by Robert Thomas Jr.
From The New York Times, October 5, 1997

NEW YORK -- Merian Lovelace Kirchner, whose pleadings for just one more bedtime story as a little girl gave birth to a beloved series of children's books, died on Sept. 25 at a hospital on Staten Island. She was 66 and the daughter of Maud Hart Lovelace, the creator of the Betsy-Tacy books. Friends said the cause was emphysema.

It was her mother who lived and wrote the Betsy-Tacy life, not so much creating as copying her characters whole from her own turn-of-the-century childhood in Mankato, Minn., or Deep Valley, as it is known in the 10 main Betsy-Tacy books and three satellite volumes.

But it was little Merian Lovelace, growing up in the 1930s in Garden City, Long Island, who first demonstrated that her mother's girlhood had more than passing appeal. She pestered her mother so often for a new story about Betsy Ray and her friend Tacy Kelly that Lovelace, who had concentrated on short stories and historical novels, decided to put Betsy and Tacy on paper.

The result has been something of a literary cult.

For although Betsy Ray and Tacy Kelly have never quite achieved the stature of, say, Nancy Drew, they have spawned a 1,000-member Betsy-Tacy Society and a Betsy-Tacy home page and they have turned Mankato into a tourist attraction.

Aside from the fact that Betsy was an uncommonly independent young heroine, a bustle-era girl who took her own ambitious career plans for granted, the books have exerted a special appeal because unlike Nancy Drew, who was blond, perfect and 18 forever, Betsy and her friends grew older in each successive book.

When the first book, Betsy-Tacy, covering Betsy's meeting with Tacy at age 5, was published in 1940, Mrs. Kirchner was 9. By the time she got to Smith College, she was something of a minor celebrity, letting her classmates read the proofs of the latest installment.

The last book, Betsy's Wedding, was published in 1955, a year after Mrs. Kirchner's marriage to Englebert Kirchner, a German-born writer.

As the daughter of a woman who turned her own childhood into literary fodder, Mrs. Kirchner might have been expected to continue the tradition. But except for a column she wrote for the Betsy-Tacy Society newsletter, she showed little interest in her childhood and none in fiction.

Not that Mrs. Kirchner was especially rebellious. It was just that she decided to follow in the footsteps of her father, Delos Lovelace, a Minnesota-born journalist who was once city editor of the old New York Sun. (He was also the author of the novelization of the movie King Kong, which helps explain why he named his daughter after the movie's director, Merian C. Cooper.)

Settling in Greenwich Village as her parents had done a generation earlier, Mrs. Kirchner held a series of jobs in journalism, contributing to a book on civil rights for Newsfront Publishers, working as a freelance book editor, and ending her career as a senior writer for the magazine Medical Economics.

After her mother's death in 1980, Mrs. Kirchner helped keep the Betsy-Tacy flame alive, working closely with the Betsy-Tacy Society and campaigning for reissues of the books. Her husband died in 1992.

For all her role in the creation of the Betsy-Tacy series, Mrs. Kirchner never appeared as a character, except by implication. At the end of Betsy's Wedding, as her husband, Joe, is about to go off to World War I, Betsy speaks of their plans to have a little girl named Bettina, not realizing, perhaps, that in time the little girl would make her mother write it all down.