PSU Magazine Winter 2003

By Melissa Steineger A fter an apprenticeship in the school of really hard knocks and a brush with fame as a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, Portland author Larry Colton overflows with stories about the pain (now mostly funny) and pleasure of writing. O f course, it's the painful experiences that make for the best stories. For instance, after his novel, Goat Brothers, was published in 1993, slipped amid the positive acclaim was the Los Angeles reviewer who said it was "a black mark on the University of California that he ever graduated from there and a slap in the face to serious students everywhere. " 'Like I'm the first guy who didn't bust his butt in college," says a mostly amused Colton. Still, the Los Angeles native admits he grew up "a beach bum kind of guy" and continued his laid-back lifestyle at University of California-Berkeley where, he says, he "majored in girls, beer, and baseball. " He never took a writing class. Why would he7 He'd known since he was seven that he'd be a pro baseball player. Schoolwork wasn't high on his priority list. "I was a jock and a frat boy," he says. "The intellectual's worst nightmare." 10 PSU MAGAZINE WINTER 2003 A fter graduating in 1965, Colton spent a few years in the minors for Philadelphia and was called up to the major league Phillies in 1968. But after a single game, Colton's career ended in a "barroom fight that should never have happened ," he says. "l didn't instigate it; l was an innocent bystander. But 1was somewhere 1 shouldn't have been. " Colton separated his shoulder in the incident and despite 18 months in rehab , he wasn 't able to regain major league pitching form . Colton moved to Ponland , where one day a friend who knew that he was in need of a job and liked working with kids, suggested they check out a new experimental school for disadvantaged high schoolers. "l ran into the princi– pal in the hallway," says Colton, "and we got to talking. He said, 'Why don't you come and be a teacher's aide."' Colton did , unaware that teaching in the far-out '?Os was a whole new bag. The teachers were on the cutting edge of liberal education and of liberal American cu lture. For Colton-former beach bum, frat rat, and jock-"it was," he says, "a pretty amazing cultural shock for me." The shock took root. "I was so into teaching," says Colton, "thats all From beach bum to baseball player, Larry Colton never dreamed he was a writer underneath it all. l cared about. " Colton had always been an enthusias– tic letter writer. Now he leveraged that experience in an unusual attempt to capture the interest of a classroom of slouched-in-their-chairs, bored– beyond-belief, at-risk-of-quitting-the– world high school students. T o keep his students engrossed in, say, the correct use of the apostrophe, Colton stayed up nights writing stories featuring those same students. "I wanted something," he says, "that would keep them from walking out of the classroom. " T oward the encl of his second year of teaching, Colton eyed the approaching three-month break and decided to try out for a summer with the Portland Mavericks baseball team. "The summer before l'd painted houses," he says, "and l figured anything would be better than that. " Colton also figured that he just might be ab le to convince The Oregonian to publish a story about his experiences. A story he would write. He did. They did. And a funny thing happened. Larry Colton was officially a writer. The editor of Willamette Week called him up and asked him to write a