It Came From Ohio! Page 4

  Then he turned and stomped out. He never said anything to me about the class. Not ever. He didn’t tell me I was doing a terrible job. But he didn’t nominate me for Teacher of the Year, either.

  Still, I look back fondly on my one year as a teacher. Even if it was the hardest job I’ve ever had. I don’t know if my students learned much, but I sure did.

  Teaching gave me time to watch kids in action. I was able to listen to what they said and the way they said it. I think my characters’ conversations in Fear Street and Goosebumps are more true to life because of my real-life year in the classroom.

  I learned that it’s important for a writer to hear how people speak. Sometimes when I start a new book, I picture some of my students and think about the way they acted and felt.

  It was a good experience. And I got a chance to catch up on my comic books.

  Most nights, when I wasn’t dreaming up lessons for my classes, I returned to one of my first loves—radio. And I worked on Captain Anything.

  Captain Anything was a two-minute comedy radio program about a superhero who could change himself into anything. Anything animal, vegetable, or mineral. Except his horn-rimmed glasses never transformed.

  If Captain Anything became a wolf, he was a wolf in horn-rimmed glasses. If there was some doubt about whether that head of lettuce was Captain Anything or just another head of lettuce, all you had to do was look for the glasses.

  My friends and I hoped to sell Captain Anything to radio stations across the country. I wrote the scripts. Two popular Columbus radio personalities, Bill Hamilton and Fritz Peerenboom, provided the voices. We worked late into the night at a recording studio in a rough section downtown.

  I remember it was kind of spooky because there had been a serious crime committed in the office one floor up. A man had been stabbed right above our studio.

  Captain Anything didn’t make it out of the building alive, either. We sent records with four sample episodes to radio stations all over the country, but the answer was always the same—nothing doing for Anything.

  I did manage to save a little money the year I taught. By June, I figured there was enough in my savings account to pay for a month’s rent in New York.

  Once I got there, I had to find a place to live and a job. It was sort of like the chicken and the egg thing: I couldn’t afford an apartment because I didn’t have a job. I couldn’t find a job because I had no place to live.

  You wouldn’t believe the first job I got.

  My first apartment was even crazier.

  Picture it: New York’s Greenwich Village. Narrow streets lined with brick townhouses and apartment buildings. Crowds of artists, poets, writers. Coffeehouses. Bookstores. Bookstores that stayed open all night!

  When I arrived in New York in the autumn of 1966, the city had stores that actually sold nothing but postcards. Racks and racks of them. One store offered every imaginable kind of lightbulb. And nothing else! There was a hole-in-the-wall place called The Last Wound-Up. It sold—what else?—windup toys.

  And a novelty shop with rubber chickens. We’re talking rubber chickens as far as the eye can see!

  I was in heaven!

  But if I wanted to stay in heaven, I had to find an apartment. I picked up a copy of the Village Voice and answered several classified ads. I finally put down a deposit on a one-room apartment. It was in the heart of “the Village.” On the corner of Waverly Place and Waverly Place. (Really!)

  When I say one room, I’m including the kitchen, the dining room, the bedroom, everything.

  The kitchen had a teeny-tiny sink and a teeny-tiny stove. The refrigerator was different. It was eentsy-weentsy! I knew the first time I looked at that kitchen that I wasn’t going to be fixing any big meals.

  No matter. I couldn’t afford food anyway. I got the next best thing—bologna.

  Every week, I bought a loaf of rye bread and one of those packages of sliced bologna. I lived on bologna sandwiches. There were times when my stomach ached from hunger. I even considered leaving my apartment and going back to Ohio.

  But I didn’t. I reminded myself I had more important things to do. I needed desperately to find a job.

  I watched the help-wanted ads. I was looking for work at a magazine. In my daydreams, I could see myself working for one of the big, glossy national magazines that are edited in New York. There was Life, Esquire, and the New Yorker. The only trouble was, those magazines were at the top of the magazine world. I was having trouble getting a grip at the bottom.

  My first interview was down near Wall Street. I took the elevator to the tenth floor of an old building. The office was small. Not small like my apartment. Nothing was that small. But it didn’t seem big enough for a magazine with the impressive name of Institutional Investor.

  The publisher, a young man named Gil Kaplan, introduced himself. He asked me if I was familiar with Institutional Investor. I’d never seen the magazine, but I wasn’t going to admit it.

  “Oh, yes, I’m familiar with it,” I lied.

  Kaplan was surprised. And pleased. They had published only two issues so far.

  He passed a copy of the magazine across his desk. I leafed through it, glanced at the ads for stockbrokers and investment bankers. What I knew about the stock market you could have fit into my kitchen. And have enough space left over for another slice of bologna.

  But I could learn.

  “You realize that this is a production job you’re interviewing for,” he said.

  A production job? I wanted a writing job. Still, I was confident. I figured I could learn anything Institutional Investor wanted me to know, and I could learn it on the job.

  I would have to. Kaplan hired me. For $7,000 a year.

  Seven thousand dollars!

  I was rich! No more bologna on rye. Now I could add lettuce!

  The following Monday morning, I reported for work at Institutional Investor.

  The art director sat me down in front of a table and asked me to put “running feet” on pages. I didn’t know what running feet were. Did the boss want me to draw them? Should they be wearing shoes?

  I know what running feet are now—now that I don’t need to know. It’s the printing at the bottom of a magazine page. It includes the name of the magazine, the date of the issue, and the page number.

  “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” the art director asked. “You don’t know anything about production work.”

  “I know what a dummy is,” I told him. “A dummy is a model of a magazine or newspaper page. We did page dummies at Sundial.”

  “That’s one kind of dummy,” he said, “but there are others.”

  He fired me.

  Had all those years of daydreaming about New York City been just that—daydreaming?

  No, they weren’t. I soon found another job. And it was a writing job!

  The morning I applied for that job, I thought I’d gotten the wrong address. I checked the number on 95th Street twice before I rang the doorbell. It wasn’t an office. It was an apartment.

  A middle-aged woman answered my knock. She introduced herself as Nancy. Nancy told me she was the editor of six teenage fan magazines.

  But not the big-name ones.

  “The bestselling teen fan magazine right now is 16,” she said. “We call ours 15.”

  I almost laughed.

  “And we’ve got Mod Teen, which competes with Mod Scene,” she added. “You’ve seen Photoplay? Well, we’ve got Screenplay.”

  Was this for real? Hey, it was a job. I handed Nancy my portfolio.

  She hardly glanced at it.

  “I want you to write an interview with Glen Campbell,” Nancy told me. She gestured to a lunchroom with two typewriters. There was a young woman already working at one of them.

  I knew Glen Campbell only from TV. He was a popular country star with his own variety show.

  I’d never seen the guy in my life. And I didn’t know where to reach him. “Do you have Mr. Campbell’s
phone number?” I asked.

  Nancy looked at me. “I didn’t say do an interview,” she said. “I said write an interview.” She handed me some newspaper clippings and a couple 8 x 10-inch photos of the singer. Then, patiently, she explained how it worked: “Use these newspaper stories for information. Come up with a story that goes with the photos.”

  “You mean make it up?”

  “You got it.”

  I sat down at the second typewriter. In less than an hour I’d written, “Glen Campbell: Two Men I Call ‘Friend.’ ” It was pure fiction. The article was accepted and appeared in an issue of Nancy’s magazine Country & Western Music.

  I went on to “interview” all of the big stars of the sixties—the Beatles, Tom Jones, the Rolling Stones, the Jacksons. Except I never interviewed anyone. I made up all of my stories.

  I asked Nancy if the stars we made up stories about ever sued the magazine.

  “No,” was her reply, “they want all the publicity they can get. They don’t care what you write about them—as long as you keep writing about them.”

  It was while I did my part to help celebrities get a make-believe life that I wrote my first horror fiction. Nancy’s boss agreed to try a horror magazine, Adventures in Horror. “Bony Fingers from the Grave” was written under the name of Robert Lawrence—my first and middle names. “Trapped in the Vampire’s Web of Icy Death” and “It Takes Two for Terror” were mine, too.

  I worked at this job for about a month. I must have written a hundred phony interviews! Then the company went out of business. I was out of work again.

  The fan magazines paid me one hundred dollars a week. My checks were big enough for an occasional restaurant meal. With dessert. And I could afford to treat myself to those great pretzels they sell at food carts on the streets of New York.

  But if I didn’t find work pretty quick, that’s where I’d find myself—homeless on the streets of New York.

  And that’s when I found one of the weirdest jobs of my life …

  I found a job at a magazine called Soft Drink Industry.

  My job was to write article after article about soft drinks, soda cans, syrups, and the people who made them.

  Sound boring to you? It sounded boring to me, too. But at least it was a magazine job!

  I wrote such articles as: “Squirt Co. Now Using Full-Color Billboards.” Pretty exciting, huh?

  My all-time favorite was “New American Flange Hopper Speeds Feeding of Rip Cap Closures.” I’m sorry we don’t have space to print the whole story here. I know you would have enjoyed it.

  I don’t want to give the impression that during this time in my life all I was doing was looking for jobs and losing them. I was also looking for girlfriends and losing them.

  Until I met Jane.

  I almost didn’t meet her. It’s a long story … (which is why there’s no room for my “Flange Hopper” piece).

  I met Jane—she was called Jane Waldhorn then—at a party in Brooklyn that I almost didn’t go to. I almost didn’t go because it was raining out, and I never like to go out in the rain. And I didn’t really enjoy big parties. Too shy.

  But my friend Chuck and I took the subway to Brooklyn and found my friend’s apartment. The party was big and noisy. Chuck and I hung out together. Then two young women came over to say hello.

  One of them was Jane’s friend Laurie. The other one was Jane. She had long red hair, beautiful blue-gray eyes—and the worst cold a human ever had.

  Her nose was bright red. Her eyes were running. And she kept excusing herself every minute to go blow her nose.

  Love at first sight? Not quite.

  But two weeks later, Jane’s cold cleared up and we decided to get married.

  I’m so glad I decided to go out in the rain that night. I cannot imagine what my life would have been like without Jane. For one thing, she is the smartest person I know. How smart? Well, we’ve been married for forty-five years—and in all that time, I’ve never won a bet!

  That rainy night was the luckiest night of my life. And I would say all these nice things even if Jane wasn’t the editor of this book!

  It was wonderful to be young and on the town in New York. It would be even more wonderful, Jane and I thought, if we could find jobs we liked.

  Jane was just out of college. She was starting to look for work. I had a job. But writing about root beer wasn’t exactly what I’d dreamed of doing.

  Even when the editor of Soft Drink Industry took me into his office to tell me, “Bob, there’s a world of communication in bottle caps!” He was so excited. He held out a bottle cap so I could see the advertising message written inside the cap.

  I’m sure the editor noticed that I wasn’t exactly jumping up and down.

  What he didn’t notice, however, was that I used my spare moments to read the want ads.

  Just as there were many good things happening in my life at this time, there were also big changes in the rest of the Stine family. My brother, Bill, met Megan, his wife-to-be. They were both students at Ohio State. And they both worked on Sundial. Bill was editor. He planned to become a writer, too. They stayed in Columbus for several months, lived in San Francisco awhile, then moved to New York.

  My dad retired, and he and Mom moved out to Northern California. My sister, Pam, moved with them. After college, she married, and she and her husband, Kelvin, still live on the West Coast.

  Everyone was doing fine. That pleased me. But in the back of my mind, I knew it meant that my childhood home was gone. I was truly on my own in New York.

  Reading the want ads finally paid off. One day on my lunch hour, I found another job.

  All that remained was to tell the boss at Soft Drink Industry.

  “You’d actually give all this up?” he asked in a tone that told me he just couldn’t believe it.

  “It’s tough,” I told him. “I’ve liked soda since I was a kid.”

  “You can always change your mind.”

  “No, it’s time to move on.” I sighed. “But I am going to miss the free soda machine here in the office.”

  The new job was at Scholastic Inc. I was hired as a staff writer for Junior Scholastic magazine.

  Little did I know when I sat down in my tiny office in December of 1968, that my life was about to change completely.

  I spent the next sixteen years at Scholastic, writing and editing magazines—my life’s dream.

  I started out writing news and history articles for Junior Scholastic magazine. A few years later, I became editor of my own social studies magazine, Search.

  Meanwhile, Jane had also taken a job at Scholastic. She wrote celebrity interviews for Scope magazine. She interviewed such people as John Travolta and Michael Jackson. And she really talked with them—she didn’t make up her interviews, as I had done.

  I loved the fast pace of working on a magazine. My magazines were published every week. That meant that we were always working on four magazines at once.

  We’d be (1) planning one issue, (2) writing another issue, (3) editing yet another issue, and (4) proofreading a finished issue—all at the same time.

  Today, people ask me how I can write so many books so quickly. I always tell them that books are slow compared to magazines!

  Magazine writing was the perfect training for me. I learned to write fast—and move on to the next piece. I’m a very lucky writer. I’ve always been able to write quickly, and it usually comes out the way I want it on the first try.

  Kids always ask me what I do about writer’s block. I have to confess that I’ve never had it. I can always sit down and write. When you are writing for magazines, there’s no time for writer’s block!

  In the 1970s, Jane became editor of the most popular kids’ magazine in the US—Dynamite magazine. Filled with interviews, jokes, puzzles, posters, and all kinds of zany features, Dynamite was a sensation—selling more than a million-and-a-quarter copies every month.

  Soon after, I started a very crazy humor magazine for te
enagers called Bananas. Bananas is hard to describe. It had such articles as: “How to Turn Your Uncle into a Coffee Table” and “How to Tell If You Are an Alien from Outer Space” and “How to Turn Your Poems into Dog Food.”

  The magazine had an advice column written by a dog. And a page each month starring a really ugly fly named Phil Fly, who begged readers not to swat him.

  My good friend and art director Bob Feldgus and I had the time of our lives trying to make Bananas more and more bananas each month! We ran ads for “Light Water” (fifty percent fewer calories) and for ice cream that you wore on your face! And we ran helpful articles, such as: “20 Things You Can Do with a Rubber Chicken.”

  It was a happy time for me. All those hundreds of little magazines I had put together in my room when I was in grade school had led to this. My own national humor magazine. My life’s dream.

  During this time, I had several important firsts that I’m very proud of. I was the first editor in the Scholastic offices not to wear a tie to work every day. And I was the first employee to have a rubber chicken hanging in his office.

  When I wasn’t having fun writing and editing Bananas, I had fun driving the other Scholastic workers crazy. I liked to send out fake “official” information memos that looked exactly like the real office memos that were always coming around. My memos were totally stupid—but there were always people who believed them.

  Scholastic had a real office-space problem. So I sent out a memo that said: “Tomorrow we will all move down one office to the right. This will empty out a whole line of offices on the left. And our office-space problem will be solved.”

  Dumb, huh? But a lot of people were complaining about how they didn’t want to move.

  A few weeks later, I sent around another real-looking notice. It said: “Be sure to wear your raincoats tomorrow and cover up all of your papers. We’re going to be testing the overhead sprinkler system all day.”

  A lot of people believed that one, too. I guess they didn’t appreciate my “dry” sense of humor.