Cherry Ames
Senior Nurse
Wells
1944
Friday is our day to indulge in fiction choices. Again, we need to reiterate that fiction is really a function of your community’s taste and space issues. Cherry Ames is right up there with Nancy Drew and the gang. Cherry was getting dated for my age group and really belongs to the previous generation. (I bet my mother read about Cherry.) Yes, this book belongs in any good popular culture archive. It is not a good choice for a contemporary youth collection with limited space. For those of you who really think a modern youth collection needs Cherry, they have newer editions, so no hanging on to moldy, old stuff!
Mary
Books from these old series actually go for a fair amount of money, so don’t put them on the $1/book sale table.
I love Cherry Ames but she was getting very dated when I read her books 25 years ago and I got some of my copies at that time from the $1/book sale table when my public library was weeding. It’s time to buy something newer. I thought they were “quaint” just like stories Grandma used to tell – but now I have to admit they just seem like ancient history to my 11 year old daughter.
My mother was horribly saddened when I told her I cleared out my Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Cherry Ames and the Bobbsey Twins from my middle school collection. I was a little sad too because I had read them when I was young. So many of the weeders found there way to my personal collection!
I have a whole book shelf at my house devoted to classics like Cherry Ames, the Bobbsey Twins (husband has been buying me first editions as anniversary presents) and Nancy Drew. I’ve started reading them with my daughters, and they love them too. The books are very dated, but are products of their time.
I agree with Alkali. Put Cherry up on eBay. There’s lots of people who are willing to pay top dollar for fiction series like this. For instance, I absolutely adore Alfred Hitchcock And The Three Investigators. I’ve tried to find some to buy but they’re super expensive. One person had the entire series, in hardback, up on eBay and the bids were already well over $3,000!
In fact, they’re so expensive I decided, should a man ever prove desperate enough to want to marry me, instead of a huge expensive engagement ring, I’ll happily take a small one with just a diamond chip if instead he’ll spend that ring money on getting me the entire AFATTI series in hardback.
I put up a couple of my Cherry Ames books on Amazon. Remember they are all ex library books! http://tinyurl.com/6vzbh85
Mary
Awesome! I would also add, many of these stories are on Gutenberg.
And to whoever was asking about a “Semi-legal” Gutenberg, look at Wikilivres.
Please, someone, tell me why there was a rabbit running around the hospital! And please don’t say it was a run-away from the old pregnancy tests! Having had rabbits, the way to catch one is NOT to flap a towel wildly at it!
My mother bought all of these when she was growing up, and kept them. I read them as a child, and have a great fondness for them….but yes, I think they probably are a bit dated. And give a rather inaccurate picture of modern medicine! There were so many of these kinds of series…In addition to Cherry Ames, Nancy Drew, and the Bobbsey Twins, there was Sue Barton (another nurse), the Dana Girls (high school sisters), Judy Bolton (married to an FBI agent – apparently someone is re-releasing these!), Vicki Barr (flight attendant), Trixie Belden (high school student), and the Maida books (hard to describe…but in modern terms, wealthy man homeschools his daughter and her friends).
I have Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse sitting on my bookshelf at home, one of the titles I rescued from my mom’s childhood home. I remember enjoying it when I was 8…
I love these books! They bring back so many memories of sitting in the grade school basement library. I’ve been trying to find good editions of them for my collection but can’t afford most of the prices. They reissued the first 4 books a few years ago with the classic covers.
I collect some of the various juvenile series books, and Cherry Ames is one of them. They are an interesting look into a career and its now-dated practices, with mild mysteries in the vein of Nancy Drew. I agree, putting it on eBay or Amazon Marketplace is a better venue to selling.
To oliviacw: There were 100s of those series’. The most well known were probably the boys, such as Tom Swift.
I remember “Cherry Ames, Student Nurse” in the bookcase when I was little. I never see those books anymore.
My mommy (I’m assuming she’ll weigh in here) told me I absolutely could not weed our Cherry Ames books because someone would inevitably come looking for them. That said, ours are in good condition. And housed in the adult section.
A great resource (annoying popups aside) for girls juevenile series books.
http://www.series-books.com/
I loved these books when I read them in elementary school in the 1980s!
Someone should start up the series again. I’ll give you the first title:
Cherry Ames: Can’t Hold a Job!
I think we have a couple of these at here at my house. We recently bought an entire collection of Nancy Drew 1-78 I think on Ebay for under $100. That’s to supplement the ones from my mom’s growing up years. Including some from my grandma with pub dates in the 1930’s! And I’ve been taking the Boxcar Children and Hardy Boys that show up in deletions at the library I work in.
We even have 1 Dana Girls I think and a few other random books from my mom. Wasn’t there another nurse series? We have one or two of those I think.
I’m almost 27 and my sister is 18 and we love Nancy Drew!
The catholic school I attended in the 70’s had ” Cherry Ames Student Nurse”.
Is it really time to weed it? ; )
OMG I read all those books. My mom was a nurse and I thought I wanted to be one too. I loved Cherry Ames. She was an educated woman who had a good job. I think the books got lost in a move, I wish my daughter could have read them.
I can see why you’d weed these, but I remember adoring dated (vintage?) novels in my middle school and even high-school years, along with several friends. It is perhaps a niche taste, but maybe not very unusual either. I suppose there is always the sale table!
The best title from the list on the back cover is by far ‘Cherry Ames, Dude Ranch Nurse’! I love the illustrations though.
I read Cherry Ames as a child. I’m 25!
I loved the Cherry Ames series. I so wanted to be a nurse, not to minister to the sick, but to wear a cute little cap and elegant cloak. I remember thinking all the rich biatch girls had names like Mavis and Stella and the humble sweet ones were named Jane and Mary. In one I learned what a golf links was. I’d never heard that term before. They were so sophisticated!
Cherry Ames: Food Truck Nurse
Cherry Ames: Hot Air Balloon Nurse
Cherry Ames: Awkward First Meeting With Your Future In-Laws Nurse
Cherry Ames: Escalator Nurse
I’d like to see a volume of Cherry Ames: Perinatal Medevac Nurse. Best nursing title I know from my various friends in the field. Cherry could end up having to pilot the chopper herself.
My mother, who is 80, liked these books when she was a girl. She tells me she really liked the red-lined blue cape. But she did not go on to become a nurse.
I worked in a very tiny town library for about a year, and no one took out a single Western. No wonder–they were ancient! So I weeded a lot of them. Then in January, some Jeremiah Johnson guy trekked down off the mountain for his winter stock of reading material. He was extremely disappointed, and I had to restock the collection. With Cherry Ames, the reaction will be a wee bit stronger (see Everything you need to know about your period)!
I have to say, the lack of context for that illustration had me giggling madly for a while.
Also, I LOVED Nancy Drew when I was about 10. I don’t know if I would have read these, though; contrary to the back cover, I never wanted to go into medicine. Much too squeamish!
When i worked in a bookstore, a lot of customers picked up the old Nancy Drew series, so I guess there’s a market for “quaint” stuff. Old Tom Swifts fascinate me precisely because the cutting-edge tech is so dated now: Tom Swift and his Motor-Cycle, Tom Swift and his Search-Light … no, I’m not making the titles up.
I’m sort of confused why so many people are calling Nancy Drew an oudated, weedable series. I mean, I realize there’s probably a difference between the older and newer versions of it (I noticed that with the old Bobbsey Twins book I tried to read, which was NOTHING like the newer ones at all but had something to do with a housekeeper who said “chill’uns” a lot, resulting in me putting it down after about two pages), but the series in general is really popular, from what I’ve seen. I had a few friends who read it (mind you, I’m 21), and I babysat for a girl (now mid-teens) who adored it. So…so you guys do just mean the old ones, right? Because I’d be shocked if the newer versions weren’t being checked out.
I read some of these for the first time once I was in nursing school, when I was 30. I found them quite good, and very amusing. A good nursing school should have a selection in their library. Not necessarily the whole series, but a sampling should be kept available as part of our cultural history, even in a small library.
Most of the Cherry Ames stories have been rewritten and modernized over the last twenty years, invariably starting with the phrase, “Dear Penthouse Forum…”
Oh, and Fromula wins the internets for the week. Other recommended titles:
– Cherry Ames, Disgruntled HMO Nurse
– Cherry Ames, Inflatable Nurse
– Cherry Ames, Nurse In Charge Of The Schedule II Drugs Cabinet
– Cherry Ames, Neo-Natal Nurse With A Sick Sense of Humor
– Cherry Ames, Greyhound Bus Nurse
– Cherry Ames, Dementia Ward Nurse (With An Even Sicker Sense of Humor)
@Leigha – Actually, at my library at least, the older Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys are checked out WAY more then the modern ones. And yes, this is by young kids. So unless the book is moldy there’s no reason to weed older series like Nancy, Cherry, Three Investigators, etc. Yes, they’re old, but kids like the older ones better.
I gave up on Nancy myself when she started having sex. By that they ended one chapter with her and her boyfriend in the car and him being suddenly “too close” and began the next chapter with her pulling her skirt back down as she got out of the car some time later.
A lot of the kids that come into my library also prefer classic movies to modern ones. We’ve got one ten year old boy who not only knows lots of classic movie history, but declared to me loudly one day that he’d like to marry Lauren Bacall.
I read my mum’s old Cherry Ames, twenty years ago and I loved them! I have a rosy memory of the books and remeber them as quite well written, but I can be wrong. Also I must say I read anything I could get my hands on (still do )and felt very grown-up reading my mum’s old books so they might not appeal to the audience of today.
My best friend’s mother is a nurse and collects the Cherry Ames books! Their house is full of them on display (along with an astounding amount of Longaberger baskets) and I never knew they were children’s books until recently!
On a side note about children checking out the older copies of books- personally, I’ve always gone for the oldest looking copy of a book on a library’s shelf, preferably a hardcover library binding. I don’t know why, I’m just more drawn to them!
Also, I now wish I had kept more of my Boxcar Children books. I loved that series.
I have loads of Cherry Ames books for sale at £1.99 each on ebay. Please contact me if you are interested.