Even before he received the Caldecott Medal, Mr. Simont contributed valiantly to the success of another Caldecott winner, Robert McCloskey’s “Make Way for Ducklings,” published in 1941. The time was the late 1930s, and the place was Manhattan, where he and Mr. McCloskey, friends from the design academy, were roommates.
Wanting to study ducklings deeply for his book-in-progress, Mr. McCloskey acquired a flock and brought it home. For some months to come, with Mr. Simont’s sympathetic assent, the ducks lived in the bathtub of their Greenwich Village apartment.
