The Vehicle of Wonder

Curled up in a wooden chair with an embroidered quilt over her head, 8-year-old Carol Frischmann held an old-fashioned flashlight to her favorite book–20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the 1870 novel by Jules Verne. The quilt, white with a rose in each corner, was the magical force that transported her from the South Carolina world she lived in and into the one she craved to explore. The walls disappeared, the farmland outside her window faded and the ocean came inside. Underneath the quilt, she sailed through the wondrous oceanic vastness in a powerful submarine, and the mysterious sea creatures came and stared her in the eye.

“What seemed totally magnificent was that a character could get into a vehicle and see a world no one has seen before,” says Frischmann, 59, who now lives in Portland, Oregon—by the water. “And from that day on, I wanted to do that—I wanted to know about everything that lived under the sea.”    Read Full Story

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