Chapter 2
A Writer Is Born
Rachel’s favorite books were The Wind in the Willows and the Peter Rabbit books. They were stories about animals and how animals live in nature. Rachel loved reading, and she pleaded with her father to let her go with him when he went into town so that she could visit the library. Soon she started writing her own stories about animals and the wonder of nature.
Each month a magazine called St. Nicholas came in the mail for Rachel. It was a publication for children that was filled with stories and poems from writers such as Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott and illustrations by artists such as Norman Rockwell. Rachel’s favorite section of the magazine was called the St. Nicholas League. It sponsored contests and printed articles, stories, and drawings that had been submitted by children. Winners were awarded gold badges, and silver badges were given to runners-up.
Children who had won silver and gold badges became honor members. They received cash prizes.
When Rachel was ten, she decided it was time to send one of her stories to St. Nicholas magazine. She thought that maybe her work was good enough to win a prize. Rachel wasn’t sure what she wanted to write about, but she got an idea from her brother, Robert. At the time, Robert was a soldier in the US Army fighting in World War I. In one of his letters home, he told the family about a Canadian pilot. The pilot had kept his plane flying even after one of the wings had been shot off.
Rachel worked very hard on her story and finally sent it off to the magazine. Then she waited to hear back from them. On a September morning in 1918, Rachel received the latest issue of the magazine. There in the St. Nicholas League section was her story, “A Battle in the Clouds.” Underneath the title was her name, and under that were the words “Silver Badge.”
Winning the silver-badge prize was exciting for Rachel. It inspired her to write more stories. Most of them were about World War I. In February 1919, Rachel received a gold badge from the magazine for one of her stories. Because Rachel had won a silver and a gold badge, she also got a cash prize. The prize was ten dollars, which was a lot of money at the time. Rachel began to think that maybe she could be a real writer someday.
And that day would come much sooner than Rachel had ever imagined. She had written an essay about why she liked St. Nicholas magazine for her eighth-grade English class, and the magazine bought her essay to use in its advertising! They paid Rachel a penny a word, which came to a little over three dollars. This money was a payment and not a prize. Later Rachel would say that she “became a professional writer at the age of eleven.” She even wrote “first payment” on the envelope that the check came in and never threw it out.
Rachel continued to write stories when she entered high school. She also worked hard to get good grades so that she would be able to attend college. And Rachel was determined to go to college.
Rachel liked spending time on her own and writing with no one else around. Because she was a serious student, teachers were happy to have her in their classes. But Rachel was shy.
Some of her classmates thought she was a teacher’s pet. Rachel decided to join the field hockey team in high school so that she would make friends.
She liked being outdoors on the hockey field, and she liked being on a team, too. She also played basketball and cheered at pep rallies for the high- school football team.
Even though Rachel enjoyed sports and her new friends, schoolwork was still the most important thing to her. Her classmates wrote a poem about her and put it beside her picture in the high-school yearbook:
Rachel’s like the mid-day sun
Always very bright.
Never stops her studying
’Til she gets it right.
Rachel graduated top of her class in high school. It was now time for her to get ready to leave home and set off on a new adventure—college!
