Visitors to Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, can see a whitewashed fence like the one that Tom Sawyer tricked his friends into painting for him in the novel.
On Nov. 2, students and teachers at St. Mary’s School of Piscataway in Clinton, Maryland, learned that their Catholic school and parish has a special connection to a modern children’s classic, Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney.
The day after his 11th and newest book in that series, Double Down, went on sale, the best-selling children’s book author visited St. Mary’s School and shared his memories of going to Mass and attending teen dances at the parish while he was growing up and was something of a wimpy kid himself.
“It’s so cool to be here. Believe it or not, 30 years ago I used to attend dances here,” Kinney told a school assembly of 180 pre-kindergarten through eighth grade students. “I tried break dancing” here, he said, before asking kids if they knew what that dance move was.
He and his friend used to think that when people at Mass there shared the sign of peace, it sounded to them like, “peas be with you,” which made them laugh. “I got in trouble lots of times for laughing in church,” Kinney confessed.
But his biggest revelation came moments later.
“The ‘Cheese Touch’ started at St. Mary’s. It’s one of the reasons it’s important for me to come here,” Kinney said. “Right outside, under the basketball hoop was a piece of cheese. None of the kids would touch it. You can tell people you went to school where the ‘Cheese Touch’ started!’” he said, as the kids looked out the window. “Beware of cheese!” he added.
The “Cheese Touch” refers to a famous scene in Diary of a Wimpy Kid and the movie series it inspired, when the main character, middle schooler Greg Heffley and his best friend Rowley try to avoid a mysterious piece of cheese “that has been sitting on the blacktop since last spring.” After a kid named Darren touched it with his finger, Kinney wrote, “that’s what started this thing called the Cheese Touch. It’s basically like the Cooties. If you get the Cheese Touch, you’re stuck with it until you pass it on to someone else.”
Kinney told the St. Mary’s students that when he was growing up, kids tagged each other and they got the “Cooties,” so he remembered that piece of cheese out on the blacktop, and came up with the idea for the Cheese Touch.
“Who put the cheese under the basketball hoop?” a student asked during the question and answer period of his talk. “It’s better that remains a mystery!” joked Kinney.
The visit marked a homecoming for Kinney, who said he wanted to start the world tour for his new book by coming home to Maryland. The day before, he had visited his former elementary school, Potomac Landing, near the Fort Washington house where he grew up.
Kinney went to Eugene Burroughs Middle School in Accokeek, and then attended Bishop McNamara High School in Forestville, where he graduated in 1989, and later earned a degree at the University of Maryland in College Park, where he was a cartoonist for the Diamondback campus newspaper and created a goofy character named “Igdoof.”
Entering St. Mary’s School, the children’s book author walked past a large banner created by students with the message, “Welcome Back, Mr. Kinney,” and reproductions of the covers of his Wimpy Kid books series, which have 180 million copies in print worldwide.
“This is where I went to church, in this hall,” he told the students at the assembly. “A lot of the jokes I got for Diary of a Wimpy Kid were from my childhood growing up. A lot of it is from here… In my mind, the Wimpy Kid world is this world. When I write, I think about where I grew up.”
The author noted that he would be traveling to India, South Korea, the Philippines, Israel and Germany on his world tour promoting Double Down, but, “It was really important for me to start here, where my home is.”
Kinney said he got into the first and only fistfight of his life as an eighth grader, when he and his friend got into a disagreement, and the kids around them were chanting, “Fight! Fight!” a scene that later appeared in the book and movie with the two boys squaring off awkwardly, not knowing how to fight.
Then there was the time when he and his friend tried to make a giant snowman, but rolling the large snowball tore up the sod in the yard, and the time when his older brother woke him up in the middle of the night and told him he had slept through the whole summer and it was time for the first day of school. Young Jeff Kinney then went downstairs at 3 a.m. and made breakfast for himself, as if it were a school day, and his father caught him and asked what he was doing.
Kinney also told the students about how he was a “terrible” member of his swim team and once hid shivering in the locker room, wrapping toilet paper around himself to warm up. All those incidents also later happened to Greg in Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
“Greg is a wimpy kid, and I kinda was too, growing up,” he said.
Kinney was inspired by comic strips like Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side, and he dreamed of being a cartoonist someday. “As a kid, I fell in love with the comics,” he said. His University of Maryland character Igdoof once made a surprise appearance in the panel of the comic strip Big Nate, after he had corresponded with that strip’s creator, Lincoln Peirce.
“That’s the moment I knew I had to be a cartoonist,” Kinney said.
After graduating from college, Kinney was not able to become a syndicated cartoonist, but he had kept a journal of funny things that happened to him over the years. “Funny things happen every day,” he said. He converted those ideas into an online comic strip, and later a book publisher asked him to rework them as a children’s book.
“I thought I was writing for grown-ups, comics that adults would like to read about childhood. I never thought for a second that I was writing for kids,” he said.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid was published in 2007, and his books have been best sellers since. “I feel really lucky it worked out,” said Kinney, who noted that his success came after receiving a lot of rejections from publishers.
During his talk at St. Mary’s, Kinney offered the kids a brief master class in cartooning, showing how a few lines make a character identifiable, like the strands in Greg Heffley’s or Charlie Brown’s hair, or the smile and teeth of Sponge Bob, and how with just a couple of strokes, a character’s eyes and mouth can show a range of emotions.
One student asked Kinney if he ever thought about launching a new book series, and he said his new book’s title, Double Down, reflects his determination to stick with writing more Wimpy Kid books. He hopes to write at least 20 of them.
Several girls asked him about the book series, Dork Diaries, which is about a middle school girl and her friends and began after his Wimpy Kid books came out centering on a middle school boy’s adventures. Kinney nixed the idea of any crossover books between the series, and joked, “I think Dork Diaries is five times better!”
Noting that his next Wimpy Kid book would be about the holidays, Kinney asked the kids for one word ideas for part of the title, and after a kid blurted out, “Apocalypse,” Kinney laughed and said, “Maybe the book will be really bad, and that will be a good title!”
After Kinney spoke to the St. Mary’s students, their principal, Scott Farren, thanked him and presented him with a school sweatshirt, which the author put on as the children applauded. “You can wear that on the world tour,” the principal said.
Later, Farren noted, “It says a lot about his character for him to come home and start his tour here. He remembers where he came from. It speaks about who he is as a person.”
In an interview with the Catholic Standard newspaper of the Archdiocese of Washington, Kinney – who now lives in a Massachusetts town with his wife and two middle school aged sons – said that in New England, people often find community life in their towns, but when he grew up in Maryland, his Catholic parish and Catholic high school were places where he found a sense of community.
“It was a huge part of the fabric of our lives growing up,” Kinney said, noting that he had spent many hours at St. Mary’s Parish over the years, as a member of the teen club there and later as that group’s president. “It’s very meaningful for me to come back to the school.”
In the past decade, Diary of a Wimpy Kid books have been published in 42 languages, and a special milestone happened last year, when the Latin version was presented by the priest who translated it to a smiling Pope Francis at the Vatican. “It was one of the best moments of my life,” said Kinney, who is a big fan of the pope.
Kinney hopes that the students whom he speaks to – including middle schoolers like he once was – “can see they can do anything they want, if they work hard” and dream big.
St. Mary’s second grader Anderson Rust – whose dad Morgan is an Army major serving in Afghanistan – accompanied the author through the school and sat in the front row at the assembly. The boy, a big fan of Kinney and his books, likes to draw cartoons, and after the visit, he said he would like to be an author some day.
“He came running up to me at the end and gave me a big hug,” said Anderson’s mother, Kristi Rust. “It made his day and his year.”
Seventh grader Katie Weslowski wore a handmade T-shirt displaying the Greg Heffley Wimpy Kid character and the words, “Welcome home, Mr. Kinney.”
“I like that they’re easy reads, and they’re really funny,” she said of the book series. “I feel like, the things they go through and the drama in the books are relatable.”
Her mother, Kathy Weslowski, went to a homecoming dance with Kinney when they were high school freshmen, and she invited her famous friend to visit St. Mary’s School.
“Having that Catholic background has shaped him to be the kind, generous person he is. He wants to give back to the community he grew up in,” she said.
Kinney returned to Bishop McNamara High School in the fall of 2014, and thanked his teachers for the great education and the moral values he received there.
His Catholic upbringing and education continue to shape his life and work today, he told the Catholic Standard. He said the values of kindness and compassion he learned motivate him as an adult to give back.
And Kinney’s funny childhood experiences, including what he learned at his Catholic school and parish, continue to shape his Wimpy Kids books. Kinney spoke to the St. Mary’s students on Nov. 2, All Souls Day, and by coincidence, there’s a scene in his new book where Greg Heffley ponders how his grandmother, Nana, is watching over him from heaven.
The boy writes in his diary that he’s okay with that “when I’m crossing a busy intersection… But there are other times when you just need privacy,” and the cartoon drawing shows Greg in the bathroom looking anxious, pondering that his Nana is watching over him then.
“There’s a huge comedic vein, growing up as Catholic,” Kinney said.
