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To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Roald Dahl was a British author of popular children's books, which have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide. He's been called one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century. Howlou had made five of his children's books into movies. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory twice, Matilda, The Witches, James and the Giant Peach, and the BFG. My name is Steve Garden, and I'm a Roald Dahl fan, and I've been a Roald Dahl fan for a long time.
I'm now in my 40s. I'm also the director of the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Center, which is an independent charity. Wonderful little museum that you can visit in the village of Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire in the UK, which is just outside of London.
Although it feels like a world away because it's beautiful countryside. And Great Missenden is the village where Roald Dahl moved to in 1954, and it's where he lived and worked and produced most of the stories that people will know and love. The Roald Dahl Museum holds Roald Dahl's personal and working archive. So we have an amazing insight into the mind of a great creative force.
What we try and do at the museum is try and explore how his lived experience fueled his creativity. He's one of the most celebrated children's authors of all time. He produced officially 20 titles for children, and these stories have been adapted into musicals, films, TV shows and more besides. His most iconic works really start with James of the Giant Peach, his first proper book for children in 1961.
He moved on to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Enormous Crocodile, an amazing purple patch in the 1980s with BFG, George's Marvellous Medicine, The Witches and perhaps most famously Matilda, which I believe sold some 17 million plus copies around the world. Roald Dahl was entirely Norwegian by parentage, but he grew up in Wales in September 1916 and in large homes with many children because his father had two children from his first marriage and then four children with Dahl's mother, Sophia Magdalena Hesselberg, of which Roald was the only boy, hence the title of his first volume of autobiography, Boy, Tales from Childhood. He was also known as the apple of his mother's eye and this probably was reinforced by, tragically, the loss of one of his sisters when he was only four and his father, Harald, died a few months later, the family legend says of a broken heart. The secret of my mother was minding her own business and always being there if she's wanted. Then you gravitate towards her.
She is there like a great big rock. And this probably characterises some of Dahl's lifelong search for father figures, some of his most famous characters, particularly Willy Wonka. There's always a trace if you understand his life story to some of his most famous creations. When he was a young boy, he didn't like school, but he did love sweets or candy. Here's an excerpt from Roald Dahl's autobiography. When I was seven, my mother decided I should go to a proper boy's school. It was called Clandath Cathedral School and it stood right under the shadow of the cathedral. The sweet shop at Clandath was the very centre of our lives.
To us it was what a bar is to a drunk or a church to a bishop and without it there would have been little to live for. But it had one terrible drawback, this sweet shop. The woman who owned it was a horror. She never welcomed us when we went in and the only time she spoke were when she said things like, I'm watching you, so keep your thieving fingers off them chocolates. So one day they decided to get back to her.
Dahl described this as his moment of brilliance and glory. My four friends and I had come across a loose floorboard at the back of the classroom. One day we lifted up and found a dead mouse. It was an exciting discovery. Hold on a tick, I said. Why don't we slip it into one of Mrs Pratchett's jars of sweets?
Then when she puts a dirty hand in to grab a handful, she'll grab a stinky dead mouse instead. When you're old enough and experienced enough to be a competent writer, by then you'll become pompous and adult, grown up and you've lost all your jokiness. And so unless you are a kind of undeveloped adult and you still have an enormous amount of childishness in you and you giggle at funny stories and jokes and things, I don't think you can do it. The five of us left school and headed for the sweet shop. We were tremendously jazzed up.
We felt like a gang of desperados setting out to rob a train. We were the victors now and Mrs Pratchett was the victor. She stood behind the counter and her small malignant pig eyes watched us suspiciously. When I saw Mrs Pratchett turn her head away for a couple of seconds, I lifted the heavy glass lid of the gobstopper jar and dropped the mouse in.
Here's Roald Dahl's biographer, Donald Stark. Well, I think Roald thought they'd got away with it, but in fact, of course, he hadn't. We all went back to our classrooms and then a message came in asking for the five of us to report immediately to the headmaster's study. Off we went, trembling. When we got there, the headmaster was standing up in the middle of the room with a long, thin cane in his hands. He ticked us off, told us that we were going to be punished and told us also to line up against the side of the study. I was lost in the line and he told Thwaites, I think he was first, to bend over and he gave him four colossal cracks and he went hopping out of the room, clutching his buttocks and whimpering.
Then the next one got the same treatment and then the next and the next. And you've been listening to Steve Gardner, the Roald Dahl museum director. When we come back, more of the Roald Dahl story here on Our American Stories. Help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our American stories dot com. Oh, hey, we're invited to the Johnson summer pool party this Saturday.
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On the second or third. Well, I'm not sure what it was. We suddenly got the shock of our lives because from the far corner of the room came Mrs. Pratchett's voice saying, that's it. Lay into him, headmaster.
Give it to him. And all that sort of thing. And we looked right. And there was this fellow sitting in an armchair watching. And when I came up, I remember yelling, that's the nastiest of a lot. You lay into him, headmaster. And I limped out clutching my buttocks and whimpering.
And off we went. He went on to another famous English private school called Repton, which had an extreme system of what was known as fagging, where younger boys were essentially servants or even slaves to the older boys. And abuse and misuse of power that this created was rife. Nevertheless, memories from these times still stayed with him.
Even the trick played on Mrs Pratchett in his childhood days in Llandaff in Wales became the inspiration for a similar prank played on Miss Trunchbull in Matilda. It's like a war, Matilda said. You're darn right. It's like a war, Hortensia cried. And the casualties are terrific. We are the Crusaders, the gallant army fighting for our lives with hardly any weapons at all.
And the Trunchbull is the prince of darkness, the foul serpent, the fiery dragon with all the weapons at her command. I've never liked authority. I've never got on very well in institutions. But it's wrong, of course, to be like that because you couldn't run schools and institutions like that if everyone was like that. There shouldn't be too many rebels around.
There shouldn't be. But you are one. Well, yes, but you get much mellower as you get older, you know. I'm still a rebel in some respects, yes. Very much so.
I don't like conformists, people who conform. Matilda is one of the four books by Darl Rank among the School Library Journal's 100 all-time children's books. This is more than any other writer on the list. Matilda has been made into a movie twice. First in 1996, directed by and starring Danny DeVito and Mara Wilson as Matilda.
And in the UK and around the world, the stage musical has been a success in London's West End since 2010. And it became a movie in 2022. One of the things that Darl's school days gave to him was a near lifelong habit of letter writing, particularly to his mother and to his sisters. So he was sent away to boarding school in England, away from Wales, following the incident at the sweet shop.
And that started a habit of writing a letter once a week. He was terribly homesick. He was a young boy, he was probably only nine. And he said he used to sleep facing across the Bristol Channel to Wales because he was so homesick.
Here's Roald reading from James and the Giant Peach, first published in 1961. My mother went to London to do some shopping, and there a terrible thing happened. Both of them suddenly got eaten up, in full daylight, mind you, and on a crowded street, by an enormous angry rhinoceros which had escaped from the London Zoo. Now this, as you can well imagine, was a rather nasty experience for two such gentle parents. But in the long run, it was far nastier for James than it was for them. Their troubles were all over in a jiffy.
They were dead and gone in 35 seconds flat. Poor James, on the other hand, was still very much alive. And all at once, he found himself alone and frightened in a vast, unfriendly world. Here's Roald Dahl's biographer, Donald Stark. I think you can sense, even in those very early schoolboy letters, the storyteller kind of beginning to enjoy his craft. He tells her stories that have been told to him at school, and then he starts to invent, and he starts to use language in a funny way.
And some of them are really pretty remarkable for a young child. So, although I think he had no idea that that's what he was doing, I think in some ways he was cutting his teeth as a storyteller. Were you bright at school? Not particularly, no. No, I was better at games than at work.
Certainly no sign of any ability to write or do anything else. No, I was nothing at school. I wasn't even a house prefect.
I used to read avidly. In my last school, Drevton, all the lavatories were outside in the outhouse where there was no heating at all. And in the winter, of course, it was freezing in there. And the prefects, they used to send us out before they went to the lavatory themselves. They would send us out to warm the seat for them. So you took your trousers down and sat on the seat until the prefect was ready to come out there.
And that's when I, of course, I took Dickens out and read most of Dickens warming the seats of the lavatories for the prefects. After school, Dahl, having been advised that he probably wouldn't get into Oxford or Cambridge with his academic record, he took a job with Shell Oil. His avowed intention was to be posted somewhere exotic. If you think of the time, which was 1933 or 4, there were virtually no aeroplanes flying you anywhere. There weren't any.
No commercial airline. It's impossible for young people today to understand the excitement of getting on a boat and travelling solidly for three or four weeks and finishing up in Africa among the coconut palms. Eventually he was sent to East Africa, Tanganyika as it was known at the time, Tanzania today. This becomes part of the stories he tells. Here's Roald's celebrated illustrator, Quentin Blake, who Roald once described as the finest illustrator of children's books anywhere in the world today. The first book I did was The Enormous Crocodile. It says he had hundreds of teeth.
And, of course, what it is, it's specially for eating children. Soon, he thought, one of them is going to sit on my head and I'll give a jerk and a snap and after that it will be yum, yum, yum. At that moment there was a flash of brown. It was Mugga Wump, the monkey. Run, Mugga Wump shouted to the children. All of you, run, run, run. That's not a see-saw. It's The Enormous Crocodile and he wants to eat you up. I'm quite prepared to have them killed in the most grisly possible way, like little boys pulled out of the windows and eaten by giants. Bones crunched up and everything. Or a child falling into a chocolate making machine and coming out as fudge.
That's fine as long as there is a whopping red laugh at the same time. He was in Tanganyika, Tanzania at the time that the Second World War broke out and he decided to volunteer for the Royal Air Force. So he drove into Kenya from Tanzania and then was signed up as a pilot officer in training. And he graduated third in his particular class, only behind two men who previously had civilian flying experience. So he was something of a talent in this area. However, on his first qualified flight from Egypt into the Libyan desert to try and meet up with 80 Squadron, something went very, very wrong.
The location of the air base that he was aiming for was not where it was supposed to be. And you've been listening to Steve Gardem and he's the Roald Dahl Museum Director in Buckinghamshire, England. You've also been hearing from Roald Dahl himself and from other authorities on the subject of Roald Dahl. My goodness, what a life story. Tough life early on in regard to just not really connecting in school. But his reaction to that in the end, his creativity may have indeed stemmed from that. He had to find his own life within that life. And I love what he said about never liking authority that you don't want too many rebels because you need that authority. Well, life can't be life. But he was a rebel, didn't fit in, and in the end unleashed.
His early life may indeed have unleashed his lifelong curiosity and creativity. When we come back, more of Roald Dahl's story here on Our American Stories. Switch on. Subscribe today at WashingtonPost.com slash iHeart. So that's a yes on the apple pie? I just went big time playing high five casino on my phone. Real cash prizes, free daily rewards, over 1200 games. So yes or no on the apple pie? I won again. I'll take that as a yes.
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Let's pick up where we last left off. So he and another pilot who were flying in formation had to make a terrible choice. And the choice was to set down in raw desert. The other pilot managed it. Dahl hit a rock and smashed his skull into the control panel of his plane, driving his nose back into his face. He blacked out.
The other pilot helped pull him from the wreckage and they were found. Dahl's injuries were severe. Here again is Roald Dahl's biographer, Donald Sturrock. The crash clearly was incredibly important because it became the subject of his first piece of published work. But I think it also may well have changed his personality. He thought and often said that he felt something had changed in him as a result of this crash. They were the head injuries that made him into a writer.
It's my cosy little theory that because I was a fairly square young chap and that I started writing soon after that, that maybe the head helped. He convalesced in Egypt, in Alexandria, and he recovered enough to be able to join up with 80 Squadron after a really long and uncomfortable flight for such a tall man. Dahl was nearly six foot seven and he had to be crammed into the cockpit of a hurricane fighter. When he arrived in Greece, he had to be lifted out of the plane by other men because his muscles were cramped up from being in the position for so long. This was then the start of Dahl's true combat experience in the Second World War. It was brief, but it was as exciting and as intense and as dangerous and as thrilling as terrifying as anybody's could imagine to be. He was part of a terrifyingly low odds rearguard action by 15 Royal Air Force hurricane fighters against an estimated 200 German Air Force planes.
Even by the conservative standards of Royal Air Force reporting, Dahl probably shot down at least five enemy planes, which in RAF terms makes him an ace. What happened next? Again, it's not entirely clear. The USA was only just joining the war. Not everybody in Washington DC was in favour of supporting this European campaign.
And so there was a public relations task that needs to be performed, led out of the British Embassy in Washington in early 1942. Didn't I read that you were a spy? No, that's an ugly word, a spy. No, I did. I worked for SIS, yes, the last half of the war when I was injured and couldn't fly.
Sure I did. Yeah, I went to America and did it. My job was to try to help Winston Churchill to get on with FDR and tell Winston what was in the old boy's mind in America.
I was really not spying against the Americans, I was trying to create amity. On the slow boat over the North Atlantic, not an easy crossing at that time, Dahl and a fellow pilot, Douglas Bygood, exchanged stories about a piece of Royal Air Force folklore. This was the idea of gremlins.
It was a wonderful idea, I've always found this incredibly charming. The idea that to soften discussions between air crew and ground crew when things went wrong with planes in a rushed and difficult environment in the height of war time. Instead of pilots landing and shouting and raving at ground crew who potentially put their life in danger by missing some crucial piece of maintenance.
The idea was to say, well the gremlins did this, these little creatures, these supernatural sprites were responsible for sticky rudders and dodgy landing gear. And all these kind of hiccups that inevitably would happen with what was of course an aeroplane itself in the 1930s and 40s was still incredibly new technology and being developed incredibly fast. Now when he ended up in Washington, bear in mind he only had a few war stories but he had a few more than anybody else there. He was tall, he was handsome, he was in an unfamiliar uniform.
That was why he felt he could be a public relations asset. I was sitting in my rather grand office in the British embassy wondering what to do and there was a knock on the door and I said come in and the tiny little man came in with thick glasses and said excuse me are you busy and I said not in the least, no do come in. And he said my name is Forrester, CS Forrester.
I said get on, you know you can't do that. He was one of my heroes. Really? Great, one of the great writers at that time, Captain Hornblower. He said now you've been in the war, America's only just coming in, I'll take you out to dinner, or lunch it was.
Tell me your most exciting exploit and I'll write it up in a Saturday evening post and we'll get the British a bit of publicity. So we went out to lunch and I remember we had roast duck and he was trying to take notes and eat this bloody duck at the same time, you know, and he couldn't do it. And I said well why don't I scribble it down for you this evening into the rough way and then you can put it right when I send it to you and he said well that would be super. Would you do that? And I said of course I would. So we finished our duck and I went home that evening and I wrote this thing out and sent it to him and I got a letter back about a week later saying I asked for notes, not a finished story. I didn't touch it, the Saturday evening post had bought it once for $1,000, the agent takes 10%, here's my cheque for $900. What amazing stuff.
I thought my god it can't be as easy as all that. What really probably got his name known as an author of some potential was the telling of the stories of the Gremlins. He wrote these stories down in rough and rudimentary form because of the structure, the hierarchy of the Royal Air Force, this had to be passed up through the ranks and it came to somebody who felt able to share it with one of their own contacts and that contact was Walt Disney. Disney was having both a good and a bad war, some of the projects the Disney company was working on were propaganda films but Disney always had a weather eye out for something that was perhaps more in tune with the House of Mouse.
And he thought he maybe saw this in the story of the Gremlins. I was very lucky because my first little book I wrote was called The Gremlins which was bought by Walt Disney and Eleanor Roosevelt read it to her grandchildren and loved this book. And so I got invited to the White House and we got to know each other a bit you know and I would go for weekends FDR had a, his country place was called Hyde Park, a fast place and I used to go there, got to know him.
I was only a young chap of 26 in an RAF uniform. I was met by Walt's number one artist and taken to the Beverly Hills Hotel. And after a bath and a shave was driven out to the studio and ushered up to Walt's room. The room itself is very magnificent with sofa, armchairs and a grand piano. I said thank you very much, and followed him down to an enormous room where half a dozen of his best artists were waiting with pencils poised to be told what a Gremlin looked like.
Long story short, as a movie project, the Gremlins died in development hell, as many movie projects do. And you've been listening to the story of Roald Dahl in part told by Steve Cardham. He's the Roald Dahl museum director in Buckinghamshire, England. You're also hearing from Roald Dahl himself and what a story. He is telling, by the way, not only a great storyteller in written form, but my goodness, in spoken form to what a voice. He has what a unique and beautiful voice and his service in the Royal Air Force and that crash that indeed he attributes in part to the imaginary talents he would later exhibit. And then, of course, what brings him to the United States is his intelligent work for the British Army and for Sir Winston Churchill. Of course, his job there, get an insight into FDR's mind, in short, how to bring the Americans into the war earlier. And that, of course, leads to the publishing of the Gremlins, to Eleanor Roosevelt having this book of his being a family favorite. And last but not least, to the offices of the great Walt Disney himself.
When we come back, more of this remarkable story, Roald Dahl's story here on Our American Stories. I bet you're smart. Yeah, and you like to hold your own in the group chat. We can help you drop even more knowledge. My name is Martine Powers.
And I'm Elahe Isadi. We host a daily news podcast called Post Reports. Every weekday afternoon, Post Reports takes you inside an important and interesting story by the kind of reporting that you can only get from The Washington Post. You can listen to Post Reports wherever you get your podcasts.
Go find it now and hit follow. Hey, this is Jodie Sweetin from the podcast How Rude Tanneritos. As a nostalgic voice from your past, I'm here to remind you that amongst the stressful and chaotic existence we live in 2024, you deserve to get away.
It's time for a vacation, no matter when you're hearing this. And let me tell you how you'll get there. The 2024 Hyundai Santa Fe. Want to bring the family to the mountains with the Santa Fe's available H-Track all-wheel drive? Well, it's got standard third-row seating and available dual wireless charging pads for the kids who just want to stare at their phone and not talk to you. You know what I mean. Visit HyundaiUSA.com or call 562-314-4603 for more details. Hyundai, there's joy in every journey. And we continue with our American stories and roll doll story.
Let's pick up where we last left off. Sometime around the publication of the Gremlins story initially in Cosmopolitan magazine and later as a book illustrated with some Disney illustrations, there was a bit of a Gremlin craze. And we even see this, not just through Disney but through Warner Bros. in the Bugs Bunny cartoon, Falling Hair. But his work as an assistant air attaché to the British Embassy in his public relations role meant that he met Ernest Hemingway. He played poker with Harry Truman and tennis with Truman's predecessor as vice president, Henry Wallace. He became friends with the James Bond novelty in front of him who also worked in British security services.
Then in London, they saw each other from time to time and it was no surprise when it came to writing a screenplay of You Only Live Twice that the producers turned to Roald rather than someone else to write it. Of course, one of the things that Dahl is most famously associated with is chocolate and this was a deep and abiding love. When I was at boarding school when we were 15, 16, 17, the big Cadbury's chocolate factory in England, for some reason they chose my school and the housemaster was sent 80 boxes of chocolate in plain brown cardboard, I remember it. And you open it up and inside were about eight different bars of chocolate with different things in the middle. And you marked each chocolate from one to ten marks and you made a comment, rotten, delicious, beastly, too bitter, too sweet, anything. But that told me and it would tell anyone that inside these giant chocolate factories there is an inventing room where men and women in white coats, scientists, are walking around trying to make new and delicious chocolates.
And so the idea of inventedness and chocolate and confectionery and candy was set in Dahl at a very young age and the idea, the excitement of these chocolate bars never left him. Did you know that he's invented chocolate ice cream so that it stays cold for hours and hours without being in the refrigerator? That's impossible, said little Charlie, staring at his grandfather. Of course it's impossible, said Grandpa Joe.
It's completely absurd. But Mr Willy Wonka has done it. He wrote the screenplay for the movie of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but he was frustrated by the casting choice, which seems incredible given that the movie that came out in 1971 has the iconic performance of Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. But Dahl wanted the great British comedian Spike Milligan because he felt that perhaps Wilder was too safe a choice.
What's interesting is that actually they seem to have been kindred spirits. Wilder took the role on the proviso that he would make his introduction as Willy Wonka on screen in a very particular way. And that is the way that if you've seen Wonka 71, you will know that Wonka appears behind the gates of his factory with a stoop and a limp, leaning heavily on a cane. And there's a point at which he appears to lose his balance, and then he does a tumble forward and stands up and is full of bright, sparky energy.
And it's the brilliant introduction that he puts to the character. I said, I'd like to come out with a cane and be crippled. And I said, because no one will know from that time on whether I'm lying or telling the truth. He said, you mean if we don't do that, you won't do the part? I said, yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Okay, okay, we'll do it. And I meant it too, because it was a tricky part. But that element of who knows, is he lying or is he telling the truth was what my main motor was. People call it the darkness in Dahl's writing, the edge. They're not entirely safe, they're not entirely sure. And I think this is evidenced by the fact that so many of the child characters that are the heroes of Dahl's stories are in perilous situations. And yet throughout Dahl, there's also a leavening of that peril. Dahl himself was on record as saying, you know, you have to let people think that evil could win, but you mustn't let it do so. That was one of his tenets for writing a good children's book.
There had to be a genuine sense of peril, but there has to be a happy and positive outcome. Dahl was adamant that his stories were an entertainment. They were an encouragement to read so that children would read many more books. But of course, his first audience was often his own children. And his children tell a tale of how he was effectively the BFG. Every night before we went to sleep, my father used to tell my sister Lucy and I a story. He told us about Fantastic Mr Fox this way, and actually sometime later he told us about the big friendly giant, which was the BFG. As part of a stunt, prank, just a bit of entertainment with his children, he would pretend to be the giant blowing dreams through their window through a bamboo garden cane. He would write our names in a weed killer on the grass and tell us the fairies had been.
If they reacted positively to a story, that was a clue that it would go somewhere. I have such a terror of boring the reader that I always condense my work into a short and shorter and shorter. And then I began to have children of my own. And again, without any thought of ever wanting to write a children's book, I used to try to make them up a story every night, which lots of fathers and mothers do.
And I find it rather difficult to make a good one every night. But now and again I would make one, and the next night they would say, do go on with the one you were telling us last night about the peach that grew or something. And when this went on for several nights with one story, which was about the peach that never stopped growing, I thought, well, why shouldn't I try and write that? So I sat down and started writing James and the Giant Peach, and it was published and it did quite well.
I thought, well, I'll do another. So I did Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That being said, when he showed an early draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to a nephew back in the 1960s, Uncle Roald, I think it's rotten, was the response. However, Dahl had never been a well man since his accident in the Second World War. He'd suffered from chronic back pain.
He perhaps didn't have the healthier lifestyle with cigarettes and a love of wine and fine food. He died from a blood disease in 1990, aged 74. When eventually you do finally have to give up or want to give up, whichever comes first. When I die. When you die.
Yeah. Is there any particular way in which you want to have been remembered? Well, you can quote Oscar Wilde and say, when I am gone, I hope it will be said, my sins were scarlet, but my books were read. What he left us is an incredible creative legacy, and the Roald Dahl Museum does what it can to work with that, to encourage the writers of tomorrow.
To learn from Roald's creative practice and see how, by feeding your imagination with inspiration, by working over and over again at the hard graft of creativity, and then sharing it, telling your stories to an audience, that's how a legacy like Dahl's can be produced. Yes, I've never wanted to be anything special, actually. I've always had drives. If I set out to do a thing, I'm jolly well going to finish it and do it properly, and I'm not the only one who has that. Half the world has it.
The other half doesn't, and that's the trouble. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to Steve Gardem, and he's the Roald Dahl Museum director in Buckinghamshire, England. And my goodness, what a job that must be, preserving and protecting and promoting the works of one of the great writers of the 20th century. And he was indeed writing for children, is no less a task, no less important than writing for any other audience, and my goodness, so many adults have been moved by his work, too, and that's what makes him great. And what a story he was telling while he was in America, in his intelligence work, he got to meet Hemingway, President Truman, and also he got to really recall those incidences when he was a kid, being visited with all that great chocolate from the Cadbury's factory for the kids to test. And most kids would just eat the chocolate, and his memory of that was that, wow, inside that factory must be an inventing room. He wrote the screenplay we learned, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Gene Wilder, the star, talking about what he did, the choices he made, and how important they were to him. His characters were never simple, any more than Mel Blanc's characters were simple. He said in the end that there has to be a genuine sense of peril in the stories, but there always has to be a positive outcome. And I love what he said, I have such a terror of boring my reader. He said, but of course he had children, and he wanted to tell them stories, and so he did, and some had staying power. Some of them became the stories we all know.
The story of Roald Dahl, his connection to America, and to all of us who live here, and the world, here on Our American Stories. The following is a high five moment from highfivecasino.com. I won! Yoo-hoo!
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