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The Secret of My Success
The last year of high school history class left me with two vivid memories: neighboring classmate Didi LaSalle's bad breath (no, not her real name!) and the joy of closing my text at the end of the year secure in the knowledge that I'd never have to study history again.
The following fall I entered college and the path towards an engineering degree; I was going to design airplanes, you see. But by Christmas, the hammering complexities of calculus and physics had driven me from the garden of my delusions. Aeronautical engineering was not, and would never be, a happenin' thing.
Being young, I sought out the path of least resistance. I remembered that despite Didi LaSalle's unpleasant distraction, I hadn't been half bad at history. After minutes of soul-searching, I jumped to a new department and degree. But there wasn't any joy in it, and at the close of college, I shut my history books with as much a sense of finality as I had closed my high school text.
I leapt to a new ambition: cartoonist. Trying to translate a childhood obsession with comics into a career, I taught myself to draw, and did my best to scale the very high walls of an extremely small profession. Hitting on the idea of editorial cartoonist—it was the Watergate Era and politics was America's greatest spectator sport—I even went on the road in search of a newspaper berth. I'd drive to towns and small cities, call the editor of the local daily, and ask if I could have a meeting . . . that day!
A surprising number of them agreed.
Although I got to see great swaths of the country and discovered a lot of generous, kind people, I never found a cartooning gig. Needing some way to make a living, I found work as a washer/dryer mechanic, movie theater manager, clam digger, cook and waiter. Years passed. My thirtieth birthday found me tending bar in Manhattan. And it was across that West 68th Street bar I discovered my career. One of my customers was an art director. She explained the world of freelance art to me. Armed with this tidbit of knowledge, a portfolio that would make an amateur blush, and buckets of naïve hope, I embarked on a new path.
It was a trail that eventually wound its way through magazines, newspapers, brochures, filmstrips (remember them?), and even 3D animation (fashioned on gawd-awful expensive computer workstations.) Between illustrations, I found the time to read history. I consumed volumes and volumes of it, in fact, reflecting an appetite for history that escaped me in high school and college.
The Federalist Papers, Shelby Foote's Civil War trilogy, Boorstin's The Americans series, Churchill's History of the English People, everything by David McCollough, Manchester's Glory and the Dream, Tuchman's Guns of August, book after book, biography after biography, memoirs after memoir. I discovered my History 101 text and reread the whole thing. I even tried Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.
With the barest of self-awareness, I had come to love history.
And it was history, not art, that led me into children's literature.
Finding myself married with two small daughters, I was frustrated at not finding many nonfiction picture books of brave and heroic women. Wouldn't that be a good lesson for my girls, reminding them women could be brave and heroic? Dipping back into that bucket of naïve hopefulness that had launched my illustration career, I decided that I could write such a book. Hitting on the story of early aviatrix Ruth Law, I wrote a manuscript, made a dummy and sent it off. With a remarkable speed that I didn't fully appreciate for years, the story was published.
That was fifteen years and fifteen books ago.
The work is great fun, immensely satisfying and, I hope, enjoyed by readers. I've tried to make some sense of it all, tried to find prologue to the current chapters in my life. I think about the half-turns, the two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back, the dead ends, the stumbles, the falls, the hop-skip-and-jumps. If it all could be plotted in a galaxy of points, could a skillful statistician discern a graph from there to here or, in the end, has it all just been chance, wrapped in luck, surrounded by serendipity?
I'm stumped. •
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About the Author:
Don Brown is the author and illustrator of several highly praised picture book biographies and histories for children. His subjects have included the 1899 New York newsboys strike, the movie pioneer Mack Sennett, the sixth-century Irish monk and calligrapher Columcille, and the scientist Albert Einstein. Mr. Brown lives with his family on Long Island, New York.
Books by Don Brown:
• The Notorious Izzy Fink (Roaring Brook Press 2006)
• Bright Path: Young Jim Thorpe (Roaring Brook Press 2006)
• Kid Blink Beats the World (Roaring Brook Press 2004)
• Mack Made Movies (Roaring Brook Press 2003)
• Across a Dark and Wild Sea (Roaring Brook Press 2002)
To contact this author or illustrator, please use the information for his or her publisher provided on our list of CBC member publishers.
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