Virginia Kahl, 85, who died of a heart ailment Nov. 4 at Inova Mount Vernon Hospital, was an author and illustrator of children's books. Her simple and silly tales involved workaholic dogs, children who must eat a tall dessert and a housewife who rations her addictive pancakes.
Ms. Kahl was a librarian much of her career, in her native Wisconsin and then with the Army in Europe before retiring from the Alexandria public library system.
"My books will appeal, I hope, to those children who enjoy a simple fantasy and possess a sense of the ridiculous; they carry no message," Virginia Kahl told an interviewer.
(Family Photo)
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She wrote or contributed to 16 books starting in the early 1950s. Her earliest works received the most attention and were cited for their slapstick humor and loopy plots. Her first book, "Away Went Wolfgang!" (1954), was about an exuberant milk-cart dog who spills all his milk on the delivery route.
"The Duchess Bakes a Cake" (1955) was perhaps her best-known book, done in verse and featuring an ever-increasing series of small disasters by the title character. She bakes a cake with so much yeast that her 12 siblings are forced to eat it back to reasonable size.
"How lovely!" the Duchess said. "Come, let us sup."
"I'll start eating down; you start eating up."
The book received the New York Herald Tribune's Spring Book Festival Award and, in 2000, Better Homes and Gardens magazine listed the book among its "undiscovered classics" for children.
She told the "St. James Guide to Children's Writers": "My books will appeal, I hope, to those children who enjoy a simple fantasy and possess a sense of the ridiculous; they carry no message. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that picture books are to be enjoyed by young readers. I leave to others the job of introducing them to the seamy side of life."
Virginia Caroline Kahl was born Feb. 18, 1919, in Milwaukee, where her father worked in a print shop. She was an art graduate of what is now Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., and received a master's degree in library science from the University of Wisconsin.
In 1948, she became a librarian with the Army special services section and was posted in Berlin and Salzburg, Austria. She returned to Wisconsin in the mid-1950s, doing library work throughout the state until settling in the Washington area in 1968.
In the 1970s, she was a teacher with a George Washington University continuing education program for women and a branch librarian in Alexandria.
She retired in 1993 as coordinator of public services for the Alexandria Library system. She was the liaison between the juvenile librarians and the library administration and also administered the volunteer program.
Her books included "The Habits of Rabbits" (1957), "The Perfect Pancake" (1960), "Giants, Indeed!" (1974) and "Whose Cat Is That?" (1979), the last about a village that requires that every house have a cat. One poor but nimble animal is recruited to fool inspectors who tramp from house to house.
Michele Slung, writing in The Washington Post, called the last book "predictably (and pleasingly) old-fashioned."
Ms. Kahl, an Alexandria resident, regularly fed stray cats in the Mount Vernon area and at one point shared her home with 22 of them.
She leaves no immediate survivors.
