When Taylor High School librarian Lynn Butler was a teenager, she loved reading realistic fiction and historical fiction. She sought out books about high schoolers, just like herself and her friends. Some were funny, some were tragic, and she enjoyed each one.
Then she discovered a book about a cheerleader named Henrietta Snow, “Snowy” to her friends, that took Butler’s reading experience to a whole new level. Written by Ruth Doan MacDougall, it became her all-time favorite book. She read it again and again, hoping for a sequel, and looking for any other books by her new favorite author.
Little did Butler know, years later she would get to meet MacDougall, and the two of them would become good friends.
“When I started reading this book, I was just completely taken by it,” Butler said. “This was the only book I had read about kids my age that was realistic. There were other books like it, but they were a little bit preachy about setting a good example and being a good person. And yes, we all want to be good people, but that wasn’t reality.”
In MacDougall’s book, Butler saw students cheating on tests, stealing each other’s boyfriends and behaving in not so honorable ways at times.
“This was the first book I had ever read where the characters were like real people I actually knew,” Butler stated. “I was just struck by that because I had not seen anything like that in books before.”
Butler kept reading and rereading that book, until one day, she went to the library, and it wasn’t there. It had disappeared from the shelves, and that was the last she saw of her favorite book until she was in college and babysitting for her boss.
Still an avid reader, Butler began “prowling” the bookshelves for a good read when she found a paperback copy of, The Cheerleader.
“I immediately started reading it, and when my boss came in, I could barely tear myself away,” Butler recalled. “She asked if I wanted to take it with me, and I said, ‘Yes, thank you!’ knowing that book would never make it back to her.”
A sequel
Fast forward to 2006, when Butler was planning a trip to see the museum and home of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the inspiration for the Little House on the Prairie series and a common vacation destination for school librarians.
“I’m on the website looking at other places in the area I can go see while I’m there,” said Butler. “I click on a link for ‘Some of Our Favorite Books’ and there’s Snowy the Cheerleader. I click on it and it takes me to a website and I see ‘The Sequel to The Cheerleader’. I’m in my 40s at the time and I scream out loud. My son comes running in to see if I’m okay. I find out twenty years after the fact that she wrote the sequel and several books after that.”
Butler ordered the sequel, paying an extra $21 for expedited shipping, then she called in sick the next day to stay home and read the entire book. While the first book took Snowy through her senior year with a college acceptance in hand, the second book took the characters through college and into their thirties.
“It was like a class reunion with old friends,” Butler said. “Then, the book after that took Snowy into her 60s, which is where I’m at now. Ruth is on her tenth book now, and Snowy and all of her friends are in their 70s. It’s like being around all my high school friends that I’m still friends with.”
When Butler discovered the additional books in 2006, she found that MacDougall had a blog and began following the weekly posts. She quickly realized that the main character, Snowy, was a version of the author herself, and MacDougall’s husband was the inspiration for one of Snowy’s friends, now an older character in the later books.
A lunch meeting with the author Butler ended up contacting McDougall and sharing fan stories of searching for the book, discovering the sequels, paying for expedited shipping and taking off from work to catch up on decades of the character’s life story. The two ended up meeting for lunch in New Hampshire, while Butler was travelling to Boston during spring break of 2018.
“I had lunch with Ruth and her husband and spent all afternoon at their house,” said Butler. “She showed me her desk where she wrote all her novels. It was a magical afternoon. We had a great time and I’ve stayed in touch with her ever since. We’ve become really good friends.”
Butler is now part of a small international group that calls themselves, ‘Ruth Ambassadors’. They help update MacDougall’s legions of fans from around the world and promote her work. When the ninth book was published in 2019, the ambassadors received advanced copies.
“I started crying when I read the last page,” Butler said. “I’m one of those people who reads all the extra pages in the front and back, and I see that I’m in the acknowledgements. My name is in her book!”
The series now includes nine books, with number ten in progress, that takes Henrietta Snow from her sophomore year in high school into her 70s. During their visit, MacDougall brought out her high school yearbooks and shared memories of friends who inspired some of the characters in her books.
While in the area, Butler traveled to Moody’s Diner, the inspiration for a scene in the book where Snowy buys a mug for her friend, Tom. So, Butler bought a Moody’s mug for her husband, Mark. She found Cat Path, a road named after a street in the book, and also enjoyed the beautiful scenery described in the series.
Butler has kept in touch with MacDougall through frequent emails and she has made two return trips to see her in person, once in 2021 and again this past July. Every year on March 19th, both Snowy’s birthday and MacDougall’s birthday, Butler rereads the original book in the series. What started out as a fan’s dream coming true has grown into a treasured friendship.
“When I backed out of her driveway at the end of our first visit, she was standing there just waving, and (husband) Don was standing there behind her,” Butler recalled. “It was a dream come true for me, meeting one of my favorite authors of all time. People who love books love the writers who write them, and meeting this woman, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Her first book captured me at age seventeen, and her more recent books are still capturing me now.”
