"Chief Read Heap Much"

I'm doing some research on Caldecott Medal books that include images of American Indians. Today I'm looking at The Rooster Crows: A Book of American Rhymes and Jingles by Maud and Miska Petersham. Published in 1946, there's one rhyme in it that shows a kid wearing an Indian headdress. I came across an article from the September 29th, 1947 issue of Life magazine...

On page 140 is "Feathers for Reading." The subtitle is "To win Indian headdress, children of an Iowa town wade through a record number of books." The program started when the librarian, Mary Woodward, ran a contest to get kids to read. For each book a child read, they'd get a turkey feather from Woodward. The article highlights Leo, the kid who read the most books and therefore has the most feathers for his headdress. He read 136 books in 1947, and had read 157 the summer before...  That's Leo on the right. The caption for the photo is "His summer's reading, piled on the grass, towers over Leo, although he is 4 feet 4 inches tall. His dangling champion's headdress gives him the right to the title, "Chief Read Heap Much." All these honors are beginning to pall on Leo, however. He is tired of competition and the necessity of always picking out thin books. "Next year I'm going to read thick ones," says Leo.  I wonder how he got that name, "Chief Read Heap Much"? Did he choose it? Did the librarian choose it? Maybe the person who wrote the article?!




And here's Leo reading one of those thin books. The book is Mei Li, by Thomas Handforth. I haven't read Mei Li but am surprised to learn it won the Caldecott in 1939 to serendipitously run into another Caldecott winning book. (Edits due to KT Horning's question in comments.)  I'm wondering if there are critical essays on it? I think Cai may have written about it.  I'm including the photograph here for colleagues studying representations of Chinese in children's picture books.

Leo isn't playing Indian in these photographs, nor does the article say he or any of the other children do that. It was, however, quite the thing-to-do back then...  Philip Deloria's Playing Indian (1998) is a good source for information about playing Indian.