Generations of children, caregivers, and teachers have imaginatively buckled up and taken a ride on The Magic School Bus through the beloved nonfiction book series that sold more than 93 million print copies worldwide.

Longtime Newtown resident Bruce Degen illustrated The Magic School Bus and will give a special presentation through C.H. Booth Library on Thursday, May 19, at 7 pm via Zoom.

Degen plans to share how he collaborated with The Magic School Bus author Joanna Cole, who became his close friend and also lived in town for quite some time.

Attendees will even get to see slides showcasing the newest and last book in the series, The Magic School Bus Explores Human Evolution. The book will mark the end of an era of Degen and Cole’s work together, as Cole passed away in 2020.

On April 29, Degen spoke to The Newtown Bee to let residents know what they can look forward to at the upcoming event, as well as his journey as an illustrator and how living in Newtown has positively impacted his life.

‘I Gotta Draw’

Growing up, Degen was a Brooklyn boy who had an undeniable passion for art.

“I always, always, always loved to draw,” he said.

In grade school, he found himself easily bored with the standard teaching methods and would much rather be doing something creative to hold his attention, he said.

Fortunately, he had a teacher, Miss Rich, who saw his intelligence and found what he needed to help focus was just a bit of multitasking.

“If I got bored, I was a very annoying kid … she would let me stay in the back of the room and paint, because then I wouldn’t get bored,” Degen said.

He recalled how when the class would do spelling tests, Miss Rich would verbally ask him how to spell a certain word and he would recite it accurately, all while standing up and painting.

Twhose formative memories inspired Degen to write and illustrate the HarperCollins book I Gotta Draw.

“It’s supposedly not me,” Degen said. “It’s a young dog who’s an artist named Charlie Muttnik. He happens to live in Brooklyn, where I happened to live. He likes to draw, and he has a teacher named Miss Rich, who I had.”

Art was a top priority for him, even at a young age, and was a clear path for him to pursue.

“My parents were kind of hopeless about me … I was good at spelling and math, but I was terrible at conduct. I found all the report cards recently that my mother had once put away, and in every report card since kindergarten to junior high school I had bad marks in conduct because I would get bored,” Degen shared.

After junior high, he passed the admissions test to attend The High School of Music & Art, known today as LaGuardia High School, at Lincoln Center.

It was there that he had a teacher who encouraged him to go to The Cooper Union, a private college in Manhattan.

“I did all kinds of artwork. I did painting, printmaking, sculpture, and all kinds of things there. I worked as an advertising agent during the summer to make money so I could go to school in the winter,” Degen said.

He then went on to graduate from Pratt Institute with a master’s degree in printmaking and painting.

“I thought that’s what I wanted to mainly do, to be a fine artist,” Degen said. “One day I decided, when I was hanging my master show, that I really felt bored with the idea of making artwork to put on the wall. It just seemed a little beside the point. I didn’t know what I was going to do, because art was the biggest thing I did.”

He found new inspiration upon attending an art show of Norman Rockwell, best known for his The Saturday Evening Post cover illustrations.

“I noticed people walking around this gallery and they were chuckling to each other. They were having a very good time. You don’t see people chuckling in most fine arts galleries in Manhattan,” Degen said.

It sparked the idea in him to switch gears and focus on creating humorous illustrations, which he had not done since childhood. From there, he dived into the world of illustrating and writing children’s books.

“I took one course at night with a wonderful teacher, Barbara Bottner, and I walked out of that course with a portfolio full of drawings and book ideas,” Degen said. “I went around to visit the publishers in Manhattan with my portfolio and I started doing children’s books.”

Career Success

Degen began writing children’s books professionally in 1975, and shortly after reached two important milestones: his first book, Aunt Possum and the Pumpkin Man, was published and his son Ben was born.

He said, “In the ‘book dummy,’ which is the sketch version of the book, he wasn’t born yet. I wrote, ‘To [his wife] Chris and Spot’ because we didn’t know who he would be. In the final artwork I could write ‘To Chris and Ben.’”

Over the next decade, Degen went on to release a steady flow of books that he illustrated, including many he also authored.

He wore both hats for his popular children’s book Jamberry, about a berry-loving boy and a bear. It received multiple honors such as the Children’s Book of the Year award by the Child Study Association of America.

“Jamberry has been in print since 1983, and there are generations of people raised on it who raised their kids on it,” Degen shared.

Bears proved to be a specialty of Degen’s, and he illustrated all ten books in the Jesse Bear series by Nancy White Carlstrom.

He also illustrated a series of spoof science fiction books by Jane Yolen called Commander Toad.

“It’s all these frogs and toads up in space and the ship is called the Star Wartz. It has all these puns,” Degen said.

After building a solid reputation for himself in the industry, Degen received a call from Scholastic Editor Craig Walker in 1984 that impacted the trajectory of his personal and professional life.

“Scholastic was unique in the fact that they had those book fairs and book clubs that kids could order the books that they desired off of lists,” Degen explained. “Craig said to me, ‘I can offer the most wonderful nonfiction, science, history, and other things and kids will not order them. I can order the silliest joke book and they sell out. What if we could find a way to marry serious science with some humor to get kids sparked up and have them follow it?’”

Walker said that he had pitched the idea to Cole, who was already an award-winning science writer and did humorous books. He asked if she could base the story around a class going on educational adventures and to make it funny, to which she agreed.

When Walker asked Degen to illustrate the proposed book, Degen was apprehensive.

He recalled Walker telling him: “I know all your work that you’ve done, and this is not going to be like that. It’s going to be the worst headache you’ve ever had, because you’ll have to do tremendous research and we found that this is going to go through many changes. You’ll have to redo it and take a long time to develop.”

Degen admitted to enjoying what he was doing and had no desire for a “headache.” Walker, however, was persuasive, according to Degen.

“He said, ‘How about we give you a nice big advance?’ And I said, ‘I’ll meet you tomorrow.’”

Life-Changing Connection

When Degen went to Scholastic to meet with Cole, they sat down together and brainstormed ideas and sketches.

“We met and we hit it off … We were a good match,” he said.

Degen emphasized that the author and illustrator for books rarely ever meet, let alone get to know each other and become friends.

What happens in most cases, he said, is that “a brilliant editor or art director and publisher put them together, because they see hundreds of people and portfolios. They see the work and say that’s a match.”

In 1986, the first book in The Magic School Bus series was published, called The Magic School Bus Goes To Waterworks.

Degen explained that Cole chose to write about reservoirs, because if they could work with a topic so underrated then they could succeed at the flashier topics of dinosaurs and space, which they would go on to do.

“She picked waterworks, she did the research, then she would send me the books she used for research, and I would find additional materials,” he said. “I would work on it, then it would go to the editor, then he would give it to experts and get their opinions in each field. We always had an expert or two. Then we would revise, so the books took a long time.”

Degen and Cole worked together to create 17 books in The Magic School Bus series, each taking about a year to complete.

“We did the core science series and then we did three in the social studies area. One is about ancient Egypt, one is medieval castles, and one is imperial China,” Degen said.

For the latter, their Chinese publisher liked the book so much they bought the rights to it and translated it into Chinese.

“I’m very proud of that,” Degen said.

After The Magic School Bus became an animated show for primary-school children that aired on PBS, the series grew in popularity.

“It exploded, and we were asked if we could do 50 books a year,” Degen said.

Not able to meet that demand or compromise the integrity of the work they created together, the author and illustrator agreed to having a separate team of people create spin-off books. While those books do not include Cole or Degen’s names on the cover, they do usually say “Based on the series by...”

“We edited hundreds of books for free. We were freelance editors, because we tried to keep the character of everything in line,” Degen said.

Life In Newtown

At the start of the professional partnership of Degen and Cole, the two lived in New York. Degen lived in Brooklyn Heights with his family, and Cole lived in the upper west side of Manhattan with her family.

In 1989, Cole was ready to move out of New York. Her daughter Rachel was entering middle school and a good friend of hers had left the city to move to Bethel. When Cole discovered Newtown, she found that it was a nice town with good schools, so she bought a house here.

Shortly after, Degen — who had lived in New York all his life — was looking to move somewhere in the Hudson Valley, where he had previously vacationed. Yet, house after house was just not meant to be.

“We went to a barbecue at Joanna’s house when she was already in town and I didn’t have a real connection with Connecticut. It was a place you went through to get to Boston,” he said.

“I said to Joanna, ‘How would you feel if we moved here?’ And she said, ‘Great, I was hoping you would say that,’” he recalled.

Cole connected Degen with a real estate agent, and his family moved to Newtown in 1990.

“My being here in Newtown absolutely came from me meeting Joanna Cole … We had become good friends doing this together and it was just wonderful. That’s how I got to Newtown.” Degen said.

One of his favorite memories of the two of them in town was when they were doing research for The Magic School Bus In the Time of the Dinosaurs. One of their scientific consultants was Armand Morgan from Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, who visited them in person in Newtown.

“We met at Joanna’s house,” Degen recalled. “He brought with him dinosaur teeth from the collection and put them on the table and said, ‘This is what I want to show you.’”

They learned that the teeth of meat-eating dinosaurs all basically had the same saber-shaped design to tear meat, while plant eating dinosaurs had all different shaped teeth depending on what specific vegetation they ate.

“We were actually holding dinosaur teeth and playing with them on Joanna’s kitchen table with Armand Morgan,” Degen said. “It was really wonderful.”

Cole later moved out of town, first to Virginia to be close to her daughter during her college years, and eventually to Iowa before her death, but the town was a special bond to Cole and Degen.

One of the biggest perks of their friendship and living so close to one another was when they would travel for work. The two could carpool to their destination or drive to the airport together.

“I knew what she had for breakfast every morning at hotels,” he said with a laugh about how close they were. “It was quite a friendship that is sorely missed.”

Lasting Legacy

When Degen set out to be an illustrator, he had no idea that he would end up meeting Cole or moving to Newtown. He also never realized that his work would go on to impact people of all ages around the world.

“I thought I would be the artist in the studio that sends something out to the world and sees it in a little book shop,” he said. “Then I realized that you go out and you meet the people who love what you do and they can actually recite things back to you about what you’ve done.”

Degen has always been in awe of what The Magic School Bus series has inspired, whether it be a grade school in Cleveland that had students create a rainforest adventure in their gymnasium or a scientific report detailing how students retained more about the solar system through The Magic School Bus than a standard science book.

“There were things like that all over the country that would just knock you over,” he said.

Degen is looking forward to sharing behind-the-scenes stories of working with Cole, the process of creating The Magic School Bus Series, and what the last installment will teach readers during the program being organized through his hometown library.

Registration is required for individuals to virtually attend The Magic School Bus event on May 19. To do so, visit chboothlibrary.org.

To purchase a signed personalized copy of The Magic School Bus Explores Human Evolution, visit the Children’s Department of Booth Library, 25 Main Street, by Tuesday, May 10.

For those interested in purchasing a copy, but who miss the deadline, Degen encourages people to support local and pick up a copy at an independent bookstore.

“Our nearest independent bookstore is Byrd’s Books in Bethel. Alice Hutchinson is a great bookstore owner. If she doesn’t have a book, she will get it for you,” he said.

Reporter Alissa Silber can be reached at alissa@thebee.com.