Paul Hecht: It was an afternoon in late September in the pleasant little city of Stillwater, Mr. Popper, the house painter was going home from work. He was carrying his buckets, his ladders and his boards, so that he had rather a hard time moving along. He was spattered here and there with paint and calcimine. And there were bits of wallpaper clinging to his hair and whiskers, for he was rather an untidy man. The children looked up from their play to smile at him as he passed and the housewives seeing him said, "Oh dear, there goes Mr.Popper, I must remember to ask John to have the house painted over in the Spring".

No one knew what went on in Mr. Popper's head and no one guessed that he would one day be the most famous person in Stillwater. He was a dreamer, even when he was busiest smoothing down the paste on the wallpaper or painting the outside of other people's houses, he would forget what he was doing. Once he had painted three sides of a kitchen green and the other side yellow. The housewife, instead of being angry and making him do it over had liked it so well that she had made him leave it that way. And all the other housewives when they saw it admired it too, so that pretty soon everybody in Stillwater had two colored kitchens.

The reason Mr.Popper was so absentminded was that he was always dreaming about far away countries. He had never been out of Stillwater, not that he was unhappy. He had a nice little house of his own, a wife whom he loved dearly and two children named Janie and Bill. 'Still it would have been nice', he often thought, 'if he could have seen something of the world before he met Mrs. Popper and settled down'. He had never hunted tigers in India or climbed the peaks of the Himalayas or dived for pearls in the South sea. Above all, he had never seen the poles. That was what he regretted the most. He had never seen those great shining white expanses of ice and snow. How he wished that he had been a scientist instead of a house painter in Stillwater, so that he might have joined some of the great polar expeditions.

Since he couldn't go, he was always thinking about them. Whenever he heard that a polar movie was in town, he was the first person at the ticket window and often he sat through three shows. Whenever the town library had a new book about the Arctic or the Antarctic, the North Pole or the South Pole, Mr. Popper was the first to borrow it. Indeed, he had read so much about polar explorers that he could name all of them and tell you what each had done. He was quite an authority on the subject.