February 13, 2025
Dear Andrew,
What a wonderful surprise! The funny thing is, I have a service from the post office that shows a picture in the morning of the mail pieces expected to be delivered today, and as soon as I saw the return address on the envelope, somehow I was certain I knew what this would be about.
It was so much fun when the letter did arrive, to read what you wrote, and to see the faint copy of the letter I had written to your grandfather so many years ago. My handwriting hasn’t changed all that much in the intervening five or six decades!
The words in his letter, and I think there had been an earlier or subsequent one as well, have been a happy memory all these years that I have periodically brought up and mentioned to various friends and acquaintances. The “ideas bubbling like soap bubbles in a sink” was such a cute and special image.
As was obvious from my writing to him, I was a huge Hardy Boys fan during my youth. The dream of writing subsequent volumes (once I got over the shock of learning that there was no “Franklin W. Dixon” and that your grandfather was the principal author at that time) filled me with such excitement. I would carry around a series of spiral notebooks and a pencil and would write during free moments of the school day and any time the inspiration would hit me during the afternoons, evenings and weekends. My family home had a screened-in porch, and I would especially feel such a rush of feelings when there would be a thunderstorm. I would sit at the long table on that porch trying to capture the feel and sound of the pouring rain, the flashes of lightning, and the extended roar of thunder rolling across the sky. I had a lot of rain storms in my stories, which always added further intensity to the plotlines! (True of the actual series as well!)
I filled up many spiral notebooks in those couple of years. From the first one my mother transcribed my scrawls to the typewritten page. I provided some illustrations in the style of the books from the ‘60s, and she bound them together in a black plastic binder. She had three or four of them made up, one we gave to my grade school library, one for myself of course, and the one which we sent to your grandfather.
I know I wrote one more after that, and maybe a third, though I think I never finished that one. Probably was moving beyond the Hardy Boys by then, but I never lost my love of the series. When I first began reading them in third grade, I would get so into them I used to call it “Hardy Boy Fever.”
Years later in my 20’s, I discovered in an old antique shop not far from where I was working a collection of the first six or seven books in the series, all of them first editions with dust jackets (though I didn’t know it at the time) along with a set of Ted Scott Flying series, that the woman who ran the shop sold to me at what even then seemed a bargain price, she just knew how much I was delighted to come across them. (I still have them by the way, couldn’t bear to part with them, even though I’ve seen them going for some very high prices.)
Flash forward another fifteen years, and my first son began reading at a very early age and by kindergarten had discovered The Buddy Books by Howard Garis, and I then gave hm my collection of Hardy Boy books to start on. He and I would read them together, sometimes out loud as bedtime stories, and it was so much fun to dive back into that world. We read them all and went on to discover the original Tom Swift series, many others, and eventually The Happy Hollisters as well.
His twin sisters, who were born seven years later, were also raised with the series books as part of the bedtime routine. So much fun.
And of course those were always times that led me to tell about my correspondence with the “real” Franklin W. Dixon.
So, as if it’s not already quite obvious, to answer your question: Yes! You found the address of the right Andy N. from Newton! What an amazing thing the internet is.
And if I haven’t waited too long to respond, I’d love it if you could send the original letters. No worries if you had to dispose of them when not hearing from me. The memories are certainly a wonderful thing that have made me smile for so many years.
Oh, and the revamping of the Happy Hollisters is so cool and exciting! What a thrill that must be, also to have that connection with the characters.
All the best to you and yours,
Andy N.