A Real Lion.

If you're a certain age or younger, you probably grew up with Leo Lionni, even if you don't recognize his name. Outside of Dr. Seuss, or Jack Ezra Keats, or maybe Beatrix Potter, I can't think of another creator of kids' books who's done more for the art form.

Friday's Wall Street Journal with its great book section had a review of a new biography of Lionni called "Leo Lionni: Storyteller, Artist, Designer." You can buy the book here.

The Lionni book that was biggest in my household when I was helping to raise two aggressively brilliant daughters was "little blue and little yellow". It had the mature childishness that equates to wisdom. My daughters each loved the book. And if either of them ever slowed down long enough to be questioned, I'd bet they could recite the book today virtually from memory.

This isn't a blog post about children's literature, however. Or even design. Or even my daughters, whom I love above life itself. It's about the power of creativity to get you out of trouble and transform bleakness into triumph.

The review itself was written by Meghan Cox Gurdon who's written a book our world might pay more attention to. It's called "The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction.” Maybe it's enough just to consider the title. 

Conquering distraction. 

What was I saying?

When I was back at Ogilvy, Maya Goldberg, a planner and dear friend organized something for the IBM team called "Story-time with George." 

George. As in, me.

Story-time started at 8AM. That weeded out the lightweights and phone-checkers and half-listeners. During story-time, I'd read aloud. "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn," by Thomas Wolfe. And play Marion Hutton's rendition of the great melody, "Brooklyn Love Song," with one of my favorite lyrics in all of songdom: 

"You can watch da barges

Tow da garbage

Out to da sea..."

Or "The Cremation of Sam McGee," by Robert W. Service. 

I suspect productivity and job satisfaction was unsurpassed on those days.

In any event, I'm going to paste a long portion of Gurdon's review on the Lionni book here. She does a better job than I can do.

By the 1930s, he was in Italy pursuing the life of an avant-garde painter; by the 1940s he had moved to Philadelphia to work as an ad man; from 1948 to 1960 he was Fortune magazine’s art director (while designing for clients on the side). And then, in 1959, came what he called the “little miracle.”

Lionni was on a commuter train headed out of New York with his grandchildren, Annie and Pippo, and needed to keep them entertained. Casting about, he seized on a colorful page in a copy of Life magazine. “Wait, I’ll tell you a story,” he said. Writes Mr. Marcus: “The simple act of tearing the page from the magazine and ripping it into monochrome bits and pieces worked like magic to rivet the twosome’s attention.”

On the spot, Lionni concocted a tale of two disc-shaped friends, whose colors combine to make green when they hug. The story was such a hit with the grandchildren (and others on the train, apparently) that he turned it into what would become his first children’s book, “Little Blue and Little Yellow.”

In Mr. Marcus’s essay, he presents Annie Lionni’s belief that the tale fit with her grandfather’s progressive politics, and writes that the book allowed the artist “to restate his belief in a common core of humanistic values that transcended race.”

What I like about this story is simple. Lionni had two distracted grand-children and had to keep them entertained. He had to "rivet their attention."

He used simple materials at hand--ripped from a magazine--to do so.

He used creativity, ingenuity, invention--a little miracle--to win them over.

Regardless of what happens in the world, regardless of the floods and filth and fascism that seems to be descending on our benighted sphere, those who can do what Lionni did--entertain, amuse, teach with simple tools will rise, and in rising, help others rise.

There's a spate of information and misinformation about the power of machines and algorithms and ones and zeroes that will change everything and return humanity again to dust.

Fine.

As the kids say, go for it.

I think we're better off reading Lionni.

I think we're better off feeling the pressure to create and by creating improving. 

I think we're better using our hands, our heads, and our hearts than replicas made by silicon. I think we're better off imagining what might appeal to other people at a human level than hoping for an equation or a white paper that will lead us someplace.

I think we're better off spending time with real lions than computer-generated ones.

They might teach us to roar.