UPDATE: I love Boing Boing readers. I never thought I'd get the name of these stories, and was wondering if I had only dreamed about them. Within minutes, several people sent me the correct answer: Homer Price. Here's the
Wikipedia article about the books:
Homer Price is the title character of a pair of children's books written by Robert McCloskey in the early 1940s. Homer lives in Centerburg, a fictitious small town in the American Midwest. He is a mild-mannered boy who enjoys working on radios, and somehow gets involved in a series of outrageous incidents, such as building an unstoppable donut-making machine or caring for ragweed taller than barn silos.
I'm trying to remember the name of a series of children's stories from the mid-20th century. They were about a boy with a name that begins with the letter H (I think), and in each story, they boy had some kind of improbable adventure.
I read the books (each book has seven or eight stories about the boy) when I was about 10 and all I can remember are bits from two stories — one where he found a mouse that could sing (which later lost the ability to sing) and another where he accidentally colored his skin with some kind of spray gun hooked up to a garden hose.
