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Dorothy Howard: Pioneer Collector of Children's Folklore 

Sylvia Ann Grider 

Everyone interested in children's folklore, especially games, owes a 
debt to Dorothy Mills Howard. Her work bridges the gap between 
the late nineteenth-century collecting of children's games and the 
current generation of scholars engaged in serious and systematic 
childlore research, epitomized by Iona and the late Peter Opie, 
recognized today as the world's leading collectors of children's 
folklore.l In 1938 Dorothy Howard's New York University doctoral 
dissertation, "Folk Jingles of American Children: A Collection of 
Rhymes Used by Children Today," was heralded as pioneering and 
innovative because it departed so radically from previously accepted 
canons of scholarship. She collected her material directly from the 
children themselves rather than observing them as an outsider as her 
predecessors had done and corroborating this secondhand 
information with adult memories. 

Born July 8, 1902, in rural Texas and named Dorothy Gray 
Mills (which she preferred to write backwards as a sort of alter ego, 
Sllim Yarg Yhtorod), she vividly remembered her own childhood, 
which she chronicled in loving detail in her memoir, Dorothy's 
World (1977). She began her teaching career when she was only 
seventeen years old, in 1920, during the second year of the great 
international flu epidemic. When a fourth-grade teacher in a nearby 
community died, Dorothy was asked to teach the class for the 
remaining three months of the school year. Her high school teachers 
tutored her after school, and she graduated on time with her 
classmates. 

She knew that she wanted a career in teaching. In 1923, she 
graduated from North Texas State Teacher's College in Denton, 
Texas. In 1925, she married James Howard and had two children, a 
son and a daughter. From 1923-44 she taught in public schools in 
Texas, New York, and New Jersey, and also served as a school 
principal. From 1931-36 she was director of a public summer camp 
for girls in Westchester County, New York. 

She became a folklorist almost by accident. As she recalls in a 
personal, unpublished memoir: 

From 1930-44 I taught in public schools in New 
York and New Jersey, teaching immigrant chil-
dren and children of immigrant parents from Nor-
way, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Germany, and Italy 
and Greek-speaking children from Turkey, to-
gether with those whose immigrant forbears may 

3 



 

Grider 

have come to America on the Mayflower or on a Dutch 
ship to New Amsterdam. My job was to teach all the 
children to read, write, and speak the English language 
and, in addition, to appreciate the beauty of literature in the 
English language. There was no book to tell me how to do 
it, and I was frustrated until I discovered that they were 
learning English faster on the unsupervised playground 
than in the classroom. Consequently, defying all prevailing 
pedagogic canon law, I brought the bouncing balls, 
skipropes, and marbles into the classroom where I began to 
construct a new curriculum based on the children's perfect 
metric play poetry. I had no thought of ever incarcerating 
my research into a doctoral dissertation. That happened by 
chance. 

Howard thus began her research into what she at first called "children's 
playlore" as a classroom teacher interested in the teaching-learning process. 
As she relates the experience (in third person): 

As a wandering school teacher, Dorothy in 1930 became a 
teaching principal in a consolidated rural school in New 
York State. One problem that soon became her great 
concern was the fact that most of the children, especially 
the boys, reached the junior high grades 'hating' poetry. . . . 
Then one spring day at noon she stood at an open 
classroom window pondering that problem [and] casually 
watching children play on an unsupervised playground. 
Skip ropes were turning; marbles, rolling; balls, bouncing. 
Gradually she became aware of metaphoric, rhythmic 
language accompanying the body movements of the chil-
dren. . . . By the time the bell rang calling the children in, 
she had counted on her fingers more than a dozen rhymes 
and formulae; and when the children came to class, 
rhymes, rhythms, and metaphors of the playground 
language were discussed. The next day, self-assigned 
homework was brought in, and by week's end, the class had 
a collection of more than two hundred playground rhymes. 
It soon became clear to Dorothy that their joy in poetry 
came from orchestrated body movements, including the 
voice. One class discussion led to another: metric and 
cadenced rhythms; kinds of rhymes and sound-meaning 
(rollicking and frollicking as opposed to cold and bold). 
Discussions led to 

4 



 

Dorothy Howard 

dramatic choral reading activities, to group creative verse 
writing, to individual creative writing, and to reading 
poetry in books, first to limericks, then to 'Jabberwocky,' 
and gradually to serious poems. (Dorothy's World, 287-88) 

As she later observed, her "use of the playground as laboratory distin-
guished her method of study and would. . . determine the character of the 
results. Her purpose was not that of an antiquarian making a pack rat, 
museum collection of fossils but that of a school teacher trying to find out 
what and how children learn and teach each other and why" (293). 

She further recalled: 

Sometime in 1933 . . . the late Dr. Walter Barnes, Professor 
of English at New York University, heard about my re-
search in conversation with my sister at a cocktail party. 
He sent word that he wanted to talk with me about it. And 
when we talked, he told me that children's playlore was 
'folklore' (I did not know that). He introduced me to the 
works of Gomme, Halliwell, Newell and other nineteenth 
century folklorists and told me that research in children's 
folklore was a fallow field unexplored since Newell. I 
remember exactly what he said, "I am keen about your 
project." He urged me to continue the investigation and to 
keep in touch with him. 

I continued playing with my schoolchildren on the 
playground and with my own and neighbor children at 
home and in the streets. Dr. Barnes and I continued to meet 
and talk until sometime in 1934. He suggested that the 
project should develop into a Ph. D. dissertation. With my 
permission, he said, he would investigate the possibility of 
persuading the higher powers at N. Y. U., and at Columbia 
University, as well as at other universities, to his point of 
view. I agreed. 

About a year later he reported. The academic higher 
powers were unanimous in the view that children's play 
was not a proper subject for a Ph. D. dissertation. 
However, N. Y. U. had recently invented a new degree—
the Ed. D. He offered to investigate the possibility of 
getting my project accepted as an Ed. D. dissertation, and I 
agreed. 

Finally, in 1936, Dr. Barnes' scholarly prestige out-
weighed and overcame the reluctance of the higher powers 

5 



 

Grider 

6 

at N. Y. U. I was allowed to take the preliminary examina-
tions for the doctorate. And my project was accepted with 
the stipulation that it be confined to verbal aspects of 
children's lore and that it be geographically expanded to 
include rhymes of children throughout the entire United 
States. Professor Barnes was appointed chairman of my 
sponsoring committee which included Professor Ambrose 
L. Suhrue and Professor Hughes Mearns (both were sym-
pathetic and cooperative). That first morning when I re-
ported to begin my preliminary examinations for the doc-
torate, I opened a door into a very large room and saw 
some five hundred or more people there, for the same 
purpose. As my eyes wandered over the room, I saw only 
two other women. In 1936, there were very few women 
doctors [i. e. doctorates] of any kind. 

In the beginning my attention had been concentrated 
on verbal aspects of children's play. But as I spent more 
and more time on the playground, I became more and more 
aware that children's voices accompanied other body move-
ments and that children moved in group patterns-not 
chaotically as I had, at first, thought. Then I began to view 
the playground as an educational institution-as a school 
operating three feet below adult eye level and invisible to 
myopic adults. 

By the time I was a doctoral candidate, I wanted to 
limit my study to one school and one group and to expand 
the inquiry to include the context of the verbal lore: the 
school (playground and classroom); the home (parent-child 
and sibling relationships); the church; the community. 
Professor Barnes had become sympathetic to my view and 
from 1934 to 1936, he and I searched for then current 
publications in anthropology, sociology and psychology 
bearing on my subject. But in those days, physical educa-
tionists were in ascendency in the academic community 
and their prevailing view was: adult-planned and super-
vised play, only, was worth serious attention. Following 
Professor Barnes' advice, I compromised and accepted the 
dictated formula for doctoral study. He said, "Get that 
doctorate. Then you can go your own way forever." 



 

Dorothy Howard 

In a 1937 article in The New Yorker, Howard published some of the 
poems and jingles from her research, thus giving readers a new insight into 
the worldview of contemporary American children. In that article, she 
explained: 

The inhabitants of the childish underworld. . . caricature 
the universe of their elders. They reduce our sophisms to 
the elementary simplicities-violence, anger, love, and 
brutal humor. They celebrate the passions which fill their 
small selves in songs fit for savage races, fit for prehistory. 

She continued: 

The child, most indefatigable of jokers, finds all 
experience an occasion for humor. The whole spectacle of 
the world is comic. Specifically, he finds risible all 
physical peculiarities, such as fat or ugliness, all offensive 
smells, sounds, and actions, and love, and intoxication, and 
wounds and contusions. . . . His art fulfills the definition of 
art as a criticism of life, for he regards adult experience 
coldly, transfers it into concepts meaningful to himself, 
and states them in satirical and critical terms. (32) 

In addition to the article in The New Yorker, Howard recalled speaking 
about her research before the annual congress of the National Council of 
Teachers of English and that the talk was written up by the New York press. 
As a result, she said she received hundreds of letters from readers all over the 
world, including one from Iona and Peter Opie, who were then a young, 
unmarried courting couple. She has stayed in touch with the Opies, who in 
the preface to their innovative and influential The Lore and Language of 
Schoolchildren referred to her as "one of the originators of this field of study 
(xvi)." 

Howard recalls, "The New York Times report also brought a Time 
Magazine reporter scurrying to see my dissertation. Out of thirteen chapters, 
she was interested in one, 'Taboo Rhymes.' And her article in Time implied 
that I was a pixilated, female schoolteacher sitting on a street curb inviting 
naughty children to whisper naughty rhymes to me when I should have been 
in the classroom teaching them their Three R's."2 In spite of this harsh and 
naive criticism, she continued throughout her long career to conduct research 
and publish the results innumerous folklore journals and other professional 
magazines in the United States and abroad (see bibliography). 

From 1944-1967 Howard was a Professor of English at Frostburg State 
Teacher's College, Maryland, and served as Chair of the English Department 

7 



 

Grider 

from 1942-1962. Throughout her teaching career at Frostburg, she assigned 
her students to collect data from local children and to write careful, detailed 
autobiographical ethnographies of their own playlife as children.3 She retired 
from Frostburg in 1967, and from 1967-1969 she was Visiting Professor of 
English at the University of Nebraska and special consultant in children's 
literature and playlore in the cooperative Tri-University Project (University 
of Washington, New York University, and University of Nebraska). She 
retired from the University of Nebraska in 1969 and lived for many years in a 
pink adobe facing the desert on the outskirts of Roswell, New Mexico, until 
advanced age and failing eyesight forced her to make other arrangements. 

Dorothy Howard has been a consistent professional voice on behalf of 
the systematic collection and study of children's folklore. For example, in 
1949, recognizing the close relationship between folklore and education, 
Thelma James, President of the American Folklore Society, appointed a 
special Committee on Folklore for Children and Young People. Dorothy 
Howard, with the assistance of Eloise Ramsey, compiled an annotated 
bibliography, Folklore for Children and Young People, which was published 
in 1952 as Volume 3 of the AFS Bibliographical Series. Because this 
bibliography emphasized folklore for children rather than by children, it 
departed from Dorothy Howard's other work; but it nevertheless reflected the 
official concern of the American Folklore Society with the otherwise ne-
glected overall field of children's folklore. 

Dorothy Howard continued her research, collecting, and publishing of 
children's lore through a long and productive career. As her interest in the 
context of children's play increased, she wanted to limit her attention to 
smaller and smaller groups in order to observe more thoroughly and to probe 
more deeply into children's minds. To this end, she increased her direct 
fieldwork with children playing together naturally in groups. 

In 1954-55, she enjoyed a Fulbright post-doctoral research grant in 
Melbourne, Australia, where she was the first to study the traditional play 
customs of Anglo-Australian children. When she applied for the Fulbright 
research grant, she intended to study the play life of Australian children in 
one school in one community. The grant, however, was not approved until 
she agreed to survey play life in the whole of Australia, an impossible task 
for one person during one year's fieldwork. 

In a presentation she made to the Victorian Institute of Educational 
Research in 1955, she summarized her findings: " . . . over 700 game names; 
descriptions of about 400 games; 175 skipping rhymes; 40 counting-out 
rhymes. . .; the words for about 15 singing games (with musical notation for 
8); a few riddles, tongue-twisters, trick rhymes; hand, finger, and toe rhymes; 
rhymes for taunting, swearing an oath, bouncing ball; and nonsense rhymes. 

8 



 

Dorothy Howard 

All this is folklore-transmitted from children to children without benefit of 
printed book or adult sponsor." The educators with whom she worked in 
Australia were astonished and fascinated by the extent of her findings. 

During her stay in Australia, she met and encouraged a young researcher 
and teacher from New Zealand, Brian Sutton-Smith, who followed in her 
footsteps to become an international authority on children and their tradi-
tional behavior. As he recalls: 

Dorothy visited me in New Zealand in 1954 shortly after I 
had returned from my Fulbright two years in the United 
States. I remember sitting with her on a wind swept beach 
on those antipodean islands considering that I had chosen 
the world's most trivial subject but had chosen it also about 
as far away from any action as it was possible to get. As 
they say down under, it seems there like all the rest of the 
world was invited to a party but New Zealand did not get 
an invitation. In those circumstances, Dorothy's own 
Fulbright visit to see me was a infusion of heartening lend-
lease sufficient to keep me going, until my personal 
invitation did indeed arrive two years later. (2) 

Dr. Sutton-Smith came to the United States to study and went on to teach at 
Columbia University and later at the University of Pennsylvania. 

In recognition of Dorothy Howard's contributions to the field, an archive 
of children's folklore was established at the Institute of Early Childhood 
Development in Melbourne, Australia, under the direction of June Factor. 
The Institute also publishes the bi-annual Australian Children's Folklore 
Newsletter, which was started in 1981 and modeled after the Children's 
Folklore Newsletter (now the Children 's Folklore Review) of the Children's 
Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society. 

Continuing her international focus, in 1962-63, while on sabbatical 
leave, Howard conducted a sociological study of one year in the life of a 
twelve-year-old boy in Tonala, Jalisco, Mexico, which was her first oppor-
tunity to confine her study to one individual child. In the preface to Pedro of 
Tonala, she explained how she chose this subject: 

I first met Pedro in the summer of 1962 when my anthro-
pologist friend, Francis Gilmore, and I visited her friends 
in several families, in Tonala. I chose Pedro Asuncion 
Munoz Maestro for my study for several reasons: 1) he 
was the oldest son in his family and an apprentice in the 
family 

9 



 

I visited Pedro at home, and on the playground and in the 
classroom at school; and, with the family, I attended local 
mercados, fiestas, and church. On later visits, we attended 
the mercados and walked about the town to see all the 
changes. But most of our time together we spent sitting on 
the Munoz-Maestro patio talking. As a grown man remem-
bering, Pedro could tell me things he had known as a child 
but did not have the words to say as a child. (n.p.) 

Grider 

pottery industry; 2) he attended the government school; and 
3) his family included, in addition to his father, mother, 
two younger brothers and one older and one younger sister, 
his grandfather, Maestro Martiniano, who still spoke the 
language and retold the legends of his ancient Indian 
ancestors. As a "maestro," he taught the young people of 
Tonala the traditional fiesta customs and he was a master 
potter, teaching Pedro to become a master potter to carryon 
the family tradition in an ancient pueblo that still clung to 
tradition. (n. p.) 

She kept in touch with Pedro for many years after that research, visiting with 
him and his wife and children for the last time in 1977. 

Of her fieldwork, Howard said: 

In 1989 she privately published Pedro of Tonala, a work she says was 
consistently rejected for publication by the "powers-that-be" in the profes-
sional folklore community because it lacked what they regarded as a viable 
theoretical base. 

Following her work with Pedro, from 1967 to 1969 in Lincoln, 
Nebraska, she studied the play life of Ingrid, a girl from the age of two to age 
four. Her research technique in this project was to play the roles that Ingrid 
assigned to her. This manuscript remains unpublished. 

As previously mentioned, she retired from her position as Professor of 
English and Chair at Frostburg State Teacher's College in Maryland in 1967. 
In her retirement she published a personal, autobiographical memoir, 
Dorothy's World: Childhood in Sabine Bottom, 1902-1910, and then turned 
her attention to a study of the play customs of Amish children in Western 
Maryland which is tentatively entitled "Work and Play in Pleasant Valley." 
This project was inspired by research she and her students had undertaken 
several years before when Howard taught at Frostburg. When she returned to 
Maryland in the early 1980s to conduct fieldwork, many of these 

10 



 

Dorothy Howard 

former students, now parents themselves, assisted her. This important study 
is unfinished. Her family has encouraged her to write a sequel to Dorothy's 
World, which she has considered calling Dorothy's Schooldays, but her 
failing eyesight interferes with continuing these projects. 

Reflecting on her life's work as a woman specializing in the then 
marginalized and largely ignored field of children's folklore, Dr. Howard 
says: 

Before the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U. S. 
Constitution and ever since my success as a high school 
debater always debating (against boys), "Resolved, that 
women have the right to vote"; and ever since Plato intro-
duced me to Socrates (in college), I have searched through 
history books to learn about the position of women and 
children throughout the history of the human race. The 
relationship of adults to children has been a preoccupation 
in my search. No folklorist-as far as I am aware-has made 
a study of the folklore of pedagogy. 

Reflecting further, Dr. Howard concludes: 

Professor Barnes was wrong when he said, "You can go 
your own way forever." All those who undertake to study 
human behavior always find their way paved with circum-
stances beyond their control.  In the academic milieu of the 
1930's in which it was my lot to live and begin my inquiry 
into children's playlore, the circumstances beyond my 
control were not unlike the circumstances beyond the 
control of Lady Alice Gomme, a proper Victorian lady of 
the nineteenth century. Lady Gomme was a non-conformist 
in her day. So have I been in mine. But, happily for me, 
children, unlike their elders, have welcomed me—a non-
conforming adult. No longer do I call myself a folklorist 
because I do not fit any definition of the word in the 
perennial debate among vying A. F. S. members. As a 
contented maverick, I prefer—If I must be labelled—to be 
called an eclectic schoolteacher or a mugwump pedagog.4 

In recognition of her vast contribution to the study of children's play, in 
1981 The Anthropological Association for the Study of Play (TAASP) 
presented Dorothy Howard its first Distinguished Achievement award. In his 
presentation remarks, Brian Sutton-Smith summed up Dorothy Howard's 
contributions as follows: 

11 



 

Grider 

Her own story emphasizes the community of kinship rela-
tionships and of play. Her emphasis (like that of Dr. Victor 
Turner's to come) is on community. And yet when one 
looks at her account one is impressed mostly by its intellec-
tuality. . .. There is an early intensive concern with literacy 
and word meanings. There is a story told with remarkable 
coolness and rationality. It is a tale of childhood told as if it 
was a cognitive map. It is written in the way we might have 
expected Piaget to do it. The same reflective rationality and 
the gutsiness of a little kid who kicks shins and spits in the 
butter if she doesn't get her way has clearly assisted Dr. 
Howard throughout her professional career as a debater, as 
a union activist, as a member of the AAUP and the 
American Civil Liberties Union. She has had the rare 
reward of contriving the dismissal of an authoritarian 
college president while holding her own job as a lowly 
professor. 

So why did she find children important enough to go 
out amongst them? I suspect that Dorothy, like many of us, 
finds in these innocent roots the reminders of that warmth 
and community of earlier life long gone from much of the 
modem life of literacy and alienation. In her own writing 
she protests against that kind of scholarship that buries the 
study of children's play in academic footnotes and com-
puter output. In her book on Pedro she seeks to establish an 
intensive play record of one child in a community context 
with a full description of all surrounding phenomena just 
as she has done for her own life with Dorothy's World. 
Though contrary to major scholarly trends, her attempt at 
such an intensive case study with a specific ludic focus 
continues to make her as much of a pioneer today as she 
was in 1931. (6) 

Howard replied, with characteristic spunk: 

Brian praised me for my childhood virtues (kicking shins 
and spitting in the butter). I kicked four shins (belonging to 
two older sisters). I spat on people (not in the butter). I was 
promptly spanked for it and soon learned that spitting on 
people was not profitable; and I have not spat on anybody 
since I was four years old. Nevertheless, 'til this day (like 

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Dorothy Howard 

Pavlov's salivating dogs and Skinner's trained pigeons) in 
the presence of some people, I have to swallow hard and 
fast. 

This, I hope, sufficiently amplifies my pedigree and 
my childhood virtues and I shall now stop playing with 
words. If I have been a pioneer on play research (as Brian 
says), I wish I could have blazed a wider trail through the 
forests and over the mountains of academic arrogance, 
ignorance, and indifference for you who now struggle to 
till the soil, plant and harvest facts and knowledge, wisdom 
and understanding for the purpose of nourishing and cher-
ishing the young of our land, where children are still 
chattel property too often unprotected by the Supreme 
Court of the United States. All I can say to you today in 
return for the honor you have bestowed on me, is my 
blessing. Right On! (6-7) 

In 1990, the Children's Folklore Section of the American Folklore 
Society awarded her its Lifetime Achievement Award. 

Bibliography 

Dorothy Howard's personal papers, research, and publications have been 
deposited in the Dorothy Howard Collection of the Rare Books Room, Willis 
Library, University of North Texas in Denton, her alma mater. 

Books 

1952. With Eloise Ramsey. Folklore for Children and Young People: A 
Critical and Descriptive Bibliography for Use in the Elementary and 
Intermediate School.  American Folklore Society Bibliographical Series, 
Volume 3. 

1977. Dorothy's World: Childhood in Sabine Bottom, 1902-1910.  
      Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 

1989. Pedro o fTonala. Roswell, NM: Hall-Poorbaugh. Dissertation 

1938. "Jingles of American Children: A Collection of Rhymes Used by 
 Children Today." New York University: Ed. D. dissertation. 

13 



 

Grider 

Articles 

1936. "Kite with a Rainbow Tail." Clearing House 11: 451-455. 

1937. (with Morris Bishop) "Onward and Upward with the Arts: Songs of 
Innocence." The New Yorker 13 (November 13): 32-42. (Excerpts 
reprinted in A Treasury of American Folklore, ed. B. A. Botkin. New 
York: Crown Publishers, 796-803.) 

1940a. "The Bell Always Rang." Elementary English Review 17: 262-264. 

1940b. "Playtime Verse." Jack and Jill (January): 18-19. 

1941a. "Old Valentine Verses." Jack and Jill (February): 52. 

1941b. '''Our Own' in the Classroom." Story Parade (October): 5-6. 

1942. "Rope Skipping." Jack and Jill (March): 7. 

1944. "Sidewalk Rhymes of New York." in A Treasury of American 
 Folklore. ed. B. A. Botkin. New York: Crown, 796-803. 

1949. "The Rhythms of Ball-Bouncing and Ball-Bouncing Rhymes." Jour- 
 nal of American Folklore 62: 166-172. 

1950a. "Folklore in the Schools." New York Folklore Quarterly 6: 99-107. 

1950b. "Mining Lore from Maryland." Western Folklore 9: 162-164. 

1953. "Children in the Folklore Market Place." Midwest Folklore 3: 243 
 249. 

1955. "Folklore of Australian Children." The Journal of Education [Victoria 
Institute of Educational Research, Melbourne, Australia] 2: 30-35. 

1958a. "Australian 'Hoppy' (Hopscotch)." Western Folklore 17: 163-175. 

1958b. "The Game of Knucklebones in Australia." Western Folklore 17: 34 
 44. 

1959a. "Autograph Album Customs in Australia." Southern Folklore Quar- 
 terly 23: 95-107. 

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Dorothy Howard 

1959b. "Ball-Bouncing Customs and Rhymes in Australia." Midwest Folk-
lore 9: 77-87. (Reprinted in A Children's Games Anthology: Studies in 
Folklore and Anthropology. ed. Brian Sutton-Smith. New York: Arno, 
1976) 

1960a. "Counting Out Customs of Australian Children." New York Folklore 
 Quarterly. 16: 131-144. 

1960b. "Marble Games of Australian Children." Folk-Lore 71: 165-179. 
(Reprinted in A Children's Games Anthology: Studies in Folklore and 
Anthropology, ed. Brian Sutton-Smith. New York: Arno, 1976) 

1960c. "The Toodlembuck—An Australian Children's Gambling Game." 
 Journal of American Folklore 73: 53-54. 

1961a. "Folklore and Fakelore in the Children's Literary Market." The 
Newsletter [Inter-American Schools Service, American Council on 
Education] 6: 2-10. 

1961b. "Folklore of Childhood." Casselman Chronicle [The Springs 
 Historical Society of the Casselman Valley] 1: 7-8. 

1961c. "String Games of Australian Children." Folk-Lore 72: 385-387. 

1964. "Introduction" to reprint of The Traditional Games of England, 
Scotland, and Ireland by A. B. Gomme (1894-98). New York: Dover,  
v-xi. 

1965. "Folklore of Australian Children." Keystone Folklore Quarterly 10: 
 99-115. 

1968a. "Folklore in the Elementary Schools." Lincoln: University of Ne- 
 braska Curriculum Development Center. [ERIC #ED-045-679]. 

1968b. "Rope Skipping Games: Language, Beliefs, and Customs." Maryland 
 English Journal 6: 14-18. 

1981. "Reply by Doctor Howard." TAASP Newsletter 7: 3,6-7. 

15 



 

Grider 

Book Reviews 

1954. "Folklore, Fact, and Fancy in Recent Children's Literature." Midwest 
 Folklore 4: 173-181. 

1960. "The Games of New Zealand Children by Brian Sutton-Smith." 
 Midwest Folklore 10 (1960): 220-222. 

Poetry 

1935a. "Alien." The Lantern 9:2 (March): 3. 

1936b. "The Bridge Is too Long." Texas Poets. n. p.: Henry Harrison, 
 Publisher, p. 154. 

1936c. "Convocation." American Women Poets, ed. Margery Mansfield. n. 
 p.: Henry Harrison, Publisher, p. 301. 

1936d. "Entreaty." The Lantern 10: 7. 

1936e. "Mist World." Texas Poets. n. p.: Henry Harrison, Publisher, p. 154. 

1936f. "Multiple." Texas Poets. n. p.: Henry Harrison, Publisher, p. 156. 

1936g. "Tangent." Texas Poets. n. p.: Henry Harrison, Publisher, p. 156. 

1937. "Oil." American Women Poets, ed. Margery Mansfield. n. p.: Henry 
 Harrison, Publisher, p. 378. 

1966. "Mass Epitaph for Polyversity Presidents." Bulletin [American 
 Association of University Professors] 52: 56. 

1967. "Administration in Passive Voice." Bulletin [American Association 
 of University Professors] 53: 338. 

NOTES 

1. In recognition of her unparalleled contribution to the field of children's 
folklore in 1989 the Children's Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society 
awarded Iona Opie its first Lifetime Achievement Award. The best biographical 
study of the Opies and their work is: Jonathan Copp, "Profile: Finding Out Is Better," 

16 



 

Dorothy Howard 

The New Yorker 59 (April 4, 1983): 47-50+. See also: Leonard Marcus, "In Search of 
'Childish Things': An Interview with Iona Opie," Lion and the Unicorn 13:2 
(December, 1989): 7. 
 2. A search of the files of Time and the New York Times revealed no such 
articles. 
 3. Many of these collections and essays are in the Dorothy Howard Collection 
at the University of North Texas in Denton. 

4. This article is based on numerous interviews and conversations with Dr. 
Howard and on her brief, unpublished memoir, "Acadaemia, 193 I-Revisited, 1980." 
My thanks also to Dr. Brian Sutton-Smith, for sharing his files and insights. 

WORKS CITED 

Factor, June. "A Forgotten Pioneer: Dorothy Howard." The Educational Magazine 
 (Australia) 37 (1980): 22-24. 
Grider, Sylvia. "The Study of Children's Folklore." Western Folklore 39 (1980): 
 159-169. 
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