Cricket magazine founder Marianne Carus leaves founding legacy in children’s storytelling

Marianne Carus could tell a good story.

She knew the essence of having a good beginning, middle and end, the Peru resident said in a 2018 interview with Southern Illinois University, and could carry on lively conversation with anyone, her husband Blouke said.

She also knew a dull story when she read it.

“Most of the children’s literature was putting parents to sleep,” her husband Blouke recalled of the 1960s, noting Dick and Jane was the curriculum during that time.

That was Marianne’s queue.

The inspiration to entertain and educate children and the frustration with children’s magazines available in 1973 led to the establishment of Cricket; which became a nationally-recognized literature and arts magazine geared for children.

Her creation would go on to inspire an estimated 20 million young readers, garnering more than 250,000 subscribers after its first year.

“That made a difference,” Blouke said.

Marianne died on March 3 in her Peru home, but the stories she kindled through her creation and the young minds she stimulated by raising the bar for children’s literature will live on.

She started Cricket, a magazine geared toward children’s literature, because she wanted something for her children to read when they were sick and in bed, she said in the 2018 interview.

That setting, among others, lent itself for stories that were shorter.

Cricket raised the bar.

The magazine featured stories, articles, poetry and illustrations from world renowned talents, not just in the children’s sector, but across all of the literature and arts world, including authors, such as John Updike, author and illustrator Nonny Hogrogian, a two-time winner of the Caldecott Medal, as well as reprints of work by T.S. Eliot and Astrid Lindgren, who created Pippi Longstocking. It also had reoccurring characters make appearances in the magazine, such as Fat Ladybug and the titular Cricket. For its personality, it was tagged as “The New Yorker for kids.”

“Exposed to good writing and good illustrations we believed that children would eventually develop a taste and appreciation for good literature and art,” Marianne wrote in “Celebrate Cricket: 30 Years of Stories and Art.”

Marianne’s talent for storytelling and her taste for good literature was nurtured in her childhood growing up in Germany, Blouke said.

“She was reading beyond school on her own,” Blouke said. “Her parents would tell her not to read in bed, but she would have her flashlight in her hand all the time reading. She read since childhood, and that’s where the talent came from.”

In 1928, Marianne Sondermann was born in Dieringhausen, Germany, and raised in Gummersbach, about 30 miles east of Cologne. Her father Dr. Günther Sondermann, was an ophthalmologist; her mother, Elisabeth (Gesell) Sondermann, was a nurse.

Her father was drafted as a medical officer in World War II and she also assisted in the war effort where girls cooked food for soldiers.

She was admitted to the University of Freiburg to study literature and began her studies in the fall of 1949. Within a few weeks of arriving in Freiburg, she met Blouke, a graduate of Caltech. They were married on March 3, 1951, in Gummersbach.

Marianne left her homeland for the U.S. with Blouke, and they settled in La Salle, where Blouke was soon occupied in building Carus Chemical Company, which his father had founded. Marianne raised three children and studied literature at the University of Chicago with Professor Arnold Bergstraesser.

“She was a very strict mom from growing up in Germany during the war,” said Inga, Marianne’s daughter. “She was a strict disciplinarian, but if you did something, she might say go to your dad first, then of course, dad would say to go to your mom.”

In creating Cricket, Marianne put together an advisory board with literary talents, such as children’s author Lloyd Alexander, Virginia Haviland, who founded the children’s section at the Library of Congress, and Nobel Prize winning novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer.

“We had them over for dinner,” Inga said. “It was a great childhood to be able to meet to these people.”

As editor-in-chief of Cricket, Marianne was putting in 60-hour weeks editing manuscripts and “always working on deadlines,” Blouke said.

The magazine’s office was on the second floor, above a tavern on Eighth Street in La Salle — which would become an unsuspecting hub for coordinating some of the finest children’s literature and art.

“It was a labor of love,” Inga said. " ... It was her fourth child.”

Inga was impressed at how her mother could advise some of the finest writing talents.

“She was a really vibrant, engaging, outgoing person,” Inga said. “She had a vibrant personality. She was silly, with a great sense of humor. Up to her last days, she had a great sense of humor.”

Blouke and Marianne traveled around the world to regular panels and children’s book fairs and met many talented authors.

The magazine expanded in 1994 with the establishment of other magazines geared toward more specific audiences, including Ladybug, Spider for 6 to 9-year-old beginning readers, and Babybug, a small board-book magazine with rounded corners for the youngest children, among several others.

“Thinking about the good old times, I especially remember all the smart and brilliant young people who worked with me on Cricket over the years,” Marianne wrote in the 30th anniversary book. “They made do with dingy, small, and windowless offices above a bar and did their best to find the few jewels in the piles of unsolicited manuscripts they had to read. ... they shared our vision to give children ‘only the rarest kind of best in anything.’ "

The Caruses sold Cricket and its related titles in 2011. The magazine still is published.

“Let’s celebrate Cricket, and may it go on ‘until the world comes to an end,’ " she wrote.

Reflecting on the thousands of complimentary notes the magazine would receive from grateful children and thinking about the millions who have been exposed to the magazine, Blouke beams with pride, celebrating his wife’s impact that continues today.

“It had an effect for children who like a story and like to read,” Blouke said. “Going from reading ‘Dick and Jane’ to something more rewarding changed their life. She had that effect on them. She changed their life.”