Example Post 1
Growing up in a household of newspaper reporters, I was delighted to become a junior reporter on the top floor of our rental house in Cleveland, Ohio when I was four years old. Both of my parents worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in the early nineteen-fifties. My nine-year-old brother sat behind my father’s battered mahogany desk typing up the news stories he had collected for the neighborhood newspaper. He was desperate for news if he inquired about the events of my day.
“So anything happening?”
“Charlotte had her kittens on my bed today!” I blurted out.
“That’s something. I’ll put it in the paper today.”
I was thrilled. I was only four, and nothing as exciting as my brother’s broken arm had ever happened to me. I, like the six other members of my family, loved seeing my name in print. Sheets of newsprint littered the house. Books, newspapers, letters, and magazine articles covered every tabletop throughout the house. Someone usually jotted down bits and pieces of our daily conversation, in case they could be used in either Mom or Daddy’s weekly columns. In those early days, I wasn’t able to write much yet, so I drew pictures. The single alphabet letters under them drew more attention. When I read those meager attempts aloud I began to embellish them so much, they soon turned into full-blown stories.
