The first story

I wasn't sure how to write it, but it was better than talking

I’m on vacation this week. In the meantime, here’s another excerpt from my memoir-in-progress. Thanks as always for reading.

The first ‘story’ I ever wrote for publication was maybe three paragraphs in a roundup of the previous days’ high school hockey games for The Salem News. I was a senior in high school, too shy to write for the high school newspaper or, more like it, too shy and nervous and scared to talk to any adult in the high school who might tell me how I could write for the high school newspaper, and certainly too shy and nervous and scared to do anything as extravagant as an interview with a person I didn’t know.

I had been a stutterer almost since I could talk, so talking –- or trying to talk -– wasn’t really my thing. Talking one-on-one to somebody was hard enough. Speaking in front of a class was downright terrifying. I remember in middle school when Mr. B, we’ll call him, would have us all take turns reading out loud in class from our book. I’d count the number of students in front of me, then count ahead in the book to see which paragraph I’d have to read. Please, I would pray, no words beginning with ‘H’. Those were impossible for me to say.

Photo by Waldemar on Unsplash

Somehow I’d get through the paragraph, stammering and hesitating and hating Mr. B for making me do this. “Give ‘em an inch and they’ll take a mile,” he’d always say, summing up his disciplinary approach. I ended up writing a story about him years later when he got an award for his long tenure as an assistant coach for the high school football team. He had no idea I was in the invisible stammering kid counting paragraphs in the back of his science class.

I liked Mrs. Pierce a lot better than I liked Mr. B. She was the first teacher in high school I remember actually paying a little bit of attention to me. I had written an essay in her English class about Monday Night Football, which at the time was this new phenomenon in the sports world, football games in prime time on a weeknight rather than the usual Sunday afternoon. I wrote about the three-person announcing team of Keith Jackson, Don Meredith and Howard Cosell, who somehow became bigger stars than the football players they were covering. Mrs. Pierce came to my desk before class started and told me she liked the essay and would I want to enter a writing contest that she knew about? If only I could have answered her in writing. You think I’m a good writer? I’d love to be in a writing contest. But this was an exchange that required actual talking. I remember being stunned that Mrs. Pierce was talking to me and only me, while everyone else in the class waited, and all I could summon was embarrassment and crippling shyness. I mumbled something like ‘No thanks,’ and as she walked away she seemed a little hurt and maybe even annoyed. The only teacher who ever paid attention to me and I sent her away annoyed.

So that was pretty much it for my writing career until my father -– I’m sure at my mother’s urging –- got me an interview with the sports editor at The Salem News when I was a high school senior. My father knew a guy who knew a guy at the newspaper, and one day he walked me into the already century-old newspaper’s office on the creaky second floor for my interview with sports editor Frank Murphy.

Mr. Murphy — crew cut, erect and direct — gave me my assignment: Cover a high school hockey game. I don’t really remember but my father must have driven me to the game. Thanks to Mr. Murphy’s instructions, I knew enough to go over to the scorer’s table and write down the names and numbers of all the players. I sat in the cold rink, scribbling notes in a notebook, listening closely to the public address announcer as he announced the goal scorers and the times of the goals. When the game ended it was back home to Beverly –- none of those extravagant postgame coaches interviews for me -– where I wrote my story on a typewriter at our kitchen table. I dutifully reported who won, the final score, who scored, and that was pretty much it, a Hemingway right from the start, a beauty in the brevity of my prose, adverbs nowhere to be found. Mr. Murphy didn’t seem like a metaphor/simile kind of guy anyway. Just a straightforward recitation of the facts would do the trick.

“It seems like it needs a little more excitement,” said my mother, or maybe it was my older sister, after reading their little Hemingway’s report of the big game. “Can you add a little more color?” Color. I guess a little color wouldn’t hurt. I could picture Mr. Murphy reading the new kid’s story, raising an eyebrow in approval of the clever turn of phrase, nodding in admiration at the way the shy kid from Beverly who hardly said a word expressed himself so clearly and eloquently on the 8-by-11 sheet of paper that I would drop into the mail slot at The Salem News later that night. So off I went with the color, adding a couple of lines about the whoosh of the skates, the roar of the crowd, the excitement that you, Salem News reader, may not have experienced in person but can now relive in full thanks to my teenage writing skills.

The next day, there it was in print, a couple of paragraphs in the middle of the roundup of all the other hockey games. There was no byline, but I could see those were my words, and it felt strange and exciting to see my own words in a newspaper that was read every day by 40,000 people. No stuttering or stammering or hating on Mr. B. Who cares if hockey begins with an ‘H’? And I didn’t even mind the fact that Mr. Murphy had cut all of the fancy descriptions –- the color -– out of my story, leaving the straightforward black-and-white tale of the mighty high school game to stand on its own. I wondered if Mrs. Pierce read the sports pages.