Author writes pig tale to teach children morals

Columbia Falls native and retired teacher Roy Ryan sensed something missing from primary-level reading books - a good moral.

So he used his real-life experience with a newborn pig to do something about it.

"The Adventures of Bonkers" is Ryan's soon-to-be-published children's book, his first foray into the book authors' world.

"Have you ever seen an angel?" Bonkers opens his narrative. "I have. Let me tell you about it."

Thus begins Ryan's retelling of how his family's collective heart was warmed by the runt in a litter of 12 pigs. The tiny pig's proclivity for "bonking over" on the verge of total collapse earned him the name.

The 1955 Columbia Falls High School graduate had no author aspirations when he earned his cultural anthropology degree with a teaching minor from Cal State, Fullerton - nor as he took his first teaching job during 1969 in San Juan Capistrano.

It was a long commute and a congested place to raise their two sons, so Ryan and his wife, Janice, also an elementary teacher, moved to an acreage outside Myrtle Creek, Ore.

There, sons Steven and Rodney started showing purebred Durocs through 4-H and helped with the family's homegrown farrowing operation.

Four or five years into the project, the litter of 12 was born and its runt rejected by the sow.

Ryan's soft-heartedness soon had the pig wrapped in a blanket and warmed by a heating pad in a straw-filled box inside the house, a clock ticking nearby to simulate the rhythm of his errant mother's heart. All four family members took turns at bottle-feeding shifts every two hours.

Twice, Ryan found the pig tottering on the brink of life and death. But a few breaths into the little porker's snout revived him and cemented Bonkers' standing as an unofficial family member, long past his weaning at 6 weeks, when he rejoined the rest of the herd outside.

It also provided fodder for Ryan's first children's book.

Ryan eventually traded him for a handmade quilt, but that didn't end the story.

"Part of all of us was missing. So I sat down to write what I remembered about Bonkers," he said. Years later, as he dusted off some Reader's Digest submissions, he stumbled upon the Bonkers manuscript. He polished it and eventually struck a deal with AuthorHouse in Bloomington, Ind.

Now living in Oregon City, Ore., Ryan returns to visit family in Columbia Falls - brother Jim Ryan and his wife, Donna, live in the home where parents, James and Ann Ryan, now remarried as Ann Thomas and living in Kalispell, moved in 1936. Their sister, Andrea Halden, and her husband, Deano, also still live here.

Ryan teamed up with professional artist Jan York of Portland to illustrate the book in a way that, he said, "put the personality of the pig in there."

He sees the book as the first in a series in his mission to get out a message to families.

"I believe in my heart that God put that experience in my life so I would write about it later, that love between people and animals," he said, "how animals can fill a void so that you can never forget it."

The book is due out by the end of August.

"The Adventures of Bonkers" is being published and marketed by AuthorHouse of Bloomington, Ind.; 32 pages; $22.50; 1-800-839-8640 or www.authorhouse.com.

Reporter Nancy Kimball may be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com