Roald Dahl Day in Cardiff

In May of 1996 my high school friend, Carol, and I accompanied a choir tour group of college people to the United Kingdom. One of our stops was Cardiff, Wales. She and I hiked over to the Norwegian Sailor's Church founded in 1868 to serve the thousands of Norwegian sailors that were employed in the Norwegian merchant fleet.

It was a place for sailors, where they could read newspapers and magazines from home, where they could relax and chat with friends. The church's exterior was corrugated steel and had been constructed in Norway, dismantled, shipped to Cardiff and reassembled there.

Without maintenance the building fell into dis-repair and was vandalized. In 1987 the Church was carefully dismantled by the Norwegian Church Preservation Trust and re-opened in 1992.

Today, on the 13th of September, 1916, Roald Dahl was born of Norwegian parents in Cardiff. His family worshipped at the Norwegian Church and he and his sisters were christened here. To honor him a party is held for children within the church every September.

From the Writer's Almanac today. " He was sent off to private boarding schools as a kid, which he hated except for the chocolates, Cadbury chocolates. The Cadbury chocolate company had chosen his school as a focus group for new candies they were developing. Every so often, a plain gray cardboard box was issued to each child, filled with 11 chocolate bars. It was the children's task to rate the candy, and Dahl took his job very seriously. About one of the sample candy bars, he wrote, "Too subtle for the common palate." He later said that the experience got him thinking about candy as something manufactured in a factory, and he spent a lot of time imagining what a candy factory might be like. Today, he's best known for his children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

Roald Dahl also wrote James and the Giant Peach. In the olden days when I worked as an elementary librarian, I read it to a group of third graders during a few minutes of their library time. Yes, I had heard that a person should never read a book to children cold. A section of it struck me so funny I got the giggles and just about fell off of my tiny little chair. Soon the children started to laugh and would have fallen off their tiny little chairs had they had them.