The Little Alvernon stories were born out of bedtime stories told by my father, the late Vernon Winship Boynton. I can still hear his deep gravelly voice tinged with Down East humor as he spun the tales of his boyhood growing up on a small farm in Maine in the early twentieth century. These stories afford glimpses of an era unfamiliar to us – of daily living without indoor plumbing, electric appliances, automobiles, television, computer technology, and all the conveniences we moderns take for granted.

Little Alvernon knew nothing of these conveniences, but he knew about cooking on a wood stove, hauling water from the well, gathering eggs from the hen house, hitching up the horses for haying, milking the cows, churning butter, and fetching big blocks of ice from the sawdust at the neighbor’s ice house for the ice box. And in these common, everyday activities of his life, this mischievous, imaginative little boy found ways to have fun, while getting himself into (and out of) real predicaments.