I knew what I wanted to be when I was a kid. I've always felt lucky about that.
May 6, 2026
I've written about this subject in the past, but I wanted to list the series of childhood events--seemingly insignificant at the time--that led me to the path I eventually took in my working life. I hope it will help my kids--and perhaps my grandkids one day--to better understand the role I played--and how I played it--in our family's history:
When I was very young, I realized that I had a talent for writing things that other people found interesting. What I recall is trying to write the way people talk. And that I could hear a rhythm in well-written things. After receiving some positive feedback from teachers, and winning a couple writing competitions, I started telling friends that I was going to be either a newspaper reporter or a writer of books some day.
Here are the little things that led me to the above conclusion:
I had Sr. Charlotte Francis for home room in the third grade. One day she gave our class an assignment to write a "make believe" story. A couple days later she selected five or six of my fellow students and me to read our stories to the kids in the next classrom down the hall. I wrote something about a "TV doctor" who made house calls to change tubes inside of televisions to make them feel better.
I was in the fourth or fifth grade when I learned that my friend Lawrence subscribed to Catholic Boy magazine. So I asked my mom to get me a subscription, too. The publication had a monthly writing contest. I submitted something about Babe Ruth and how my dad had told me stories about his hitting prowess. (Which was a total fabrication.) I won an "honorable mention," and the magazine, headquartered at the University of Notre Dame, sent me a check for $5.
In the sixth grade I had Sr. Jean Charles for homeroom. She gave the class an assignment to write an essay describing a character from a book, such that the reader was supposed to guess the character based on the written description. So I read a 96-page abridged version of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain and completed the writing assignment. After about a week, Sister said she was disappointed in the overall writing effort of the class. Except for one paper. "Leonard, come up to the lectern and read your essay to the class." That was, perhaps, the biggest shock of my young life.
Later that year, the same nun gave us an assignment to select a picture from a magazine and to write an essay about how we interpreted it. So I cut the cover art from one of the issues of Catholic Boy, featuring a fire truck in front of a fire station being inspected by a fire fighter and some kids. This time, before the nun even looked at our papers, we were instructed to read them, one by one, in front of the class. After I read mine Sister asked, "Leonard, did you really write that?" "Yes, Sister," I replied respectfully. She seemed astonished. That was my second big shock of the school year.
I was in the eighth grade when I learned of an essay contest sponsored by the Polish Women's Alliance of America. Entrants were to write something about the United States and the United Nations. First, I looked up the United Nations in our family's Encyclopedia Brittanica Junior. Then, I submitted something based on the premise of a headline I had seen in an ad on a "car card" near the ceiling of a Detroit city bus : "The UN is not perfect. But what if we didn't have it?" I was surprised one afternoon when the school principal, Sr. Marie Ruth, walked into our classroom with a big trophy in her arms and announced that my essay had won first prize in the state competition.
By the time I was a teenager I realized that I had a talent for writing papers, essays, sports stories, letters, etc. However, I struggled with writing fiction. Nevertheless, after receiving an assignment to write a short story for English class during my junior year, I was surprised to hear from several friends that Sister Ann Josepha had read my story aloud to another English class. I think its title was "The Thing." The setting was in a mysterious dark tunnel, and I wrote about a light at the end of it that kept getting bigger and bigger. I can't remember anything else. I do remember, however, that Sr. Ann Josepha never said a word about my story to me.
The St. Alphonsus Class of '65 was the first not to have a yearbook (inadequate funds). So I was approached by several students to be the editor of a makeshift version--mimeographed sheets bound in a duotang. I recruited a small staff who contributed short biographies of each member of our 120-student graduating class. No photos. No art. Nothing but words. About 15 years ago someone gave me a copy they had saved. It was a hoot to go back and read what we had written.
Finally, I was asked to write some "liner notes" for the graduation announcement of our senior class. I wrote something about our class's high school journey, while envisioning how I imagined one of the popular girls in our class probably felt about it. I was surprised when that same girl came up to me one day and said that what I'd written had captured the essence of her young life, bringing tears to her eyes.
Addendum:
Thinking that I was likely to become a reporter one day, I enrolled in the journalism curriculum at Michigan State. During my first two years, I rarely received a grade better than a C in my field of study because I had difficulty adjusting to the discipline's "who, what, when, where" form of writing. So I switched my major to advertising to become a copywriter. During my second year I took an elective class called Essay Writing, English 213. There were fewer than 20 students in the class. And each week we were to submit an essay based on a topic of our own choosing.
Most weeks the professor complimented my work but counseled me to "cut it to the bone" and to avoid what he called "automatic language" (overused words, cliches, typical phraseology, etc.) At the end of the last paper I submitted that semester he wrote, "A for paper and A for the class. May I keep a copy of this for use in future classes?" That was the day I became absolutely convinced that "I can do this."
Finally, the biggest point of this essay: I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to be when I was just a kid. I am so thankful that I had the awareness to know it, the drive to pursue it, and the goal to become it. Looking back on it all, realizing that I had a budding talent at an early age was one of the luckiest elements of my entire life. Other than the brief periods of time that I reported to a boss I didn't like, I went to my job feeling happy almost every day. I got paid for doing something I would have done for nothing, as they say, if I could afford it.
It's one of the reasons I'm likely die with a feeling of fulfillment.
















