skipped across the waves when the big tugboats were too heavy.

Little Toot is a child - he hates work, the story tells us, and enjoys gliding down the river or zig-zagging around the piers. The "hard-working tugboats" get annoyed at the playful figure 8s he draws in the water - one as wide as the river itself. They call him "a sissy who only knew how to play," and laugh at the smoke balls he blew. He sulks under the wharf, but then eagerly tries to join in on the tugging of an ocean liner. When he's rejected, he feels even sadder

It was both written and illustrated by Gramatky, who had been one of Walt Disney's animators. (Disney included a cartoon version of the story in their 1954 collection "Melody Time," 15 years after the book was published.) But his story really does capture all the sights and sounds of a real harbor. The ships blow steam and smoke, and there's signal flags flying proudly off Little Toot's masthead.

And like any good children's story, there's hints of a larger world lurking somewhere outside. The ships "come from all over the world, bringing crews who speak strange tongues, and bringing even stranger cargoes - hides from Buenos Aires, copra from the South Seas..." And early on, the book drops a foreshadowing hint about "the wild seas that lay in wait outside the harbor." The little tugboat soon finds himself confronted by "the Ocean. The Great Ocean that Little Toot had never seen."

There's a storm - the pictures show lightning - and an ocean liner grounded on the rocks. The young tugboat is tossed on the waves, and in one picture has a horrified open-mouthed frown. I don't want to give away the ending, but I'll describe my favorite drawing in the book. All the ships in the harbor flock through a golden ray of light to an enormous "S.O.S." in the sky. "Big boats, little boats, fat ones, and skinny ones..."

"And the whole tugboat fleet insisted upon Little Toot's escorting the great boat back into the harbor."

Learn more about this author, Moe Zilla.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.