Five Pages a Day Read Free Page B

people, including my family, did not yet have television. Radio, movies, board games, and sports provided entertainment.
    Although I loved to read, the Dog Newspaper had temporarily ended my hope of becoming a writer. That dream did not surface again until I was in high school.
    In my junior year, I signed up to work on the Austin Sentinel , my school newspaper. My first creative writing was published there. While the other kids wrote teacher interviews and articles about school games, band concerts, and field trips, I wrote an article about how buttons were trying to take over the world. It warned of an elaborate plot for buttons to pop off clothing at important events, all perfectly timed and coordinated by the button leaders.
    I will forever be grateful to the Sentinel ’s advisor for publishing my button piece. Because it was so different from what the school newspaper usually printed, it created a stir. Once again I received congratulations on my writing, and this time the feedback made me think seriously of becoming a writer.
    This was not a common goal for a girl growing up in the Midwest in the 1950s. I had never met an author. Since we had no TV, I’d never seen author interviews. Writing instruction in school consisted of lessons in grammar and sentence construction, not creative writing.
    Girls were expected to marry and raise families. After my button article was published, I wondered if it might be possible to do both. Could I be a wife and mother and an author? I wasn’t sure. My mother had never worked outside our home; only one of my friends had a mother with a job.
    Besides writing for the Sentinel , I volunteered to help with the school yearbook, the Austinian . There wasn’t much artistic writing involved, but I often stayed after school to do extra work—helping with layouts or writing photo captions. I even sold advertising to local businesses.
    Toward the end of my junior year, I had to choose whether to be on the staff of the Sentinel or the Austinian during my senior year. I chose the Austinian because I thought I had a good chance of being named editor. What an honor that would be! Because of my hard work and dedication, I felt I deserved the position, and I looked forward to the day when the announcement would be made.
    I rushed into the room that day and read the posted announcement. Editor: Gary Eppen. Associate Editor: Peg Schulze .
    After I congratulated my friend Gary, I tried to figure out why he was selected. I decided that he must be more competent and smarter than I was, as well as a better writer.
    Many years later, when I returned to my high school as a guest speaker, I confided my long-ago disappointment to a former teacher who had come to hear my talk. She told me, “But you could never have been the yearbook editor. Back then they always chose a boy.”
    Indignation streaked through me like a shooting star.
    Perhaps Gary would have been picked anyway—certainly he did a fine job as editor—but it was so unfair. No matter how hard I worked or how good my work was, I could never have been chosen as the editor just because I was a girl.
    The sting of not being selected was soothed when I landed my first summer job. Except for a few evenings spent baby-sitting, I had never earned any money, but I was determined to collect my own pay that summer.
    All my classmates, plus the graduating seniors and the college students who were home for the summer, were also looking for summer work, so the competition was fierce. Who would hire a girl with no experience and no skills?
    Instead of reading the Help Wanted ads, as my friends were doing, I thought about where I would most like to work. I decided that since I wanted to be a writer, the logical job for me would be at the local newspaper.
    Gathering up my courage, I walked into the offices of the Austin Daily Herald and said I was seeking summer employment. To my amazement, one of the newspaper’s owners,