Trivia about Newbery Award winners:

At the Banquet

When Marguerite Henry came to the 1949 ALA convention in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to accept the Newbery Medal for King of the Wind, she brought her horse, Misty, the subject of 1948 honoree Misty of Chincoteague. The publicity stunt was a surprise to ALA leadership, who were less than thrilled. Misty wasn’t allowed to attend the banquet — she stayed at the Rand-McNally booth.

E. L. Konigsburg is one of six authors to win the Newbery twice. (Prior to 1958, an author was not allowed to win more than once, unless the vote was unanimous.) The other double winners — Joseph Krumgold, Elizabeth George Speare, Katherine Paterson, Lois Lowry, and Kate DiCamillo — each won their second within a decade of their first. But Konigsburg’s wins, for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1968) and The View from Saturday (1997), came nearly three decades apart. She opened her second speech: “As I was saying, four days and twenty-nine years ago…”

The author of 1927’s winner, Smoky the Cowhorse, was a French Canadian who fled to the U.S. after allegedly killing another man. He assumed a new identity as a cowboy named Will James and was soon arrested for cattle rustling. He served over a year in prison, and then made his ­living as an artist and writer. He is one of two Newbery Medalists with a mug shot (the other is Jack Gantos, author of 2012 winner Dead End in Norvelt).

Monica Shannon’s 1935 Newbery-winning Dobry tells the story of a Bulgarian peasant boy who longs to become a sculptor. The tale is loosely based on the life of Atanas Katchamakoff, who, incidentally, illustrated the book.

In 1936, when Carol Ryrie Brink’s Caddie Woodlawn won, three of the four Honor Book authors (Elizabeth Janet Gray, Kate Seredy, and Armstrong Sperry) went on to win Newbery Medals in subsequent years. Phil Stong was the only honoree who did not.

Esther Forbes won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for her biography Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. The following year, she won the Newbery for Johnny Tremain, a novel set during the Revolutionary War, in which Paul Revere is a character.

Eliza Ingersoll Bowditch, wife of 1922 Newbery winner Hendrik Willem van Loon (The Story of Mankind), was the great-granddaughter of Nathaniel Bowditch, the subject of Jean Lee Latham’s 1956 Newbery winner, Carry On, Mr. Bowditch.

Two sons of Charles Boardman Hawes (whose 1924 Newbery-winning The Dark Frigate would be ineligible by today’s standards, since it first appeared serialized in the boys’ magazine The Open Road), John Peter and Baldwin “Butch” Hawes, sang with Pete Seeger in The Almanac Singers, a precursor to The Weavers. They were later joined by Woody Guthrie.

Ruth Sawyer, 1937 winner for Roller Skates, started the first storytelling program at the New York Public Library in 1910. Her daughter, Margaret, was also a librarian and was married to Robert McCloskey, who won the Caldecott in 1942 for Make Way for Ducklings. Sawyer’s granddaughter was immortalized in McCloskey’s Blueberries for Sal, a Caldecott Honor in 1949. McCloskey won another Caldecott Honor in 1953 for Journey Cake, Ho! ­written by his mother-in-law — Ruth Sawyer.

Author of 1939’s winner, Thimble Summer, Elizabeth Enright was the daughter of political cartoonist W. J. Enright and children’s book illustrator Maginel Wright Enright, and the niece of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Armstrong Sperry’s journeys in the South Pacific inspired most of his writings, including 1941 winner Call It Courage, which is set at sea. His brother, Paul, also loved sailing and invented a shoe with a rubberized sole — the Sperry ­Top-Sider — after accidentally slipping on a boat deck.

As a teen, Paula Fox (1974 winner for The Slave Dancer) put a baby up for adoption. Years later she reconnected with her daughter — and learned that her granddaughter was grunge music icon Courtney Love.

Sid Fleischman, 1987 winner for The Whipping Boy, and his son Paul, 1989 ­winner for Joyful Noise, are, to date, the only parent/child pair of Medalists.

Russell Freedman’s father worked in publishing, so young Russell had dinner with authors such as John Steinbeck and Margaret Mitchell. Freedman said he would have preferred to dine with his favorite childhood author, Hendrik Willem van Loon. In 1988, Freedman followed in van Loon’s footsteps, also winning the Newbery for a nonfiction book, Lincoln: A Photobiography.

The 2002 banquet occurred on Father’s Day, and Linda Sue Park opened her acceptance speech for A Single Shard by giving her medal to her father, ­saying he had always encouraged her to be a reader and a writer.

From the May/June 2022 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine: The Newbery Centennial.