Max Braithwaite wrote a profile of Mary Grannan for Maclean’s in 1947. Grannan’s Just Mary stories on the CBC played an outsized role in the childhood of my parents’ generation.

Mary gets her ideas for her stories from what she sees about her. For instance she was recently walking with a friend along Dundas Street in Toronto when she noticed a church steeple without a top.

“I wonder where the weathercock went off that steeple,” the friend remarked.

“I’ll tell you next Sunday,” Mary assured her. And she did in “The Strange Adventures of Lucy Littlemouse,” which featured a mouse with a new bonnet who wanted to be of some use in the world and who climbed up on the church steeple, gnawed the golden weathercock loose, and took his place with disastrous results.