Rider McDowell published his family’s children’s stories for pediatric cancer.

Rider McDowell has written and published three children’s books, all at once: Brain Frizzlers? Impossible Riddles for Nice but Slightly Wild Kids, The Boston Cream Pirate, and J. Herman’s Museum Adventure.

The books are published by he and his wife Victoria’s Pine Brothers Charity Press – McDowell’s family owns the Pine Brothers sore throat lozenges company; Victoria created Airborne dietary supplements – and all proceeds from sales of the books are going to the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital of Stanford. That’s where their 11-year-old son Errol was treated, successfully, for brain cancer.

“We were basket cases,” he says. “But in that year and a half we saw kids that weren’t so lucky – you can’t even talk about it. It’s an epidemic.”

McDowell vowed to his son’s surgeon that he would do what he could to help pediatric cancer research.

“[The books] are part of that pledge.”

Brain Frizzlers? is based on silly riddles that he and Errol told each other. They are non-sequitur set-ups that lead to fake punchlines, charmingly illustrated by Troubletown syndicated cartoonist Lloyd Dangle. The Boston Cream Pirate is McDowell’s reworking of an egalitarian rhyming children’s story his father created in 1969 for McDowell and his siblings. J. Herman’s Museum Adventure is about a woman and her dinosaur friend exploring New York City, illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin; McDowell and his family live in Pebble Beach and summer on the East Coast.

But this isn’t a vanity press project; it’s a charity press project.

“Whenever we have a windfall, we give to charity,” he says. He’s set up a family trust to go to the Lucile Packard Foundation.

The books can be purchased at Tancredi & Morgen, Tessuti Zoo, Carmel Bay Company, local bookstores, PineBrothers.com and Amazon.com