Nourishing Norristown
Jerry Spinelli writes books that win awards and droves of young readers. When he needs an idea, he returns to his roots.
Don't tell Jerry Spinelli you can't go home again.
The popular and prolific author of more than 20 young adult novels regularly makes the trip across the Schuylkill to Norristown, the working-class community where he was born and raised.
Spinelli calls these junkets "little pilgrimages back into my memories." They help inspire books like Maniac Magee, the Newbery Award-winning saga of an orphan in a blue-collar river town.
"Jerry is the William Faulkner of Norristown," says Roger Adelman, a prominent Washington attorney who has been friends with Spinelli since they were 6. "He has used Norristown as the basis for many of his books in the same way Faulkner used Yoknapatawpha County. At 67, Jerry can still think like a child and communicate as a kid."
That uncanny ability to plumb the adolescent experience is on display again in Spinelli's new book, Smiles to Go, about a pizza-loving skateboarder whose carefully laid plan for life gets disrupted. (The author will read from Smiles to Go on May 18 at 3:30 p.m. at the Philadelphia Book Festival.)
"Jerry's characters are completely unique in every book," says Spinelli's editor Joanna Cotler. With Smiles to Go (the title is a play on Robert Frost), "he's written a story about a control freak who loses control. Really, he's writing about all of us in the gentlest and most loving way."
Sitting in the airy Main Line home he shares with his wife and fellow children's author, Eileen, Spinelli looks like a phys ed instructor approaching retirement age. Except when a thought or phrase hits a sweet chord in his mind. Then his eyes sparkle like a boy's.
For nearly a quarter century, admiring readers have been asking how he manages to get inside kids' heads.
"When people hear I have six kids and 16 grandkids, they think, 'Oh, boy, you must get a lot of stories from them.' I don't," he insists. "It's not like I'm behind the sofa in the living room taking notes while the grandkids carry on.
"It's not that way. More often than not, my reference point is not the kids or the grandkids but myself when I was that age. I remember the days at Hartranft Elementary and Stewart Junior High in Norristown."
Spinelli has managed to found a formidable literary empire on his prosaic upbringing.
"I think I have a pretty goofy profile for a writer," he says. "It seems to me most writers were reading Little Women when they were 6 months old. At the age of a lot of my readers, I wanted to be a major league baseball player. I didn't read much."
His one indulgence was Red McCarthy's sports column in the Norristown Times Herald, which he devoured. His admiration for Red led to the event that Spinelli describes as "the launchpad of my career."
In 1957, he watched from the stands at Roosevelt Field as Norristown High School upset national powerhouse Lower Merion, 7-6, thanks to a heroic goal-line stand.
The inspired 16-year-old went home and composed a poem about the victory in epic Grantland Rice style. The final stanza reads: "The halfback drove with all his might / His legs were jet-propelled / But when the dust had cleared the fight / The Eagle line had held."
A few days later, through the intercession of his father, who worked in a print shop on East DeKalb Avenue, the poem appeared in its entirety in the Times Herald sports section. "I went to school the next day," Spinelli recalls, "and players, coaches, teachers, students - everybody's patting me on the back." (The dedication in Smiles to Go reads: "To my schoolmates / Norristown High School / Class of '59".)
That experience cinched it. The boy decided he was going to be a writer. And no amount of discouragement was going to stop him.
"A quarter of a century would pass before my first published book came out," he says ruefully. "During that time I wrote a stack of short stories, poetry and four novels that nobody wanted."
After graduating from Gettysburg College, studying creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, and serving a stint in the Naval Air Reserves, Spinelli searched for the most grindingly dull job he could find.
He found it at the Chilton publishing company as an associate editor at one of its trade magazines, writing product descriptions of valves and switches for design engineers.
"Most people are looking for a challenging, interesting job," he says. "I wanted a boring, undemanding job so that I could forget about it at 5, so that I would have something left over at the end of the day to do my own stuff."
Applying himself to his fiction writing during his lunch hour and after work, Spinelli figured that best-sellerdom was just around the corner. He figured wrong.
Soon after he joined the company, he remembers informing the receptionist at 56th and Chestnut, "Yeah, Tina, I'm a writer, working on my first book. It will be finished soon and then when it's published you get royalties, and when those start coming in, I'll probably be leaving here in about a year."
In fact, he would be with the company for 23 years, still waiting for literary fame to come knocking.
It was a comically banal domestic incident that would change his life beyond recognition. He came down to the kitchen one summer morning after Chilton had moved to St. Davids to retrieve his brown-bag lunch of fried chicken.
The sack felt a little light. Upon inspection, he found only bones. One of the six children sleeping upstairs had pilfered his meal. He considered waking everyone up to extract a confession, but instead headed off to the office, still fuming.
At lunchtime, he closed his door to pursue his daily writing stint, but he couldn't get the chicken he wasn't eating out of his mind.
"I started to write [about the incident] I suppose because it was so fresh in my mind and I was still agitated about it," he says, "Before pen hit paper, I had a thought: 'There's a more interesting point of view here - the point of view of the kid who took the fried chicken.' When I started to write, it was from the kid's point of view."
The words poured out in a torrent, chapter upon chapter, beginning with a boy being confronted with a row of chicken bones by an angry parent. In a couple of months, Spinelli had the manuscript for the book that would become his debut novel in 1982, Space Station Seventh Grade.
Still, the author had no idea his readers would be so young.
"In my mind, I was writing an adult book," he says. "That's one reason there's bad words in it. It's one reason why this kid thinks and acts and speaks like any, if not most, real 13-year-old-boys think, act and speak. There was no reason to give any consideration to censoring myself. It's a totally honest book."
But Spinelli had found his voice and his sales niche. Even so, it took another seven years for him to achieve his long-cherished dream: to quit his day job and write without a net.
"Most people don't understand what a miracle it is to make a living, to actually pay the bills and feed your family writing stories," he says.
With six children, it was still touch and go until he got the midnight phone call in 1990 that his fifth book, Maniac Magee, had just won the Newbery, the most prestigious prize in children's publishing.
"Within a couple of a days, your living room looks like a funeral home," he says. "There are so many flowers, many of them from all those people who sent you rejection slips. It becomes a parade that goes on for years. In a sense, it never ends."
Nearly two decades later, Spinelli continues to march merrily along, although he can't shed this nagging feeling that he's been miscast.
"In my mind, I don't write for kids even now," he says. "I write about kids, and that's a huge distinction as far as I'm concerned. When I sit down, I don't think to myself, 'This is how I want to write this sentence. Now how do I dumb it down for the kiddies?' That's not what I do. I just write the story the best way I know how and let the readership fall where it will.
"Accidentally, I became this thing called a kids' writer," he says. "On the positive side, I suppose, I've discovered I'm feeling pretty happy and fulfilled where I am. So I'm content to play around in this particular sandbox."
Philadelphia Book Festival
The festival - May 17 and 18, inside and outside the Free Library at 19th and Vine Streets - will include more than 60 writers and dozens of exhibitor tents, live music and children's entertainment.
Among the highlights are the storybook character parade at noon May 17, a discussion of Middle East policy moderated by Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin at 2 p.m. May 17, a reading by children's author Jerry Spinelli at 3:30 p.m. May 18 and an interview of television journalist Barbara Walters at 5 p.m. May 18.
For information, call 215-567-4341 or visit www. philadelphiabookfestival.org or www.freelibrary.org
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