Huntingdon borough

Caldecott Dual Champ

Did you know? A two time Caldecott Medal winner was born right here in Huntingdon.

Chris Raschka was born in Huntingdon on March 6, 1959. The Library of Congress has it in his authority record, which is about as official as a birth fact gets.

He won the Caldecott Medal twice, for The Hello, Goodbye Window in 2006 and for A Ball for Daisy in 2012. Before either of those, Yo! Yes? was named a Caldecott Honor Book in 1994. The Caldecott is the top award in American children's illustration, and most illustrators never get near it once.

Being straight about the rest of it: he did not grow up here. His family moved to suburban Chicago, and he spent part of his childhood in Austria, where his mother was from. Huntingdon is where he started, not where he was raised.

Still, somewhere in this town there is a hospital record with a future two time Caldecott winner on it, dated March 6, 1959.

Nothing further from the county histories. The six histories held here end in 1913 and this story belongs to 2012, so there is no passage in them that bears on it. Rather than attach an unrelated page and let it look like corroboration, this story stands on the sources listed below.

What the fact check changed. The blocking item was the 1959 birth year, which Wikipedia does not carry. The LIBRARY OF CONGRESS NAME AUTHORITY FILE does, and it is a better source than anything else in this post's chain: record n90644672 gives 'Raschka, Christopher, $d1959-' and a birthDate of 1959-03-06, with LC's own note reading 'Chris Raschka (born March 6, 1959 in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania)'. The post's year was right and the rewrite can now give the exact day. CONFIRMED: two Caldecott Medals, The Hello, Goodbye Window in 2006 and A Ball for Daisy in 2012. ADDED: Yo! Yes? was a Caldecott Honor Book in 1994, so there are three Caldecott recognitions, not two. The post undersold him. CORRECTED, the from-here trap again: 'From a small rural Pennsylvania county to the top of American children's illustration' implies he was raised here. He was not. He was born here and grew up in suburban Chicago, with part of his childhood in Austria, his mother's homeland. This is the third time this trap has appeared in the queue, after Phillips and McKenzie. The rewrite claims the birth, which is genuinely ours and genuinely documented, and says plainly that the raising was elsewhere. Claiming only what is true is also what makes it safe to say loudly.

Sources

Checked 2026-08-01 · County history, independently fact checked

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