From: Ginny Kruse <gmkruse>
Date: Fri, 07 Jul 1995 21:04:00 -600

Friends, I'm sorry to bring you the sad news that children's book author/artist and educator Frances Temple died on Wednesday, July 5, of a massive heart attack. Her Orchard Books Editor Richard Jackson phoned me yesterday morning to let me know.

We talked a bit then about the only time Dick and Frances had an opportunity to meet each other in person. They met for the first and only - time early in April when he flew from California and she from upstate New York to this university campus in Madison, Wisconsin, to speak at the Images of Community conference cosponsored by the CCBC. The editor and the author had always enjoyed each other by phone, fax and mail - and they delighted in discovering that they enjoyed each other in person, as well. Some of you heard and met Frances at that time, too, which is why I am using CCBC-NET for this sad purpose.

Perhaps others in the CCBC-NET community have also met Frances Temple
- through her fiction or her adaptation of a folktale for which she also created illustrations. If you have read one of Frances Temple's three published works of fiction (Taste of Salt, Grab Hands and Run and/or Tonight, By Sea), you met her as a novelist. If you have seen her retelling of a Jamaican Anansi tale titled Tiger Soup, you met her as a writer and an artist. If you have read Tiger Soup aloud to children or noticed Frances' dramatization of the tale on the inside of that book jacket, you realized that she understood young children very well. Actually, Frances Temple was also a first grade teacher and a curriculum writer - and a parent, and... and... and...

Dick had talked with Frances on the morning of her death. On Thursday he told me a bit of what he had learned about her death. We both knew that she and her husband Charles were ready to move their family and household to another state next week. He had a wonderful new faculty appointment. They looked forward to having indoor and outdoor space into which to welcome their extended family, thus relieving their respective elders of that role for the gatherings they all enjoyed. Dick said that Charles and Frances had gone dancing over the weekend. She swam that morning. The two of them were walking the dog near the lake when the heart attack occurred on Wednesday afternoon.

Frances Temple was 48 years old. As I think about her death and the great loss many are experiencing as they attempt to understand it, I remember when a marvelous UW-Madison faculty colleague Valmai Fenster died - too soon, too young, leaving so much yet to do and contribute. At that time Valmai's father compared her career to a meteor, saying she arrived so rapidly, sweeping across our consciousness with a brilliant flash, and then she was gone.

The fortunate children and young teenagers who read her books will know Frances Temple flashed across the universe. Individuals and groups in Vietnam, West Africa, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and the U.S.A. for whose rights and movements she found ways to fight have substantial evidence that Frances Temple understood Community on a deep and daring level. However, we cannot imagine what Frances Temple might have written or accomplished with her amazing combination of talents and her passion for justice had she been granted the gift of longevity.

You are welcome to comment about any of Frances Temple's books, if you wish.
   Ginny
**************************************** Ginny Moore Kruse gmkruse at macc.wisc.edu Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) A Library of the School of Education University of Wisconsin - Madison 4290 H.C. White Hall 600 North Park Street Madison, WI 53706 USA
Received on Fri 07 Jul 1995 10:04:00 PM CDT