NEW YORK (AP) – Author Joanna Cole, whose “Magic School Bus” books transported millions of young people on extraordinary and educational adventures, died at age 75.
Scholastic announced that Cole, a Sioux City, Iowa resident, died Sunday. The cause was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
“Joanna Cole had the perfect touch to combine science and history,” Scholastic President and CEO Dick Robinson said in a statement Wednesday. “Joanna’s books, full of humor and information in equal parts, made science easy to understand and fun for the hundreds of millions of children around the world who read her books and watched the award-winning television series.”
The idea for “The Magic School Bus” emerged in the mid-1980s. Scholastic senior editorial director Craig Walker received frequent requests from teachers for science books and thought that a combination of storytelling and science would take hold . He brought Cole, whose humorous work as the children’s book “Cockroaches” he had admired, and illustrator Bruce Degen. With the ever maddening but inspired Mrs. Frizzle guiding her students on journeys that explored everything from the solar system to the submarine, the “Magic School Bus” books sold tens of millions of copies and formed the basis of a popular animated series. TV and a Netflix series. Plans for a live-action movie, with Elizabeth Banks as Ms. Frizzle, were announced last month. Mrs. Frizzle relied in part on a Cole fifth grade teacher.
“I think for Joanna the emotion was always in the idea. Than? Why? How? “Degen said in a statement.” And with “The Magic School Bus” was how to explain it to be exact and in a way that a child can understand and use. And you can actually joke while you learn. She had a stranger sense of what might be humorous. “
Cole and Degen recently completed “The Magic School Bus Explores Human Evolution”, slated to leave next spring.
A lifelong science fanatic, Cole was born in Newark, NJ, and graduated from City College of New York, who worked as a children’s librarian and magazine editor before “The Magic School Bus.”
She is survived by her husband Phil; daughter Rachel Cole and her husband, John Helms; grandchildren, Annabelle and William, and her sister Virginia McBride.
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