MCPS shared this week that art teacher Jonathan Roth recently wrote his seventh children’s book with his eighth coming out on October 1st. We caught up with the longtime Ashburton art teacher and asked him a few questions about his recently released book “Almost Underwear: How a Piece of Cloth Traveled from Kitty Hawk to the Moon and Mars” and what he enjoys most about MoCo.
Roth has been teaching for 26 years– his first six years at Potomac Elementary School and the last twenty at Ashburton Elementary School in Bethesda. “Almost Underwear” marks Roth’s first foray into both picture books and nonfiction. It recounts the journey of a simple piece of muslin fabric, originally used for making women’s underwear, which was purchased in 1903 by two brothers in Dayton, Ohio. That fabric was later wrapped around the wing of the Wright Brothers’ first airplane. In 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong took a fragment of the same cloth to the moon, and in 2021, a NASA rover carried a tiny piece of it to Mars.
After getting his art degree at the Cooper Union School of Art in NYC, he started doing some freelance cartooning but realized he was also intrigued with all the interesting things going on in picture books for kids. Roth began to learn as much about them as he could, and after he began utilizing picture books in his art room, “I knew without a doubt I wanted to create them too. But it’s a super competitive business, and after many rejections and false starts I branched out to chapter books and finally had a series published. Then I began a graphic novel series and only now finally had my first picture book published – ‘Almost Underwear’ – which tells the true story of how pieces of an ordinary cloth that was used for the first airplane later went to the Moon with Neil Armstrong and more recently to Mars. To my great delight, I was invited to do the first signings for this book at both National Air and Space Museums. (I also have a graphic novel releasing in a few weeks – Rover and Speck book 3 – and I’ll be launching it with a talk and signing at the Davis Library on Oct. 5).”
Roth is an avid cyclist. “MoCo is a great place for getting around on two wheels. I often ride in Rock Creek Park, from Lake Needwood to DC. Rockville, where I live, has ample nice bike paths and lanes, though sometimes I take off for the more scenic rides between Darnestown and Poolesville. We also keep our canoe moored at the Triadelphia reservoir and love to paddle as often as we can. The last couple weekends we’ve spotted bald eagles there, among other birds. It’s our happy place.” he told us.
Over the years with MCPS, he has applied for nine grants to help fund artists-in-residence projects that resulted in large scale permanent art installations. His favorites have included a many-paneled tile mosaic project (star and space themed!) for the front lobby of at Ashburton and one installation where students livened up the cement ground of the school courtyard/garden area with paintings of flowers, butterflies, animal prints and even a working sundial in which a student’s shadow lets you know what month it is.
You can read more about Jonathan Roth and his books on his website.