Excerpt: Every Little Thing by Janice Landry
"The little things really are the big things."
Janice Landry has won four national awards for her writing and work. In March 2025, Halifax West MP Lena Metlege Diab presented Janice with the King Charles III Coronation Medal from the Government of Canada for her body of work, books, and longtime mental health advocacy.
Janice is a veteran journalist and proud Haligonian. In May 2025, she released her seventh book, Every Little Thing – how small acts of kindness make a big impact, following her 2023 Lyme disease diagnosis. Janice has since fully recovered and wrote this “small book with big messages” to thank society’s many and varied helpers, including some of her own. Janice’s longtime publisher is Nova Scotia’s Pottersfield Press. Her last two books, Eye of the Ocean and Silver Linings, were both bestsellers.
Chapter 8 - The lowliest little friend
Author’s note: This excerpt from “Every Little Thing” includes a rare interview with the only child of the late, global storytelling icon, Richard Scarry. Scarry was Janice Landry’s favourite author as a child. Janice’s late father, Baz, read her Scarry’s stories at bedtime.
Huck Scarry spoke exclusively to Janice in a virtual interview from his homebase in Gstaad, Switzerland:
Huck is also connected to these books in ways that go beyond being the author’s son: as a co-creator before Scarry died, as a current writer and illustrator of Scarry books and by being in the books as one of his father’s early characters.
JL: “I understand that you are one of the characters your father created. Am I right?”
HS: “Yes. I am Huckle Cat. Huckle Cat started as a little bear in a book called Storybook Dictionary. There is a bear family. He wore lederhosen [a reference to Scarry’s European roots]. My father changed Huckle into a cat. I don’t know why. … Huckle is just any cute little boy who is curious about the world. Sometimes he accidentally gets into a bit of mischief [laughs], an accident or something. Just an ordinary, nice boy, maybe between five, six, seven years old, and his best friend is Lowly and they’re always together.”
Lowly is an orangey-brown worm who wears a very special green hat with a feather – called a Tyrolean hat – a red bowtie, blue shirt, green trouser and a red sneaker. Lowly’s famous hat was a nod to Scarry himself. “That hat is downstairs. I wear it when I go to book signings and things like that. It’s a hat that my father bought in Tyrol, Austria in 1950. He and Patsy [Huck’s mother] did an extended honeymoon a year after they got married. They didn’t have any money before that. They spent several months in Europe in 1950,” Huck said.
Scarry and Patsy (Patricia) Murphy first met in the United States where they grew up. A former copywriter and textbook author herself, Patsy collaborated on some of Scarry’s books and later wrote her own children’s stories that her husband illustrated. “When he came back to the States [after their honeymoon], my father continued wearing the hat. We lived in Connecticut, in Ridgefield, and Dad would take the train and go into New York to visit his publisher and would wear this hat and a backpack. It became a little bit of a symbol of him. There are photos of him on the [Richard Scarry] website wearing the hat. So when he created Lowly, I guess he decided Lowly should wear a Tyrolean hat. Of course, Huckle Cat wears lederhosen. We have an Austrian pilot [character] named Rudolf Von Flugel. So, there are a number of elements which are sort of a love of things that are Austrian. Later in life, he still wore that hat often. Then he started wearing a cowboy hat,” Huck said of the latter, a soft, white hat Scarry purchased in Los Angeles, and which Huck also still owns.
Residents of Gstaad, the Scarrys’ longtime home base, may very well know of the family’s storied history, but Huck said people mostly remain at a respectful distance. “I have to tell you, I really appreciate it very much. Here, I am an unknown character. I know the people in the village because I have been living here a long time. When people discover I am the son of Richard Scarry, very often, like yourself, they get all excited and [say] lovely compliments about my father’s work and they want to find out about him and it’s very, very nice. It’s a beautiful thing to know that he’s touched so many hearts in so many places and so many generations. It will continue to be that way.”
If the original Huckle Cat is Huck, and Lowly Worm and Huckle are best friends, and Lowly wears a Tyrolean hat as Scarry once did, does that mean my favourite character, Lowly, is none other than the great man himself? In his answer, Huck told me the backstory of four of his father’s well-known and loved characters, beginning with Lowly:
“All the characters are all of us. The characters are what I would call ‘archetypal’ to a great degree. In other words, Lowly represents everything that is optimistic. As a parallel, you could say he is a little bit like [the Peanuts character] Snoopy. He can solve problems. … He has no hands. He has one foot. He can do anything, and he can do a lot of things other people can’t do. So he’s the big problem-solver, through his squiggly body, and he’s also very bright. He has a good sense of humour. He’s also very philosophical and puts Huckle back on the right track if Huckle goes overboard with something.”
The second character was the aptly named Mr. Fumble, a cartoon pig who bungles just about everything he touches. “He often loses and chases his hat. He drives a pickle-car and is prone to accidents. He never complains. He’s also optimistic. He falls down, gets knocked over, always gets up, brushes himself off and he starts off again on the next misadventure,” said Huck.
The third character Huck described was a police officer dog, Sergeant Murphy. “Sergeant Murphy is the character who looks after everybody. He’s ‘The Helper.’ He is the one who warns of some danger, helping people if something bad happens,” Huck said.
The fourth and final character is a glass-half-empty fellow. “Mr. Gronkle, who’s the grouchy warthog guy. He’s always grumpy about everything and sees everything black.”
The characters are designed to represent a part of all of us. You may see yourself reflected in one or more of them. Many more Busytown residents are described on the Scarry website. “That’s the way the characters are and each one of us has elements of those characters in us. Each one of us will feel empathy towards those characters,” said Huck.
Book Details
Publisher : Pottersfield Press (April 1 2025)
Language : English
Paperback : 128 pages
ISBN-10 : 1990770770
ISBN-13 : 978-1990770777