50 Fun Facts About The Wednesday Wars

Which baseball idol refuses to sign Holling Hoodhood's ball because the boy turns up wearing yellow tights?

Mickey Mantle tosses the ball on the floor, and Danny Hupfer hands back his own signed one in protest. Holling had raced over straight from the stage, still in costume.

Which fairy role in a Shakespeare play lands Holling Hoodhood on the front page of the local newspaper?

Ariel is a part he gets only because the town baker, Mr. Goldman, needs a boy who knows Shakespeare. The Home Town Chronicle prints a mid-leap photograph that makes him look as if he is flying.

Which pastries does Holling Hoodhood accidentally coat in chalk dust while cleaning erasers for Mrs. Baker?

Cream puffs baked for the Wives of Vietnam Soldiers sat cooling under an open window above him. His classmates then demand a batch of their own, a debt that takes him weeks to settle.

Which names belong to Mrs. Baker's two pet rats, which escape while Holling Hoodhood cleans their cage?

Sycorax and Caliban were a gift from Mrs. Baker's husband, cute as babies before they grew big and scabby. They stay loose inside the school walls until spring.

Holling Hoodhood is the only seventh grader left with Mrs. Baker on Wednesdays because he belongs to which church?

Presbyterian puts him in a class of one: half his classmates leave for Hebrew school and the rest for catechism. The only two friends who shared his church moved away the summer before.

Lieutenant Baker's telegram to Mrs. Baker promises he will be home from Vietnam in time for which fruit?

Strawberries are what every member of her class is holding in boxes on the tarmac when his plane finally lands. Holling refuses to describe the reunion, calling it simply a happy ending.

Who becomes principal of Camillo Junior High after calmly seizing two escaped rats by the scruff of the neck?

Mrs. Sidman had once given up classroom teaching after a student's prank stained her face for days. The rats dropped out of the tiles straight into her lap during a school board visit.

Which ceremony terrifies Danny Hupfer so much that Holling Hoodhood and friends spend lunch recess hearing him rehearse?

His bar mitzvah, before a full synagogue, is where Holling feels he is watching his friend become a man. The sight sparks his boldest argument yet with his own father about growing up.

Which TV newsman does Holling Hoodhood's father watch every night, shushing anyone who interrupts the broadcast?

Walter Cronkite's reports from Vietnam run through the whole school year like a soundtrack. By spring the entire family is watching together as the news grows grimmer.

Which adventure novel is Holling Hoodhood's favourite book before Mrs. Baker introduces him to Shakespeare?

Treasure Island steadies him in a recess game against an eighth-grade bully, when he tells himself to show guts like its characters. He rereads it the night he decides his teacher hates him.

Which Shakespeare play does Mrs. Baker give Holling Hoodhood first, expecting, he assumes, to bore him to death?

The Merchant of Venice thrills him instead, and parts of it give him shivers. He reads it from a huge, smelly black volume with tiny print and decides he has spoiled her plot.

Which Shakespeare play does Holling Hoodhood rank almost level with his favourite novel, learning its curses by heart?

The Tempest delights him so much that he practises its insults in his bedroom every night after supper. He then tries them out on his sister, his gym coach and his lunch.

Which Shakespeare play does Holling Hoodhood find ridiculous, yet take Meryl Lee Kowalski to see on Valentine's Day?

Romeo and Juliet costs him nothing, because the school cook Mrs. Bigio hands him tickets she says she cannot use. He had only $3.78 to spend on the evening.

At which store do Holling Hoodhood and Meryl Lee Kowalski drink Cokes after their Valentine's Day theatre trip?

Woolworth's was his sister's mocking suggestion, so that his date would learn at once he was a cheapskate. The friends end up spending every afternoon of spring break there.

Which flower does Holling Hoodhood take to Meryl Lee Kowalski's house to make peace after wrongly blaming her?

A rose, delivered with two Cokes, mends the friendship after her father copied the Hoodhood design. She later waves it, dried, from the sidelines while he runs.

What news about Mrs. Baker's husband do Holling Hoodhood and Meryl Lee read in a dropped telegram?

Missing in action is the verdict after his helicopter goes down, and Mrs. Baker runs from the room. She keeps teaching as usual while the whole town scans the nightly reports for him.

On which ominous date do the school board's visit and the running tryouts both fall in The Wednesday Wars?

The Ides of March looms because Holling is reading Julius Caesar and takes the soothsayer's warning to heart. The sky even turns greenish that morning.

Which author, who taught English for decades at Calvin University in Michigan, wrote The Wednesday Wars?

Gary D. Schmidt was labelled a slow pupil in elementary school until one concerned teacher turned him into a reader. His doctorate is in medieval literature.

Which American children's book award recognised The Wednesday Wars, the second such nod for its author?

Newbery Honor recognition had come three years earlier for his novel Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy. Kirkus gave the later book a starred review.

Which companion novel to The Wednesday Wars follows Holling Hoodhood's classmate Doug Swieteck after he moves away?

Okay for Now opens with Holling saying goodbye to Doug and went on to be a National Book Award finalist. It looks back more than once to the day Doug met a famous ballplayer.

In which suburban part of New York State is The Wednesday Wars set during the 1967–68 school year?

Long Island lends its name to the Shakespeare company whose Holiday Extravaganza gives Holling his stage debut. With New York City so close, his school takes its bomb drills seriously.

Meryl Lee Kowalski's father wins a three-year job renovating which New York landmark in The Wednesday Wars?

Yankee Stadium needed a classical designer, as Mrs. Baker learns from the players after a game. The contract rescues a firm that Holling's father had happily written off.

Whose presidential campaign does Holling Hoodhood's sister join, refusing a receptionist job at her father's office?

Bobby Kennedy, she insists, will end discrimination and turn America around. When he is shot in June she locks herself in her room, and Holling leads her to a church to light candles.

Holling Hoodhood is doing homework at Meryl Lee Kowalski's house when her father brings news about which public figure?

Martin Luther King Jr. has just been shot and killed, and the two friends watch the announcement on the evening news. The following Tuesday the whole school watches his funeral on television.

What does Holling Hoodhood win in his first big race and later give up to rescue his stranded sister?

A $100 savings bond fetches only $52 when he cashes it early at the Commerce Bank, but that is enough for her fare home. He skips class that day to wire the money.

From which Midwestern city does Holling Hoodhood's runaway sister phone home, alone and down to four dollars?

Minneapolis is where she climbed out of her boyfriend's car and refused to get back in. She rings late at night, when only her brother is awake to pick up.

Where is Holling Hoodhood's sister bound when she drives off with her boyfriend in a yellow Volkswagen?

California was already on her mind in September, when she told Holling he should escape there himself. She never reaches it.

Which Shakespeare play bores Holling Hoodhood so badly that he starts skipping over its monologues?

Hamlet gets a second, complete reading once Mrs. Baker hears of his shortcut and insists Shakespeare has no boring parts. Its silences remind him of his own home after his sister leaves.

Which Shakespeare comedy, the last play Holling Hoodhood reads with Mrs. Baker, does he complain is not funny?

Much Ado About Nothing shows, in Mrs. Baker's reading, that comedies are about people who know they can choose a happy ending. She cites it when he asks how she can be sure her husband will return.

What collapses in the Hoodhoods' spotless living room on the night Holling's father is due to collect an award?

The ceiling had been leaking since November and finally comes down in a heap of mouldy plaster. Furious, his father shreds the white carnation he was meant to wear to the dinner.

Holling Hoodhood's family keeps what in the front room purely to impress visitors, though nobody at home can play it?

A baby grand piano stands by the window among furniture kept under plastic covers. It is there to impress the kind of people who might one day hire his father.

What name does Holling Hoodhood's father give the family home, which sits in the exact middle of town?

The Perfect House has symmetrical windows, flawless azaleas and pavement that turns white and uncracked as you approach. After his daughter runs away, the father stops watering the bushes.

Which vegetable does Holling Hoodhood's mother quietly stop cooking once his sister has run away from home?

Lima beans turn up at one tense family supper after another, and his sister once flicked one at her father in a row over college. Holling reads their absence as a sign that love is draining from the house.

Which car does Holling Hoodhood's father buy the day after a rival firm lands a prestigious renovation contract?

A Ford Mustang, Holling suspects, was bought to console himself. He later jeers that the keys are on his dresser if his son wants to drive into the city to collect his sister.

Which New York university does Holling Hoodhood's sister plan to attend until her father flatly forbids college?

Columbia University was in the grip of a student strike that spring, with no classes running. Her father calls college the craziest place in a crazy world and says she will stay home and be safe.

Holling Hoodhood wires money to a Western Union office on an avenue that shares which name with his sister?

Heather goes unnamed for much of the story, known simply as his sister. Unsure which of the city's two stations she is near, Holling picks the office on the street bearing her name.

What must Mrs. Baker's class do whenever the siren sounds during Atomic Bomb Awareness Month?

Crouch under their desks in the dark is the drill, though Mrs. Baker admits to Holling that it would save nobody. She says that feeling prepared gives people comfort.

Which New York ballplayer gives Holling Hoodhood his own jacket after a surprise game of catch in the school gym?

Joe Pepitone and his teammate Horace Clarke turn up as a treat arranged by Mrs. Baker, days after another star had snubbed Holling. They also hand each boy two tickets for Opening Day.

Mrs. Baker shows Holling Hoodhood a silver medal she won at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics in which event?

The sprint relay, over 4x100 metres, earned her the medal she keeps in a wooden box. Until that moment Holling had assumed she had been a teacher all her life.

With which Vietnamese dessert does the school cook Mrs. Bigio apologise to a refugee pupil in Mrs. Baker's class?

Fried bananas arrive with an apology for a cruel remark she made months earlier in her grief. The girl then teaches the class a Vietnamese song about the fruit.

How do Danny Hupfer's parents respond when he is suspended for punching an eighth grader who mocked a classmate?

A trip to Washington, D.C. is his reward, because they are so proud of him. He had tipped his lunch tray over a boy who taunted a Vietnamese refugee about eating rats.

What does Holling Hoodhood scatter along the trail when his pack splits open on the class camping trip?

The cutlery slips out piece by piece, can opener included, leaving the whole class a single spoon. They open the chili tins with sharp stones and eat using hot dogs as scoops.

Where does Mrs. Baker take Holling Hoodhood's class camping to celebrate the end of the school year?

The Catskills trip is one she leads every year even though she openly despises camping. Holling guesses she only ever went because her husband enjoyed it.

What does Meryl Lee Kowalski wear to class after Holling Hoodhood decides she has betrayed him?

Sunglasses hide that she has been crying, though she claims a doctor ordered them for the rest of the year. She ends up hurling them at his head.

On what does Holling Hoodhood sketch his father's design for the new junior high, a drawing Meryl Lee keeps?

A paper placemat from the lunch counter goes home as a souvenir, where her father sees it and borrows the ideas. Holling's father then rounds on his son in front of the school board.

Whose televised Christmas special keeps Holling Hoodhood's parents at home on the night of his stage debut?

Bing Crosby wins out over their son's performance, and his father then fails to collect him afterwards. Danny Hupfer's parents come to the theatre instead and drive him home.

Which Shakespeare play does a note on Mrs. Baker's door tell Holling Hoodhood to read over the Christmas break?

Macbeth comes to mind when a bully plasters the school with an embarrassing photo, an urge Holling likens to its hero's sudden ambition. He muddles several of its characters on the test.

What kind of school does Holling Hoodhood ask to transfer to after an embarrassing photo of him spreads everywhere?

A military academy strikes his father as too ridiculous to discuss. His sister objects for a graver reason: cadets end up in Saigon, and soldiers come home in body bags.

Which grammar exercise does Mrs. Baker drill constantly in The Wednesday Wars, even on the last days before Christmas?

Diagramming sentences starts in the first week, when Holling is handed one he considers impossible. By spring a Vietnamese refugee has become the best in the class at it.

Which later novel by the author of The Wednesday Wars makes Meryl Lee Kowalski its main character?

Just Like That appeared in January 2021, well over a decade after she first met readers. Her classmate Danny Hupfer turns up as a teacher in a still later book.