How to Learn to Write

When he began teaching English at Denver's big South High School (3,300 students) in 1935, exuberant Harold Kea-bles lived only six blocks away. It was too far. He bought a house half a block away so that he could get to school faster.

Keables whirs out of his front door every morning at 7:30. Within minutes, he begins spouting poetry as he strides up and down before his students. Soon covered with chalk dust, he pounds and perches on the front seats (kept vacant to give him room). He brooks no interruption. If an office messenger invades the room. Keables cries: "I told you we should have locked the door!" If a daydreaming student stares out the window, Keables peers through his bifocals and thunders: "Get out!" Lanky Harold Raymond Keables, 60, is brimful of a passion to teach literature and composition to bright seniors. All he asks is undivided attention. And it pays to pay attention to Teacher Keables.

No. 1 in the U.S. Since 1950, Keables' students have triumphed in the nationwide Scholastic Magazine writing contest with 20 first prizes, twelve seconds and 21 thirds. Last week the record was even more impressive. With 23 winners, Denver became the nation's top high school-writing city--and nine of Denver's winners were Keables' students. The No. i winner: South High's tiny, pretty Sherry Granzow, 17, a psychologist's daughter and one of Keables' seniors. She walked off with the Ernestine Taggard Memorial Award, Scholastic's highest honor. She was the third Keables student to do so.

A South High student himself, Keables yearned to teach after graduating from the University of Denver ('23). But his father and two brothers pushed him into the family restaurant business. Quitting after ten unhappy years, he joined the South High faculty, caught fire in the 19405. "I started late." says he wryly.

"But I'm seasoned now, and I know what I'm doing." South High students agree ("Most teachers discuss--Keables teaches"). Says one senior: "In Keables' classes you compete with every other student he's ever had. I've written my heart out trying to beat somebody who's probably old enough to be my mother." God-Given Ability. In his creative writing class, Keables insists on personal experience: "I want them to write what they have seen, felt or done, not imitate something they've read." He aims at inductive instruction: "The writing itself is the chief basis of teaching." This means that Keables' key work is correcting papers, and a student's first joy is being able to decipher the man's scrawling. Says one student: "If you can read Keables, you've got it made." Says another: "Keables does more writing on a paper than it had when you handed it in to him. But we all love him." Lugging papers home. Keables goes to work on them immediately (and continues all weekend). He follows his wife around the house, reading to her. Tumbling into bed at u, he pops up again at 6 to go on working. Delighted by a really good composition, he bounds into class even faster, whips out the paper and says hoarsely: "Nowhere is something." Dedicated Teacher Keables is a frustrated writer who treats each student as a kind of novel in progress. He carries on voluminous correspondence with old grads, often gets back weighty manuscripts for criticism. Since he teaches South High's stiffest senior English courses, he gets the best students. He also gets the best out of them.

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