HOULTON, Maine — Each Christmas during the late 1980s and early 1990s, readers of the Houlton Pioneer Times could count on a new adventure of “Pip the Mouse” from editor Kaye Trickey. The stories told the ongoing journeys of Pip, and later his family members, as they discovered new and mysterious things in their community.
But how exactly did Pip come to be? The answer, Trickey said, was simple.
“Marshall Hammond, who was the editor (1963-87), was very big on Christmas,” she recalled. “He always did a front page that was totally devoted to Christmas. He was just that type of person. It was his thing.”
Trickey said each year, the newspaper received a Christmas story from the librarian at the Cary Library. But one year, after the librarian moved away, the staff realized there would be no Christmas story.
“Marshall came out to my desk, stood there, and looked at me for awhile and then said ‘We don’t have a Christmas story for the front page.’” Trickey said. “That was all he said and he walked away. I knew that meant he was expecting me to come up with one.”
The idea for Pip, a small mouse who lived at Hollyhock Farm, came to Trickey in the middle of the night when she sat up in her bed spontaneously and jotted down the idea. The fictional stories featured Pip discovering an angel on top of a Christmas tree or receiving visits on the farm from his extended family.
Her favorite story, though, involved Pip journeying to town to investigate the melodious sounds of an organ coming from a local church.
Looking back, Trickey said many of the stories were adaptations from her own life and as her family grew to include grandchildren, so too did Pip’s family.
Each story featured a drawing of Pip, which was created by Houlton resident Bob Cowperthwaite.
“Kaye came to me and said she needed to have a mouse for a Christmas story, and that was all the direction I had,” Cowperthwaite said. “He evolved over time from a simple mouse to one that wore clothes and had more of a cartoon look to him.”
Cowperthwaite said the illustrations became more and more elaborate as the years went on and Pip’s family grew. All of his drawings were done on bonded paper and he still has many of the original pieces of artwork.
“There was talk of putting the stories all together in a book, but for some reason that never happened,” he said.
Trickey said when she retired from the newspaper business, after 20 years with the Pioneer Times, in the late-1990s, she also retired the Pip stories, but to this day people still approach her to ask about the mouse. She has a collection of the stories in her home that she compiled for her grandchildren.
“I think people liked the stories because they all had a moral,” she said. “Or maybe it was because I was brought up Christian and in subtle ways I would work that into the stories.”
