Sleuth Gina celebrates Nancy Drew's 80th birthday

Gina Travis says she’s really nothing like Nancy Drew, the mystery-solving girl detective created by the Hardy Boys author in 1930.

Sure, she surmised that she must look a little like the strawberry blond, blue-eyed character introduced by author Edward Stratemeyer, and she drove, of course, a similar blue sports car, but Nancy Drew was much braver.

“Nancy was bold. She wasn’t afraid to go anywhere or talk to anyone,” Travis said.

For the literary-minded, Nancy Drew stood out in her time because she was neither the love interest of the story’s main character or a damsel in distress.
 

Dawn Allen recalled the words of Pulitizer-prize winning columnist Kathleen Parker in her Sleuth Magazine article.  “Nancy could do anything, and a generation of girls who lived vicariously through her heroic adventures assumed they could too,” Parker said.

Travis and the 143-member Nancy Drew Sleuths were part of the 2010 celebration of  Nancy Drew’s 80th birthday. Travis attended a Bahama cruise with other fans and spent time with book cover illustrator Rudy Napi.

Travis insists that she’s not crazy, compared to those Star Trek fans, but she has a Nancy Drew lunchbox, the Nancy Drew Mystery board game and a child’s Nancy Drew Halloween costume.

As a child, she played out Nancy Drew scenarios with her sister. They would bury things and draw clue maps. Travis even burned the edges of one of her maps to make it look authentic.

She grew up attending a country school near Dunbar, a village of 200 people in southeast Nebraska. The school library had only two Nancy Drew books, but she and the other girls would share their own copies.

She beamed, she said, when the girls learned they could buy copies at the Woolworths in Nebraska City. Her mom bought her first book, from the yellow spine series, when she was 10 years old and she finished with 22.

The spooky stories caught Travis’ attention the most.
“When you live in the country you see abandoned, old houses and they made me think of stories. Stories about the people that had lived there and the treasures they might’ve left behind,” she said.

Nancy Drew also had a role in her first driver’s license. Travis was intimidated as she approached the stately Otoe County Courthouse, where she would have to take her test.

“I was so shy I almost turned around, but I put on my Nancy façade. I got a little strength from her,” she said.

Nancy Drew probably had an impact on Travis’ career, as well.
Travis, who retired as a Braille teacher from the state school for the visually handicapped, said Nancy is famous for solving puzzles.

In the featured story on the cruise, she deciphered a code in newspaper classified ads to expose a plot against NASA.

“You learn the Braille code, like Nancy Drew decoding in her stories,” she said.

At her going-away party, the school quizzed Travis with trivia, expecting her to know that 65 million copies of the books are in print, her housekeeper’s name is Hanna and Mildred Wirt Benson was the first writer under the pen name Carolyn Keene.

After the 2007 Nancy Drew movie debuted starring Emma Roberts, Travis held a Nancy Drew Day. She showed the movie and served Nancy’s favorite foods -- chicken salad, lemon bars, carrot sticks and chocolate milk.

But Travis said she didn’t always have an interest in Nancy Drew. Off to college, marriage and children, she rarely gave the sleuth a second thought.

“I didn’t think about Nancy Drew, but I had still had the books,” she said.

With her daughters grown and a husband who supported her interest by finding the last book in her yellow spine series, Travis put the books back on the shelf.

“My interest was renewed. It all came back to me. People like to think about things from their childhood that they enjoyed,” she said.

Travis said Nancy Drew was a good role model for the girls of her era.
“She could sing and dance and she was proficient at judo and art. She could win a swim meet and the tennis match. She was extremely smart too.

“One thing you could count on was that she would never give up. It didn’t matter how many times she was locked in a closet or hit on the head – she was always getting conked on the head – she never gave up. She was compassionate and selfless,” she said.

Travis said she isn’t really like Nancy Drew, but in those little moments of life, when she had to overcome the stress of a speech or show up new on a college campus, the girl from the town of River Heights was there to lead the way.