Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 10.djvu/139



OME months ago, one of your favorite Chicago writers remarked rather plaintively:

"A year or so ago I was about the only writer in Chicago selling stories to and I was plenty busy. Now there are at least a dozen guys right here in town fighting for the front of the book and a name on the cover."

Well, I'm just one of the dozen. How I got that way, or From Rags to Riches, is a thrillingly unexciting story that teems with an appalling lack of adventure and is probably of interest to nobody but myself. I'm saving most of it for the time when I can gather my assorted posterities around my aging and rheumatic knee and lie gracefully.

Writers are somehow expected to be glamorous, mustachioed figures who swirl gaily through soldier-of-fortune escapades. My efforts at raising a mustache have been a total flop and the only time I was ever outside the USA was the time I drove across the bridge into Canada from Detroit, just for the hell of it.

I was born up among God's Frozen People in Minnesota, in a little farming town of under two thousand pop. Me and the year nineteen-eight crept into existence at very close to the same time. Graduated from high school there by dint of hard work. If you don't think it's work to think up ways of annoying the teachers until they graduate you in sheer desperation, regardless of marks or lack of them, you just don't know about life. So there.

Anyhow, I started reading before I entered the first grade and have made it my favorite indoor and outdoor sport ever since. Started reading pulps (behind the barn) while I was in the fourth grade and was inspired to write a fantastic serial, believe it or not. This was painfully hand-scrawled on notebook paper, behind the screen of a geography book, and then circulated through the class, a chapter a day, until the teacher caught me. I dug the darned thing out not long ago and it's actually better than a lot of the tripe I've done recently. I'll doll it up some time and sell it. See if I don't.

Did a lot of direct selling during school vacations and put in a short sentence behind a grocery store counter. I quit that when the boss decided to stay open three nights a week until two in the morning to accommodate farmers and then refused me a raise from forty to forty-five bucks a month. The louse!

Drifted a lot after graduation and tried almost everything from punching cattle out in the Nebraska Sand Hill country to being publicity for an air circus. Between times worked my way through business college and part of an art course, neither of which "took." Landed on the advertising staff of two trade magazines (hell, I was the staff) and sold my first piece of writing—a short article on restaurant management, about which I knew absolutely nothing. Since then have sold trade and business articles to forty-odd magazines besides editing five different trade magazines and owning at one time.

Was married ten years ago to a school-day sweetheart and have one boy who thinks a hammer and my typewriter were simply made for each other. Sometimes I do, too. Anyhow, my boy is the real reason for my becoming an Stories writer.

In the hospital where he was born, I met a most annoying Jekyll-Hyde character. This man had a vexing habit of patting young Michael and saying: "What a fine boy" one minute and then in the same breath snarling: "Listen here, Millard. Are you going to take care of that little matter today? You know it was strictly understood that this hospital has ceased to extend credit on obstetrical cases "

It happened that at that moment the number of people who didn't want any advertising or business articles written was simply colossal and something had to be done. So I dug into my pet