First, let’s get the “Dickey” stuff out of the way. I grew up in Dickeyville, a former mill village on the banks of the Gwynn’s Falls, where the Dickey family had once run the mill. I went to Dickey Hill Elementary School. I’ve heard all the jokes, as have the kids from Cockeysville. Get over it.
When I was in second or third grade, the school started a spring book fair. A mimeographed sheet of titles would be distributed and students were expected to make a shopping list before they were admitted to the fair for 30 minutes of browsing and buying. I remember Mrs. Shapiro going over our lists and expressing disappointment that so many of us wanted to buy “Peanuts” or “Dennis the Menace” compilations. Grubby little pleaser that I was, I decided to spend the breathtaking amount of 95 cents on a book about a horse. It was awful. But then, I never much liked books about horses — not Walter Farley’s and, shock of shocks for a Maryland girl, not even “Misty of Chincoteague.”
One could win a gift certificate to buy more books by entering and winning the poster contest. For some reason, this contest became my Holy Grail. I sweated and slaved over my entries, but was usually bested by my best friend, Maggie Argent. Maggie was far more talented at art than I, a tidy and conscientious girl, yet also creative. In sixth grade, for our segment on marine biology, she embroidered a mural, three by six feet, showing an accurate view of ocean life.
Maybe that’s why she felt a little burned out when it came time for the poster contest. She contented herself with simply cutting out the letters DICKEY HILL BOOK FAIR and pasting them to tagboard. She used a freehand style that we had recently learned, one in which symmetrical letters could be formed by folding the paper just so.
My entry was operatic, busy, passionate. I believe it took “The Witch of Blackbird Pond” as its inspiration and had some sort of couplet in which I rhymed “ages” and “pages.” It was, in my humble opinion, magnificent.
Maggie won. I was devastated. To be beaten by someone who wasn’t even trying seemed a cruel fate indeed.
It was the last time that I really cared about the outcome of a contest. Just in case you’re wondering.
Well I saw your “poster” this year Laura, and it was operetic, busy, and passionate. In my humble opionion it was magnificent.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond! You was robbed, honey.
“Witch” is one of the great ones. I also liked The Bronze Bow and Calico Captive (learned what a “gauntlet” was while reading the latter.) But “Witch” was my favorite.
Bahahaha!
I care about the Edgars every year, and it always pisses me off when I don’t win.
Haven’t been nominated yet, and it’s been three years since my last book, but it’s still just wrong.
Keith is having fun — I think — but he opens this up to larger cosmic questions about how one can gnash one’s teeth about anything and everything. Really, with just a little effort one could be in a bristling rage every day of the week.
I saw prize fever infect the newspaper where I worked, the Baltimore Sun. I knew reporters who tortured themselves over not winning Pulitzers — and, perhaps, in one notorious case, “sweeten” a story to enhance the importance/effect of stories that were to be submitted for the prize.
I am second to no one in my admiration for Lisa Pollak’s Pulitzer-prize winning feature story for the Sun, one of its first wins in almost two decades, but it’s worth noting that Lisa’s story was organic, an idea that bubbled from the ground (reporter) up. Ditto, Will Englund’s win the next year, along with Gary Cohn, on the industry of ship-breaking.
But when a newspaper becomes intent on winning prizes, it ends up putting out a few spectacular stories at the expense of the newsroom as a whole. And the process can become very political; in my final year at the paper, when I was on the outs, I wrote a piece that my editor at the time said was one of the best short, on-deadline features he had ever read. He later told me that it was not submitted for any awards because, well, “You’re you.”
I’ve been lucky — I chose that word with great deliberation — to win some prizes for my work in the mystery field. So I can afford to be generous.
Still, I hope that I’d never forget what I learned in sixth grade — you can care too much. Also, in case it wasn’t clear: Maggie’s poster was better.
Laura, your post and my own recent experience volunteering at my daughter’s school book fair, has brought back memories of my first exposure to a book fair. I attended a parochial elementary school which didn’t even have a library until I was in 4th grade. There weren’t any book stores in the community either, although the local family-owned drug store did carry a supply of Classics Comics. So the nearby public library was the source of much of my early reading.
After 6th grade my parents transfered my sister and I to the local public junior high school. The culture shock of that experience is grist for posts some other time. While I’ve managed to forget much of that first year in public school, I do recall the joy of my first book fair. It was also held in the spring, in the school library. Several tables of mostly paperback books, all for less than a dollar. Real books you could keep! My first purchase was my very own copy of the 1972 Guinness Book of World Records. Sure, it wasn’t deep fiction, but for a kid who had spent hours upon hours reading a 7 year old set of encyclopedias, it was an awakening.
My other purchase was the now out-of-print “Ghost of Dibble Hollow.” The main character was a boy the same age as me who befriends the ghost of his dead ancestor, also a boy. I read that book many times, and think of it every time I use a letter opener (read the book and you’ll find out why).
The Guinness Book of World Records became the victim of a flooded basement. Fortunately, “The Ghost of Dibble Hollow” had been placed on a higher shelf. I still have it today. I keep bugging my middle school aged sons to read it, but since the book “looks old” they’re not interested. They’d rather leaf through their 2005 hard-cover copies of the Guinness Book of World Records.
>>>I care about the Edgars every year, and it always pisses me off when I don’t win.
Haven’t been nominated yet, and it’s been three years since my last book, but it’s still just wrong.<<<
This made me laugh, though I totally relate to it.
I’ve also got “Edgar Syndrome By Proxy,” though…I get pissed off when my deserving friends don’t win. Or even the SO’s of my friends. (L&O:CI indeed!)
Loved this blog entry, Laura.
Stu was nominated for the Fan Artist Hugo a record 13 (that’s thirteen) times before winning. Thirteen. It did hurt a smidgen, esp. the year there was a tie, and he didn’t win either. But he won the next year, all by himself.
The “Hugo Losers” party is still more fun, and probably had better food. In the fan categories, mostly, we’re friends so winners and losers can sort of comingle. But it WAS that 13th loss, I think, that caused us to create a number of “It’s an honor just to be nominated” buttons, because he got just a weeeeeee tad tired of hearing it, well-meant or not. It’s true BUT, to a certain point, then it gets a little ugly.
course, he still occasionally frets at not being nominated now, though he’s doing far less sf/fannish art and cartooning but it was such a CONSTANT in his life for so many years.
And when we moved here, our joking requirement was “a two bedroom place with a fireplace”. It wasn’t so much the fireplace, but when you have a Hugo, you seriously GOTTA have a mantlepiece to put it on. Or make a lamp out of it…
Andi
You’re right, Laura, about newsroom prize goals. While the New Haven Register doesn’t have a prayer now of ever attaining a Pulitzer unless we have some sort of huge disaster and we’re in the right place at the right time (that’s how the Hartford Courant got theirs for the Lottery shootings in 1998), the Society of Professional Journalists awards create a frenzy every year. The only one I’ve ever been nominated for was my work putting together the extra edition on Sept. 11 (didn’t win) but my husband, who took down a mayor over a town insurance fraud scheme was put in the wrong category and failed to get even an honorable mention. I put no stock in such things anymore, although winning the Freed award was one of those one-in-a-million things and was so unexpected that I nearly fell off my chair when I got the call about it. I caught that brass ring and I never need to win anything else.
Just to clarify — to win an award is a wonderful thing and no one should ever feel anything but fine about it. (And the Freed award strikes me as a particularly notable award to win.) It also helps that the mystery world is one where one is likely to lose to friends.
It’s the quest that can distort. I don’t know a single novelist who sat down with the goal to win a prize; to publish is prize enough. But I did know reporters who made themselves sick over the Pulitzer.
Laura was always the smart girl in the class!… The Dickey Hill Elm School Book Fair was held in the gym and we were in the SECOND grade Laura… I had a Huge Crush on Laura because she was so smart!… Hello Old Friend.. Randy (roach) Roche