Last post left me standing in the middle of the Claremore Public Library, age 12, in a shock of rapture.

The nice lady librarian typed up a temporary library card and told me I could only have one book the first time. She would be a big part of my life until I left for college and I still remember her face, but I never knew her name.

My mother was waiting, so I quickly picked up a book. It was the last time I had to rush; afterward she dropped me off, did all her shopping before picking me up, and I could be sure of an unhurried hour and all the books I could carry.

Readers today are contemptuous of Tom Swift and his kind, and with good reason. I had loved those books up to my first day in the library because they were all I had. They had filled lots of hours with lots of entertainment, and had opened me up to worlds beyond the farm.

Now, I took home Star Man’s Son by Andre Norton, and things would never be the same. Here was a real writer; she had something to say, and she said it with grace and style. Ultimately, I would find Heinlein, Zelazny, Dickson, Le Guin, and hundreds of others beyond science fiction. But Norton was the first and she taught me how to write. Fifty-five years later I still hear the faint echo of her style in my writing.

Forty years later, the school where I was teaching had a special day in celebration of reading. My friend Crystal invited several of us to talk to her class about our early reading habits.

I went to the local library here in California and found an original copy of Star Man’s Son still on the shelf. Thank God for libraries that never throw anything away. When my turn came, I was able to hold it up and say, “Here is the first book I ever checked out.” Then I could hold up copies of Jandrax and A Fond Farewell to Dying and say, “And here are the books I’ve written, because long ago I learned to love to read.”

I was born on a faraway planet called Oklahoma in the fifties. Stranger still, I grew up an only child on a farm three miles outside the nearest town, and that town had a population of 121 people. Actually, that probably counted the surrounding countryside. I was never sure.

We had no plumbing for the first seven years of my life, and a salt water well that produced only a trickle until I was in my teens, but this wasn’t poverty. This was normal life at the edge of the world on the edge of the modern era.

Don’t get me wrong; this is not a “my pitiful childhood” story. I loved life on the farm.

I learned to read from Little Golden Books. They were cheap, available at the local dry goods store (local means twenty miles away), and Dr Seuss wasn’t writing yet. When I was about ten, my grandfather sent me a copy of Tom Swift Jr. and his Outpost in  Space for my birthday. I was instantly hooked.

We lived midway between three towns, and we went to one of them at least once a week. If you farmed in the fifties, you spent half your time farming and half your time fixing broken machinery. That takes parts, and that means a trip to town.

Every time we went to town, my great-grandfather would give me a quarter. Tom Swift Jr., the Hardy Boys mysteries, and Rick Brant adventure books all cost a dollar each. I bought a book every fourth trip.

When I was about twelve my mother dropped my father off at the John Deere dealer, drove to the other end of Claremore (about eight blocks), and took me to the county library. I had never seen a library and was barely aware that they existed. I almost fell out of my work boots. It was a big room with tables down one side, and ten double shelves of books down the other.

I had found heaven. More next post.

By the time you get to the end of this post, you will see its connection with Labor Day.

There are six libraries within driving distance of my home; I use two of them frequently and the others on occasion. There are five used book stores, and another five have come and gone in the last few decades. I have access to others through the internet, and to a major remainder house through mail-order.

It isn’t enough for a truly herbookverous beast.

I recently stopped at a yard sale and browsed through boxes of books. It was a good find, full of the books I like best, old ones with hard cloth covers and faded spines. One was The American by Howard Fast.

Would-be writers, hear me! When you can write like this, heaven will open before you.

I found I’d read the book before, decades ago. It is the story of John Peter Altgeld whose later career as a Progressive governor of Illinois gained him the hatred of the upper crust for championing those who were demonstrating for an eight hour day.

I first flipped open to Altgeld in his young manhood laying down rails. It is an old story, celebrated in folktales, of the opening of the west. But as told here, it becomes a tale of corporate greed that turned the growing tracks into killing fields, where the immigrant workers were used up, destroyed, and cast aside.

Then I returned to the opening, and lived with young Altgeld through his childhood and youth, to his entry into the Civil War. He was isolated in the newly settled forests of Ohio, tied to a desperate father who beat him unmercifully. He was young and strong; he was driven to work, and the work made him stronger. He was driven by vague dreams, and he spent his youth planning his escape.

It felt completely familiar and completely different. My father never beat me; he hid his desperation as best he could through drought and storm, usually behind crusty humor. My father worked me hard, but he worked himself harder. Algelt felt like a slave. I felt like a man, a working man at twelve, and I was proud of my contribution. Altgeld, overworked, was driven to the ground. My work was long, but light enough to allow for dreaming. Work was the best part of my childhood.

Today we have the eight hour work day, but with wage levels that frequently leave full time workers in poverty. We have a nation full of hungry men and women for whom there is no work, or not enough work, and hungry children for whom there is not enough food and often little hope. It is a new-old story; completely familiar and completely different. Some of them will find their escape. Some will not. And for those who fail, society will point judgmental fingers and say, “You didn’t try hard enough!”

I was a teacher for twenty-seven years, but it took about twenty years before I admitted it. Until then I said that I was a writer with a day job. Eventually it became obvious that I was going to retire from my “day job”. I had become both a writer and a teacher.

During the thousands of gab sessions in the break room, one theme recurred regularly. Whenever the television or newspaper would report a teacher who turned out to be a sexual predator, one of my colleagues would say, “How could a teacher do that?”

I heard it on the TV news and I heard it from my non-teaching friends: “How could a teacher do that?”

If you have said that, let me suggest that you are asking the wrong question. If a person had the urges that would lead him to become a sexual predator of children, what jobs would he chose? Teacher? Boy scout leader? Youth minister? If you are a pedophile, practicing or potential, you would go where the opportunities are.

Most police officers are there to protect the public, but if you only want to drive fast and shoot people, what job would you choose? Cops or robbers – take your pick.

Even if 99% of soldiers are right thinking patriots, there will be some who joined so they can rape and kill, and get paid for it. Where else could they find a job with those benefits?

It seems to me that teachers and cops and soldiers don’t usually go bad. The bad ones start out bad, then blow their cover.

There is a flip side to all this. Kids lie. Kids make things up. Not every teacher (or cop or soldier) who is accused of a crime is guilty of that crime.

In education today there are strict, formal procedures for reporting misdeeds or suspicions. This is designed to assure that every suspicion is reported, but is then investigated by an agency set up for that purpose, not by the accused’s colleagues. It provides protection for the accuser and the accused alike.

I don’t see any better solution, and when I can’t see a simple cure in the real world, I write a novel.

In the late eighties, I wrote Symphony in a Minor Key, a novel in which a teacher whose life has been disrupted by false accusations has to begin again in a new school. There he discovers that when one of his students seems endangered, he believes her without question, just as others had believed the student who accused him falsely.

I will say more about Symphony in a later post.

I feel guilty of bait and switch. This post isn’t about the Beatles, or Sgt. Pepper, or the Summer of Love. It actually was forty years ago today that I first sat down to see if I could write a novel.

Would-be writers should take note. This was a controlled experiment. I wasn’t writing from the depth of my soul, nor writing the books that had been burning a hole in my brain for years. That came later. This was simply to answer a single question – could I sit down every day and write, or would my well run dry after the first week.

September 2, 1975 was the day after Labor Day that year, and I was at loose ends (see yesterday’s post). My wife and I were had just rented a tiny house in the poorest part of town; she had a new job as a picture framer. She proved to be very good at it, and ended up managing the gallery for most of the next decade. If my writing experiment hadn’t worked, I would have reapplied to graduate school.

Writing a science fiction novel or a fantasy novel would have called for a lot of time spent in world building. That wouldn’t tell me what I wanted to know. A historical novel would have called for even more research, and a detective novel would have called for crafting a complex puzzle. I wasn’t worried about any of those skills. I just wanted to know – could I write word after word after word, day after day, week after week.

I needed a no-research story, so I decided to send my protagonist on a deer hunt, where he would get lost. I would set it in autumn, in a part of the Sierras I could drive to in a day if I needed to be on the scene. I would roll in a storm, with low hanging clouds so he couldn’t find north and couldn’t send up smoke. I intended to let him get out on his own. Over the weeks I piled misery after misery on the poor guy’s head.

GPS? Cell phone? Don’t be silly; this was 1975, when lost meant lost.

That was the setup. Here is the payoff – I wrote the novel. There is nothing exciting to say about sitting down every day and pounding the keys of a typewriter. (1975, remember; no computers.)

There were no exciting stories to tell my wife at the end of the day, but inside my head I was having a ball. Getting lost in the woods and finding my own way out was infinitely exciting, and every night I could go to my comfortable bed while my protagonist tried to sleep on the frozen ground. I was hooked. I never went back for my Ph.D..

I did go back a few years later for a second BA and MA in History, while I was writing, but that’s only because I love learning almost as much as I love novels. It had nothing to do with career plans.

The novel, Spirit Deer, was only 141 pages, far too short to publish. It turned out better than I had expected, and its core story was not age specific. A few years ago I got rid of Tim’s wife, his best friend, the forest ranger, the old hunter, and even Tim’s last name, and turned Spirit Deer into a young adult novel. It’s looking for a home. When it finds one, I’ll let you know here.

I had always planned to be a scientist and a college professor. By the time I finished high school, I knew I wanted to study ecology, but I was ten years too early. In 1966, DNA was the hot new topic, and all biology was done via an electron microscope. That wasn’t for me, so I switched to anthropology.

By 1970 the Viet Nam war was going strong, I had just completed my B.S. at Michigan State, and my draft number was 41. The Navy said they would make me an officer – so naturally I spent the next four years as an enlisted man working in the dental service of a naval hospital. If you have any connection with the military, that will make perfect sense.

At the end of my enlistment, I entered the University of Chicago. I had been admitted to a master’s program and intended to continue with my Ph.D., but didn’t work out that way.

During those four years of working on Marines’ wisdom teeth and broken jaws, I had lost my chops. Learning how to study, learning how to learn (not the same thing), and learning how to play the game (definitely not the same thing) are a college student’s chops. Like a musician, you have to practice to stay good. It took me half a year to get my chops back, and by then the next year’s quota for Ph.D. candidates had been filled. My would-be career was in hiatus.

However, all was not lost. When my major professor read my Master’s thesis, he told me to reapply the following year and they would find a place for me. In the social sciences, nothing is as important as the ability to write. Having a professor who believes in you doesn’t hurt either.

I had an unexpected year off. What to do?

I had been an insatiable reader all my life, and had always thought it might be fun to write a novel. I knew I could write, but doubted I could sit down day after day and write hundreds of pages. This was my chance to find out.

The day after Labor Day, September 2, 1975, I sat down in front of my typewriter. Within a month, I was addicted. I never reapplied to Chicago.

Tomorrow I will celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the day I sat down to become a writer.