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• July 9, 1965: Hi! I’m Mike Petrie. I’m 15 years old and live in
Ever since I was a little kid I have enjoyed writing. I had a toy typewriter and used to type out stories on it, pretending to be some great novelist or a reporter for some large metropolitan newspaper like The Daily Planet. So, to resolve my boredom it only makes sense that I do what I’ve always enjoyed, I should write a story. With that decision made, I sat down and thought about what to write. It
should be a story about something interesting and a subject about which I
have some expertise. I thought and I thought . . . and then it came to me.
To be completely candid, I must admit I did get some inspiration to write my story from our English teacher at school. One of our class assignments was to keep a journal on what it’s like to be a teenager today. Putting pen to paper, it was fun recording my thoughts. She also required us to read two books that I thought were very cool: The Catcher in the Rye, a very entertaining book, really - my favorite of any “required reading” books. The other book was Gidget and the Surfers, about a young girl befriended by a bunch of beach-bum surfers in California. (To be a surfer living on the beach in California would surely be about the neatest thing I can even imagine!) In both these books the central characters write about themselves and their experiences, that’s what I’m gonna do too. But, unlike those other two books which are about fictional characters and situations, whatever I write is going to be the absolute truth; the whole truth and nothing but the truth! So bear that in mind. |
Downers Grove, Illinois. It’s summer, no school, plenty of time on my hands and, like most people my age, I am bored
to tears. I’d like to take that boredom and turn it into something productive, but what?
What is more interesting than ME! Just your typical teenager growing up in
the rapidly expanding suburbs of Chicago. Okay, so maybe there is a more intresting
subject I could have chosen, but I decided to go with the subject matter that I
am most familiar with, namely yours truly.