Gilbert Patten
In describing his childhood, Patten says, “There was no Sunday baseball in those days, no movies on any day, no radio to bring entertainment and cheer from the throbbing far-away world, no automobiles flying over the highways, not much of anything to do but sit around and take it.”
He developed an insatiable desire to read, anything he could get. With few books in his home and no library in the town he began borrowing books and other reading material from anyone who had them. He says, “My hunger for reading increased as it was fed, and I soon became a borrowing and begging nuisance.”
During a visit to the attic of another boy’s house he found a tattered copy of The Pirate’s Own Book by Charles Ellms. Unable to resist, he took it home. The book described the “degraded and bestial lives” of many notorious pirates. He says, “Not only were the pictures fascinating, many were repulsive in their gory brutality. And the text was equally fascinating and shocking.” While he did read it, the book gave Willie a permanent distaste for sea stories and gory details.
You can view this same book. It is available online at this link at the Project Gutenberg web site: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/12216/pg12216-images.html
Willie’s first introduction to dime novels came as a loan from an older boy he names in his autobiography as Frank Nutter. When he asked Frank to loan him something to read, the older boy handed him a dime novel with the warning, “Don’t let your folks see it and don’t tell anyone I let you have it. They’d say I was trying to ruin you.” The book was a reprint of an English tale about a boy stolen by gypsies and raised to believe he was one of them, nothing like the gore and depravity of the pirate book.
Frank later lent Willie copies of dime novels published by the Beadle and Adams company. These stories became his favorite. They contained, “Indian stories…replete with thrilling situations, clever stratagems, surprising twists, and extravagant but clean and inoffensive humor.”
Willie started writing stories some time before this but these dime novels spurred his imagination to the point that he began “writing more stories feverishly”.
He had difficulty getting paper to write on. His parents did not have money for the expense. He begin meeting the afternoon train that came into Corinna, often bringing passengers who would stay at the local hotel. He would beg to carry their luggage. Sometimes he would receive a two-cent piece or even a nickel for the chore. At the general store he used the coins to buy a “sheet of brown wrapping paper large enough to be cut up into smaller sheets on which, by covering both sides, quite a lot of words could be written.”
He showed his first long story to Frank Nutter. After reading it Frank said, “Say, this is pretty good, Will…If you keep on you’ll get to be a real author some day.” Patten says at that point, “The seed of a dream had been planted.”
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