A Funny Way to Become an Author

It was at the meeting with the advisors for our joint Reading Specialist degree advisors that co-author Peggy of 45 years now told them we were going to sell our research. And so we created a workbook and sent a sample to publishers. Twenty-three of them promptly sent us rejection letters. However, one invited us to their Chicago office. We flew there and rented a car. Unfortunately, it kept stalling and stalling so we needed to contact the rental company. Since cell phones had not yet been invented, we pulled into a parking lot with a phone booth only to discover that we had no change. An attendant was in the entrance booth and Peggy borrowed a quarter from him, but she never returned it. When we got to the publisher and met the editor, we laughingly told him about our trying day, and he asked us to be serious when making our presentation to the publisher. The company actually bought our idea and published our first six books.

After this initial success, we decided to keep writing together but felt we needed to find additional publishers. Somehow, we managed to get appointments with several publishing houses including World Book, Scott Foresman and Children’s Press in Chicago. To add to the logistics of seeing all these publishers, we also were watching my daughter play in a tennis tournament there. Our first visit was to Children’s Press where the editor told us the company was looking for writers for their Rookie Reader series. On the way to our room on the 48^th floor of our hotel, we created the outline for a reader out loud to the amusement of the other elevator occupants. And Pancakes, Pizza and Crackers, a book about shapes, was soon published. Ultimately, we would write for all the publishers that we visited in Chicago.

We have now written more than 100 books together and had some quite unusual experiences with editors. On St. Patrick’s Day, the World Book editor took us to an Irish pub for dinner, but before that we had to accompany her to Weight Watchers for a weigh-in. After this, she did not eat dinner, but we wolfed down corn beef and cabbage. Then there were the two editors who we talked to in a hotel room with everyone sitting on the beds on Halloween night.