The cherished literary companions of their childhoods are neither gone nor forgotten

I was autographing books at the Raven bookstore in La Canada one Saturday afternoon before my recent leave, and a woman came up to the table and handed me a treasure.

It was a tattered copy of “Andy the Acrobat,” the book I had described as having had the greatest effect on my life. I had never seen a copy of it since the green buckram copy I owned when I was 10.

As I had said, “Andy” wasn’t a great literary work, but it was the first full-length book I read, and it didn’t make me want to be an acrobat; it made me want to be a writer.

What a fantastic skill it was, I thought, knowing how hard it was to write a sentence, to go on writing page after page of sentences until you had written a book.

I don’t know how long Mrs. Billye Lennon had had her copy, or how important it was to her, but it was copyrighted 1907, a date somewhat before either of us was born. It shows how hard books are to destroy in a free country, even books that may be regarded as of no consequence.

Meanwhile, I am embarrassed by my faulty memory of the Gray Seal in the Frank Packard series of books about Jimmy Dale, a rich New York clubman who haunted the underworld, confounding plots and aborting crimes.

I wrote: “The Gray Seal (meaning a seal she left behind as a mark of her presence) was an ethereally beautiful woman, mysterious and elusive, who floated in and out of the hero’s life, leaving only that gray seal and her maddening scent . . . . She was the woman of my adolescent dreams . . . . “

Yes, but how clouded those memories were. There are a good many Frank Packard buffs still around, I have discovered, many with better memories than mine.

“I recall Jimmy Dale (not the woman you describe so feelingly) as being the Gray Seal,” recalls Robert C. Merz of Laguna Hills. “I think it was he who would autograph his work by extracting an adhesive gray seal from a little silver box--using a pair of tweezers--and sticking it in a conspicuous place for the law to find.

“The woman, on the other hand, was Marie LaSalle--known as the Tocsin. She served as the warning bell for Jimmy, trying always to protect him . . . . “

“The woman of your adolescent dreams,” wrote Newton Brickman of Sherman Oaks, “was ‘the Tocsin,’ so named for the ring worn on our hero’s little finger, given to him by her and inscribed ‘Sonnez le Tocsin,’ or ‘Sound the alarm.’ She was the recruiter, guiding light and alarm-sounder for his actions . . . . “

“The profound impression these books made on an innocent 13-year-old is confirmed by the total recall of their character names after all these years,” wrote William Scholl of North Hollywood. “I still remember my dismay and chagrin when in a school book club meeting I was asked my favorite author and I replied, ‘Frank L. Packard, author of the Jimmy Dale books.’ The teacher derided him as ‘second rate.’ ”

Shameful. I’ll bet she wanted him to read George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. How many English teachers today would rather have their pupils reading a chapter or two from the adventures of Jimmy Dale than watching another hour or two of television? I am convinced that our lives have been more influenced by the “children’s” books we read than by our acquaintance with the classics and the Bible.

Harry Niemeyer of Laguna Hills wrote that he is the only living member of the Gray Seal Fan Club, Hollywood Local No. 1, the other two members having been Matt Weinstock and Harry Crocker, columnists on the old Daily News and the old Examiner.

This local was active during World War II, he recalls, “when you were reading ‘War and Peace’ in Honolulu.”

“The Gray Seal Fan Club was formed when I was a press agent at RKO and planting usually fabricated but often plausible copy with Weinstock and Crocker. Both were avid Frank Packard buffs and when they discovered I owned a complete set of the books they graciously allowed me to donate them to their respective libraries, and to take them to weekly luncheon meetings on my RKO expense account . . . . “

And I was especially gratified to find that Ray Bradbury, our benign volcano, was a Gray Seal fan himself.

“I was delighted,” he wrote, “to see your mention of Frank Packard’s Gray Seal stories, many of which I read when I was a kid. In fact, I still have one of those novels put away in my basement, along with copies of about six Tom Swift books, and all of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and John Carter of Mars books.

“Then, of course, in my basement, saved over from when I was 8 and 10, are such incredible books as ‘Jerry and Todd and the Whispering Mummy’ (there’s a title for you!) and all of the Oz books.

“Not a classic among them. And yet, if I am not part jungle hero, Martian adventurer, cohort of L. Frank Baum, and friend to Tom Swift, I am nothing.

“Shakespeare was to come later, with his friend G. B. Shaw. But my love for them was nothing to the mad love I had for Tantor the elephant or Kala the Ape.

“Oh, keeper of the Gray Seal, where are you, now that we need you?”

Bradbury knows where she is, as well as I do. She’s at your nearest library, waiting for you.