Thanks to the Singer Sewing Machine Company

Now that I've joined The Betsy-Tacy Society, I'd like to share the following post from one of my old blogs.

I feel that, to use a cliche, many readers owe a great... make that a humongous... debt of gratitude to the Singer Sewing Machine Company. What if they hadn't transferred Patrick Kenney to their Mankato, Minnesota office? Then he probably would never have moved his large family into the house across from the home of Tom and Stella Hart and their family. And that would have meant that their children would not have met.

Just imagine if Maud Hart (Betsy) and "Bick" Kenney (Tacy) had never known each other.
There would have been no "Betsy-Tacy" books.
No "Betsy-Tacy" books??? To use another cliche, let's not go there. I, for one, cannot imagine my reading life without them. I read the books at least once every year and a half, dividing them into three categories:
1: Childhood:
"Betsy-Tacy"
"Betsy-Tacy and Tib"
"Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill"
"Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown"
{at the end of this book "the curtain goes up" on
the approaching high-school years.}

2: High School:
"Heaven to Betsy"
"Betsy in Spite of Herself"
[this book always makes me want to hear, again, "The Merry Widow Waltz", "La Boheme", and the then-popular song, "Dreaming"]
"Betsy Was a Junior"
"Betsy and Joe"

The Adult Years:
"Betsy and the Great World"
"Betsy's Wedding"
[And is there a more perfect, more satisfying ending to a series than the final chapter of "Betsy's Wedding"? It doesn't, as so many endings do, make me wish the author had taken the characters into even later years. Rather, it makes me look forward to the next time I will begin reading the books.]

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Update:  And, as it turns out, Maud Hart Lovelace felt the same way about the way "Betsy's Wedding" ends.
Click here and then scroll dowm