Category Archives: Updike Family

Updike Society acquires author’s typewriter

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One day after what would have been John Updike’s 91st birthday, The John Updike Society acquired the Pulitzer Prizewinning author’s typewriter from his four children. The purchase was made possible by a donation from The Robert and Adele Schiff Family Foundation, which provided the initial funding for the society to buy and restore The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, Pa.

The manual typewriter—an Olivetti Linea 88—was made in Great Britain in 1968-69, the year Updike moved with his family to London following the publication of Couples. It will be displayed in a case upstairs in the house at 117 Philadelphia Ave., where Updike lived from “age zero to thirteen” and where he said his “artistic eggs were hatched.” In the front bedroom of this house, at age eight, Updike used his mother’s portable Remington to type his first story, which began, “The tribe of Bum-Bums looked very solemn as they sat around their cozy cave fire.” According to biographer Adam Begley, Updike said, “I still carry intact within me my happiness when, elevated by the thickness of some books to the level of my mother’s typewriter, I began to tap at the keyboard and saw the perfect letter-forms leap up on the paper rolled around the platen.”

When the typewriter is installed at some point in the near future, it will instantly become the most important piece in this small museum, which celebrates Updike and the affection he felt for the house, the neighborhood, and Berks County. The John Updike Childhood Home is presently open Saturdays from 12-2 p.m. See the house website for more details about Updike and the house, which officially opened on October 2, 2021. The John Updike Childhood Home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was awarded a Pennsylvania Historic Marker.

The flock, you say – Mr. Updike’s Penguins

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Sculptor Michael Updike loves a good joke, and so, apparently, does Newbury, Mass., where John Updike’s son makes his home. The Newburyport News posted a piece titled “Joppa’s penguins go into hibernation”—about four “beloved and iconic penguins that have shown up at Joppa Flats during the summer months” and “make their way ‘south’ to Updike’s home, for the winter.”

Reporter Ashlyn Giroux asked Updike about the penguins, and got the full story.

“The kids were sort of middle childhood, like 8 and 10, and we were coming back from a soccer game in Lynn or Revere, one of those places, and we stopped at Newbury Comics and somehow, probably as an impulse buy, I thought we’d buy the penguin along with the Yugioh cards, and so we had this penguin and I said ‘Oh, I really should put it on an iceberg and put it out there,’ said Updike. The kids didn’t really respond much, and then I thought, ‘I don’t wanna be that dad who makes a promise or says something and doesn’t follow through.’ So, I went and got three more penguins and built the iceberg out of styrofoam and then put it out there, and the kids sort of looked at it for three seconds and went back to what they were doing.”

After moving to Newbury, Giroux said Updike put the penguins out on the marsh behind his home to the amusement of a few neighbors.

“When I moved down here to Newbury, I brought the penguins and said ‘OK that’s the end of that.’ But, all my former neighbors on Water Street kept saying ‘where are the penguins? We want the penguins back!’ So I just started putting it in in the spring and taking them out every fall, and it’s something that just I do,” he said.

Read the full story.

Plowville spotlighted in Reading Eagle history feature

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“Plowville” to an Updike fan calls to mind the image of 13-year-old John in the back of the family Buick looking out of the rear window at his beloved dogwood tree and house at 117 Philadelphia Avenue receding into the distance, both spatially and temporally.

Plowville is big part of the Updike story, and readers might want to check out the historical feature on Plowville that Susan Miers Smith wrote for the Reading Eagle in January 2022: “Berks Place: Plowville a slice of Americana in Robeson Township; The village grew up around a well-known hotel on Route 10.”

Smith writes, “The cemetery is also the final resting spot of Linda Grace Hoyer Updike and Wesley Russell Updike, the parents of author John Updike. Linda Updike was born in and died in a Plowville farmhouse nearby.” That farmhouse was prominently featured in Updike’s early novel Of the Farm, in which a writer returns to visit his parents and introduce to them his second wife—with tensions between wife and mother creating much of the drama.

Interview with Michael Updike spotlights Plowville gravestone

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If you haven’t been to Plow Church cemetery to see John Updike’s gravestone carved by son Michael, there’s a large photo of it accompanying a Northshore Magazine story about how Updike’s sculptor son changed his artistic course after that gravestone.

In “Artist Michael Updike Creates Works of Art in Stone,” Robert G. Pushkar (who also took the photos) writes, “After the death of his father, writer John Updike, in 2009, Michael experienced a tectonic shift in his artistic awareness. He set out to commemorate his father’s life in a meaningful and also aesthetically unique way. But first he had to learn the intricacies of gravestone art. Already he had experience carving in granite and marble, but slate required another skill set. He explains, ‘You have to carve in a totally different way.'”

Michael told Pushkar, “In my art I do make death heads and winged skulls as a nod and recognition to the early folk artists of New England . . . . I can tell a carver’s style and feel. We won the American Revolution but looked back toward the neoclassical influence in creating gravestones, instead of the pagan skulls and wings with so much personality. Now you have urns and weeping willows, which are stagnant.”

Since the one he carved for his father, Michael has done a number of gravestones.

“It’s very exciting to me. . . . It takes me to a wide-range gamut of emotion, because I can suddenly be working with a parent who lost a child, or I can be working with very ironic people who want to do their own gravestone before they die. A lot of jokes and humor could be built into it. . . . The journey of getting the stone is what helps them recover and heal. . . . Not completely, but to a certain level where they can move on. There’s a little bit of being a psychoanalyst, a little bit of being a pastor or minister, or just sometimes being a friend realizing their vision.”