The next day they made it to Acquebouille, another 20 miles south, and slept a fitful night in a barn. They could still hear the German shelling. That first day they rode 30 miles south to Étampes. They were married in Rio in 1935 and honeymooned in Paris and never got around to leaving-until they pedaled away with the manuscript and art for what would become one of the most popular children’s books of the 20th century. If Hans was dreamy and sweet, Margarete was ambitious and unsentimental. Margarete, a photographer, arrived a decade later. He sketched and painted, and sold plumbing fixtures up and down the Amazon. Hans had moved there in 1925 after serving in World War I. Hans Reyersbach and his wife, Margarete Waldstein, were artists from Hamburg, but they had met in Rio de Janeiro. At 5:30 on the morning of June 12, they rode out of Paris with a monkey hidden in the basket. The husband bought every spare part he could find and built two bikes from scratch. There wasn’t a car or a bicycle left in the city. Among them a young couple, German Jews who had been living in Paris for just four years.

Parisians fled by the hundreds of thousands before the Germans captured their city on June 14. On May 10, 1940, Adolf Hitler sent three million troops through the Low Countries into France.

He may be the most human character in postwar literature.Īnd he arrived with nothing, a refugee, to became a worldwide sensation-the ultimate American story, one worth remembering on the 75th anniversary of the publication of Curious George and with an upcoming documentary about his irrepressible creators. Well-meaning and disastrous, impulsive and forgetful, selfish and ingenious and in constant need of forgiveness. Practical, unflappable, loving, forgiving, patient-the Man in the Yellow Hat is who we would all like to be.

Curious george rides a bike 1952