Homer Price is a series of stories written by Robert McCloskey.
Homer Price is a smart, friendly, and diligent boy from Centerburg, Ohio. He likes to fix radios in his free time, and does odd jobs for his relatives and neighbors on the side (e.g., raking leaves, sweeping down the barbershop, looking after his uncle's lunchroom, and helping his dad run the motel where they live). All too often, outrageously bizarre things happen in Centerburg, and Homer, usually accompanied by his pal Freddy, must use his wits to find a way to stop the madness.
The first collection of stories, simply titled Homer Price, was published in 1943 and contained the first six stories, followed by Centerburg Tales in 1951 with the remaining four. Centerburg Tales was also reissued as Centerburg Tales: More Adventures of Homer Price and as More Homer Price, both of which left out the "Grandpa Hercules" chapter.
Three stories were adapted into live-action short films and a TV special in 1963 ("The Doughnuts"), 1976 ("The Case of the Cosmic Comic"), and 1977 ("Homer and the Wacky Doughnut Machine").
Stories:
- "The Case of the Sensational Scent": After finishing a homemade radio, Homer hears of a robbery. With the help of Aroma (a skunk who wandered into his home), he infiltrates the thieves' hideaway and brings them to justice.
- "The Case of the Cosmic Comic": Homer, Freddy, and Louis (Freddy's little brother) meet the Super-Duper (an Expy of Superman) in person at the Centerburg cinema, but they learn that he's really just an actor, and not the genuine article.
- "The Doughnuts": Homer's Uncle Ulysses has installed an automatic doughnut-making machine in his lunchroom in downtown Centerburg. While Ulysses is out and most of the populace is at the movies, Homer minds the store while waiting on a hobo who works in advertising, and a rich woman shows Homer how to make doughnuts using her family's recipe — unfortunately, she makes a bit too much batter, which results in the machine making more doughnuts than they can handle.
- "Mystery Yarn": Homer's Uncle Telemachus and the Sheriff of Centerburg are rivals for both the record of World's Greatest String Saver, and the hand of Miss Terwilliger. So, they hold a contest at the County Fair.
- "Nothing New Under the Sun (Hardly)": A mysterious stranger arrives in Centerburg, and lends the use of his musical mousetrap.
- "Wheels of Progress": Centerburg holds its annual pageant, celebrating the town's history and the completion of a new housing division. However, a promised set of street signs isn't erected in time, threatening to derail everything.
- "Grandpa Hercules": Homer's grandfather tells four tall-tales from the frontier days — "The Hide-a-Ride", "Sparrow Courthouse", "Looking for Gold" and "The Gravitty-Bitties".
- "Experiment 13": Local vagrant Dulcy Dooner inherits a greenhouse from his late uncle, a noted botanist, and discovers an unfinished experiment involving ragweed.
- "Ever-So-Much-More-So": A traveling salesman peddles cans of an invisible substance which he swears will make people's lives better.
- "Pie and Punch and You-Know-Whats": A stranger leaves a record in Uncle Ulysses' new automatic jukebox; the song it contains is so catchy that those who hear it can't stop singing it.
Homer Price's adventures provide examples of:
- Actor/Role Confusion: In "The Case of the Cosmic Comic", the actor who plays the "Super-Duper" in movie serials makes an appearance at the Centerburg theater and Freddy asks if he could do some horseshoe bending or flying for them. Disillusionment sets in later when the actor's car ends up in a ditch and needs to be towed to Homer's father's filling station.
- All Cloth Unravels: In "Mystery Yarn", Miss Terwilliger mysteriously beats Uncle Telly and the sheriff to become World's Greatest String Saver, even though her ball of string was smaller. The story doesn't explain, but astute readers will notice that when she starts unrolling it, she's wearing a "robin's egg-blue dress with the pink trim at the bottom", which is later described as a "robin's-egg-blue blouse with the pink skirt" and finally a "dress with the robin's-egg-blue trim at the neck."
- Alliterative Name: Ne'er-do-well Dulcy Dooner, plus his late uncle, Dupree Dooner.
- Auto-Kitchen: "The Doughnuts" is about an automated doughnut machine that Homer's uncle acquires for his diner, which, once turned on, is unable to stop until it exhausts its seemingly-limitless supply of dough (it's implied that Uncle Ulysses simply didn't assemble it quite right, which is why it's acting up).
- Brown Note: "Pie and Punch and You-Know-Whats" has someone put a horrible song on the jukebox in the lunch counter. Anyone who hears the song — whether the original jukebox tune or someone else's rendition — can't get it out of their head. Ultimately the main character gets it out of his head by using Punch, Brothers, then gives it to the rest of the town. Now he's cleared but they have it. So, he tells them to sing it to the one person who hadn't been in town. Now everyone is cleared except that person, who now has to be smuggled out of town to keep from reinfecting the whole town. note
- Consolation Prize: In "The Doughnuts", due to an accident, a diamond bracelet gets mixed into the doughnut batter and ends up inside the machine. When they figure this out, Uncle Ulysses (acting on advice from Homer) announces a sale on doughnuts. Whomever buys the doughnut with the bracelet inside can't keep it... but they get a consolation prize of 100 dollars (not quite the value of the bracelet, but still a good prize) from the bracelet's owner.
- Remember that the story was written in 1940, that $100 is over $2,000 today.
- Cut-and-Paste Suburb: In "Wheels of Progress", the local millionaire decides on a whim to build a new suburb for Centerburg — 100 identical houses, with her mansion in the center. Hilarity Ensues when said mansion (which they'd been using as a landmark so the residents would know where they lived within said suburb) is moved away and a 101st house put in its place. And it turns out the guy hired to put up the road signs found a stash of alcohol buried under said mansion (probably a holdover from Prohibition) and got snockered, so he has yet to start putting up the signs, leading to some serious confusion.
- Denser and Wackier: The early ones, most famously "The Doughnuts", are gentle comic tales of small-town Middle American life... but from there on out, the stories keep getting steadily more outlandish, to the point where the final four stories teeter on the brink of surrealism.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The sheriff is only ever referred to by his title.
- Family Theme Naming: Homer has uncles named Ulysses and Telemachus and a grandfather named Hercules.
- Imposed Handicap Training: Grandpa Hercules trained to make a big leap while wearing additional weights on his clothes. If the muscles are used to moving with the added weight, they'll let him jump large distances once the weight is gone. It works.
- Impossibly Delicious Food: In "Ever-So-Much-More-So", a peddler comes to Centerburg selling an invisible powder which makes anything moreso of what it is. It's introduced as a thing you put on food to make it better, but it also "works" on other things; for example, if an ornery person eats things with it sprinkled on, it makes that person Ever-So-Much-More ornery. (In the product's demonstration, the salesman sprinkles it into a cup of coffee and gives it to Homer, who observes that, since he doesn't like coffee in the first place, it is now Ever-So-Much-More bitter and nasty.)
- Involuntary Dance: In "Pie and Punch and You-Know-Whats", when all of Centerburg gets the song from the jukebox's new record stuck in their heads, they can't stop singing it, and even start to dance to it. Homer realizes that the only cure is another song — one by Mark Twain ("Punch Brothers, Punch!"), which one forgets as soon as one tells it to someone else.
- It Won't Turn Off: In "The Doughnuts", Uncle Ulysses' new doughnut machine is incorrectly assembled and won't turn off until it's used up all the batter in it. Too bad they made an extra-large batter recipe and now have hundreds of doughnuts they can't sell (until they come up with a marketing gimmick).
- Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: The kids' biggest fictional heroes are the Lonely Ranger and the Super-Duper.
- Mail-Order Novelty: One story mentions how the diner owner bought dozens of Whoopsy-Doodle Breakfast Food cereal boxes to help the local kids collect the box tops for mail-order prizes. However, the actual cereal didn't taste very good and sold poorly. Homer's grandpa Hercules buys the stale cereal from the diner owner at a discount and uses it as chicken feed.
- Mind Virus: In "Pie and Punch and You-Know-Whats", a mysterious stranger comes to town and puts a record in the lunchroom's jukebox, telling Homer and Freddy not to play it. Of course they do, and they can't stop singing the song. They teach the song to others, who can't stop, and so on. Homer finally cures himself and the town by learning a different song (from a Mark Twain story), which makes them forget the first song, and once you pass that song on you forget it in turn. They send the one person infected with the new song out of town (she was going on vacation anyway) where they hope she'll teach it to someone else.
- Mouse Trap: The old man in "Nothing New Under the Sun (Hardly)" spent 30 years developing a humane, musical mousetrap, which he comes to Centerburg to demonstrate. It works a little too well...
- Named After Somebody Famous: Homer, who's named after Homer, a historical figure and famous poet from ancient Greece.
- No Name Given: The town sheriff and judge are only ever referred to as "the sheriff" and "the judge", despite the former appearing as a supporting character in roughly half-a-dozen stories.
- Not What It Looks Like: "Nothing New Under the Sun (Hardly)" has the children of the town following after Michael Murphy and his musical mouse trap on the day he uses it to lure the mice out of the town. The adults see this and mistakenly assume he's luring the children away too, when they actually just want to watch and see what it'll look like when he releases all the mice.
- Pest Controller: In "Nothing New Under the Sun (Hardly)", the town hires Michael Murphy, a pied piper type who uses a mechanical contraption to play the music in order to lead mice out of town. Homer and his friends decide to follow along and see what happens, but since Homer has all the kids stuff cotton in their ears so they won't hear the music. Despite this, since none of the kids thought to tell the adults what they had planned, the adults fear the worst when see the piper with a gaggle of kids following behind.
- Protagonist Title: The first collection of stories is simply titled Homer Price.
- Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: Homer's Uncle Ulysses, Grandpa Hercules and Uncle Telemachus are all named after figures in Greek mythology (though the first two use the Roman forms of their namesakes' names).
- The Sheriff: Centerburg's chief law officer is only known as The Sheriff; he's also prone to Spoonerisms and is really a nice guy who does the best he can.
- Shrinking Violet: "Nothing New Under the Sun (Hardly)" has Michael Murphy, who's been away from civilization for thirty years and is very shy around people as a result.
- Smelly Skunk: In the very first story, "The Case of the Sensational Scent", Homer takes in a skunk, whom he names Aroma. Aroma plays a key part in helping to apprehend the robbers when he and Homer come across four men who stole a suitcase containing two thousand dollars and a dozen bottles of shaving lotion. Aroma, who likes to take naps in Homer's suitcase, climbs into the suitcase with the money and one of the robbers gets the bright idea of throwing a rock at him, which results in six fewer bottles of lotion and a stinky suitcase. This particular scent combination enables Homer to identify the robbers when they stop at one of his parents' tourist cabins for the night and pay with a five-dollar bill from the suitcase.
- Spoonerism: The sheriff has a tendency to make these:
- "Wold the hire, I mean, hold the wire." ("The Doughnuts")
- "That's nighty mice music." ("Pie and Punch and You-Know-Whats")
- "[Uncle Telly and Miss Terwilliger]'ll make a very cappy houple, I mean, happy couple [...]" ("Mystery Yarn")
- Tall Tale: Homer's Grandpa Hercules is famous for these, usually about himself or his alleged ancestors.
- Time-Passage Beard: "Nothing New Under the Sun (Hardly)" has Michael Murphy sporting a very lengthy beard (and hair in general) to indicate that he's been away from civilization for thirty years.
- Weird Trade Union: In "Wheels of Progress", Dulcey Dooner claims to be Secretary-Treasurer of the Sign Putter Uppers Union. It's pretty obvious from context that he invented it on the spot to get paid more for putting up street signs.
- Weirdness Magnet: If you were a first-time visitor to Centerburg In-Universe, you wouldn't believe all the mishegaas that goes on there. The locals, by contrast, appear to be used to it.
- Wet Blanket Wife: Homer's aunt Agnes, wife of Uncle Ulysses, is something of one. Ulysses is always on the lookout for the newest labor-saving device, but his wife never approves, always throwing up her hands and sighing and sometimes becoming unkindly disposed towards him for days, because "She was of the opinion that Uncle Ulysses just frittered away his spare time over at the barbershop with the sheriff and the boys, so what was the good of a labor-saving device that gave you more time to fritter?"
- Wrong Genre Savvy: In "Nothing New Under the Sun (Hardly)", an old man who spent twenty years alone in the mountains inventing a humane musical mousetrap comes to town. The Centerburg residents are impressed with his similarity to a storybook character, and once the librarians determine the most fitting one, refer to him patronizingly as Rip Van Winkle. It isn't until all the kids in Centerburg start following his musical mousetrap out of town that they realize he's a lot more like The Pied Piper. (And even then, he's not purposely luring them like the Piper did — the kids just think it'll be quite a sight when the mice get freed and want to be there to watch.)
