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Rootabaga Country

A couple years ago I decided to type up the Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and put them on my web site. Dad had read some of them to us when we were kids so I had a place in my heart for them. It took a while but I got most of it done then left it for a year or more. They’re great. They have stuff about kids who are allowed to name themselves, a railroad that runs off into the sky, a place where they make clowns and bake them in ovens. There are musicians, little girls, uncles and uncles’ uncles. There are blue foxes and flongboos, not to mention corn fairies and shadow animals.

After a while I began to notice (from my logs) people were finding them. I followed some of the refer links back and came to the conclusion there is a revival of interest in the stories. Baked clowns drying out in the Rootabaga CountryThen a couple weeks ago I noticed a refer link in my log from the wikipedia article on Carl Sandburg. Wow! I thought, “I’ve been wikipedia’ed.”

So I got busy and finished them up.

Here they are.

Then I thought, what they hey … I don’t want to go half-hog with the thing, so I bought rootabaga.net and put up the world’s first Rootabaga Country social networking web site.

Here’s the Rootabaga Community site.

Just so’s you’ll know—the book was published in 1922—it’s in the public domain. My motivations are not totally altruistic, nor totally self-agrandizing. I think I might put advertising on one day and get a little income maybe.