When you ask conservationist and story collector Phillip Hoose about the story of his own life, he responds with a story—really a story filled with stories.

Phil grew up in a small family and lived in the Indiana towns of South Bend, Angola, and Speedway. For much of his childhood, he says, he was a lonely, only child for whom nothing came easily except reading. He says that reading became his refuge. But Phil's status began to change at age 12. This was the year that his brother was born and the year that he reached the 7th grade. Finally he had company at home, and at school a teacher who praised an essay that he had written and placed it in a showcase for parent-teacher night.

High School Stories
Phil's first inkling that he might become a writer came in high school. At Speedway High School he met Grace Hein, the teacher who would hone his literary skills and provide the praise he needed to form an image of himself as a writer. Phil tells this story about Ms. Hein:

In high school, I ran up against a woman, Grace Hein, who was the terror teacher of the school. We all knew, as junior high students, that we would meet her some day. She was legendary and formidable. She was from Texas, an iron-willed lady who made us drill in grammar and vocabulary through a little blue book by Ogle and Works called Building Word Power. She would take a word like, obese, and we'd just have to learn lists of synonyms: adipose, burly, corpulent, paunchy, pudgy, stout, portly, rotund, and so on. Then we had to write around different kinds of themes. You know, expository writing. . . . But, given all that rigor, there was an awful lot of flexibility in the kinds of themes that we could write. And I was surprised by how much I could get away with. She also—for Central Indiana—gave us a fair sampling of literature. She had a sense of humor that encouraged creativity, and she praised me lavishly in front of the others. And this was not a woman who was loose with praise, so this meant something.

Gradually, Phil says, as he began to think that he might have some writing ability he formed an image of himself as a writer. "She meant so much to me," he says, that I went up to her when I was a senior and asked, 'Mrs. Hein, do you think I'll be a writer one day?' And she said, 'Only if you need to!'"

Phil didn't initially become a writer, though. When the 1960s social movements came, he was in college and struggling. "Those were bad years for me, and I didn't write much," he says, "but I kept reading and developing awareness about the world."

Observation Stories
Part of Phil's growing awareness was of the state where he grew up. These are his stories of his high school, his town, and local sports.

I grew up in a weird state, Indiana, but didn't know it. I went to a lot of basketball games and wanted to be a high school basketball player. I went to school with 892 kids, Speedway High School. All white, no Jews, no nothing; you talk about diversity? The school was named after a racetrack, Speedway! And everything about the town and the school had to do with racecars. The Speedway Speedette was the school paper, the Sparkleairs was the chorus. The Spark Plug was the mascot...

Not only that, all of the streets in my town were named after cars. In the old section of town, streets were named for touring cars, like Auburn, Cord, Winton. And the streets in the new section of town were Cadillac and Desoto and Imperial. You know, my friends lived on, like, Desoto. The whole town was laid out by these five engineers who wanted a racetrack as a testing ground for the new touring cars of the day. (Touring cars are vintage autos with two seats, four doors, and a folding top.) They decided they needed a town to go with it. It's just an odd place to live.

As I said, there were 892 kids in the school, which had a gym that seated 3,500 people. And it would fill up on a Friday night, especially in my time, in the '40s and '50s when community basketball just defined the whole town, because there was nothing else to do. Girls didn't have sports, so there weren't any girls' basketball games. . . . You didn't have soccer or any of this sort of stuff. So all the hopes and dreams of an entire town would go on 10 boys and what they did. And you'd just talk about those 10 boys endlessly. "Oh! I hope there's a growth spurt left in him," they'd say. And oh, I just wanted to be one of those ten boys! Never could! I just sort of thought it was this way everywhere.

Maturity Stories
Following high school, Phil went to Indiana University, graduating in 5 ½ years. He said that he almost didn't make it: "I had a 2.13 grade-point average, I had already been there beyond the allotted time (six years), and they threatened to kick me out. When the threat came I got straight A's the last semester."

The big move came next. Once out of college, Phil moved to New York City where he began to find a place for himself.

My cousin had pitched for the Yankees, and that was a big deal for me. That and that there were so many great musicians here, I was really into music. My plan was to get a teaching license. I passed the exam and got a license, but didn't do it. It just seemed too tough. Instead, I took temporary office jobs. One of them took me to the Natural Resources Defense Council. This was an environmental law firm that had just been formed the year after Earth Day. All I did was alphabetize file cards for fundraisers, but I kept telling them that I could write. So they gave me research papers and liked what I wrote. They kept kicking me up, I was a total part of the Peter Principal.

Finally the boss of the whole thing, John Adams, came in one night and said: "You're not doing us any good. You're not doing yourself any good. You've got to do something different. I'm not kicking you out. I'll help you make a transition, but you've got to move forward in your life." So I ended up at the Yale Forestry School. Me, with a 2.1 average, in my 6th year at Indiana University, a graduate student at Yale! And I did well because it was interesting. I liked environmental matters by then. After a couple of years, I graduated. Right after, in 1977, the Nature Conservancy hired me. It's 25 years later, and I'm still working for them.

Publishing Stories
One Friday night, before Phil left New York, he went to a basketball game. "I thought it was going to be just like back in Speedway; that it was going to be in the high school gym, and that everyone in the neighborhood would be in the audience. It's funny now, but at the time, as I was flipping through the phone book to find a high school in lower Manhattan, I really believed that most people living below 14th Street would be at the game....The nearest school was called George Washington High School. I got the address and walked over to the school and asked, "When's the ball game?" A lady told me, "We had it. It was Wednesday afternoon at 3." I thought, "How ridiculous." But I left and the next Wednesday at 3, I went to the school. There was indeed a ball game but there couldn't have been 50 people there, mostly other high school students. I began to think maybe this isn't weird. Maybe where I was from was weird. And I started doing some research. I found out that 17 of the 18 biggest gymnasiums in the United States are in Indiana. And that was strange."

This understanding led to the idea for Phil's first book. A reporter friend who was working with Sports Illustrated encouraged him to write about the folklore of Indiana and those gyms and how outlandish and big they were. "My research got turned into a Sports Illustrated article, which I didn't write but got paid something like $3,000 for. It was fantastic deal for me because I got to to travel around Indiana and interview people and do all the research for the article. And because I was from Sports Illustrated, I could interview gods. At the end of it, I had a lot of material. Because I had written a book for my day job at the Nature Conservancy, Building an Ark: Tools for the Preservation of Natural Diversity I was able to get an agent, and sell my material almost immediately to Random House. The book is called Hoosiers, and it did very well."

When Phil returned home for a visit, he went to see his teacher, Grace Hine, and they had a good laugh. "Phil," she said, "you'll never guess what happened. I was at the Kroger's store and, instead of TV Guide, they had your book! I picked it up, and I couldn't believe my eyes. I told the check-out girl that you were my student once, and she didn't' even care!"

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