Our Little Cook Stove
Beatrice Remembers
by Beatrice Katsaros
and Kristina Katsaros
illustrations by Carol Shenk
in collaboration with: Kristina Katsaros
published by Sweetgrass Books
- Experience a Day in Yakima Valley, Washington in the Early 1900s with a Little Girl Named Beatrice!
Little Beatrice lives on a farm in the Yakima Valley with Mamma and Pappa and her sisters Gladys and Cleo. At the center of their home is a little black cook stove, where fresh biscuits await her after school and baby chicks nestle together for warmth. Adapted from a short piece that the adult Beatrice wrote many years later, these moments in Beatrice’s life, lovingly recalled and beautifully illustrated, reveal the comfort a little girl finds in daily routines with her loving family and the joy she finds in the world around her.
24 pages, 8.5 x 11, 24 illustrations
softcover
ISBN 10: 1-59152-310-9
ISBN 13: 978-1-59152-310-9
$16.95
RELEASE DATE
7/26/2022
| Our Little Cook Stove
Beatrice Remembers |
| |
 |
| Beatrice Katsaros was born in 1905 to Myrtle and Samuel Huitin the town of Buena in the Yakima Valley, Washington. She had an older sister, Cleo, and a younger one, Gladys, who also appear in our book. I am so glad to be able to share this story with you, Our Readers, because of the loving and kind spirit that shines through in Beatrice’s narrative. | |
| This book came about through some fortuitous circumstances.
Beatrice wrote her remembrances in an issue of Vogue Magazine, surrounding
a picture of a cook stove. I found that page in 1964 when I was visiting her, my mother-in-law, in connection with a field trip for my scientific research. She was living near her daughter, Elaine and family in Kennewick, Washington. I asked to keep that page and copied it for all the women in our family (her two daughters and their two daughters). Fifty-six years later a friend saw it framed , Carol Toms, on our living room wall and said, “This would make a nice children’s book.” Carol Shenk, a long-time friend of my daughter Ester Katsaros—Beatrice’ granddaughter—was inspired to take on the illustrations. It was meant to be! It transmits her approach to life and the tremendous value that her openness and love had in the person of her son, Michael Anthony Katsaros, my husband, (born in 1936—the last of her three children) and on to our children, Anthony and Ester. It is a lesson for us all. It is a great pleasure for me to honor Beatrice’s creative and generous nature with this book, offered in loving memory of her. |
|