PROMPT KING

Princess Diana once ate all by herself in the corner of a filthy American café. Her waitress’s name was Blanche, who worked for a man named Moe.

All of the above?

All made up.

But this is true: Author and creative writing instructor Bob Boone—the director of Glencoe Study Center since it opened in 1977—has had a longtime knack for deleting the fears of young scribes and unlocking their gift for the written word through a variety of stimulating prompts.

Several of the kick-starters are fleshed out in Moe’s Café: 48 Decidedly Different Creative Writing Prompts (Good Year Books, 2006), which Boone, 83, wrote with Mark H. Larson. Their follow-up to Moe’s Café, Joan’s Junk Shop: For Developing Writers (Good Year Books), was published in 2012.

One of his students had come up with the Princess-Di-sitting-at-a-greasy-spoon’s-counter scene and put pen to paper, prompting Boone to smile and praise the youngster for fully understanding the exercise in creativity and taking it to a royally inventive level.

“Teaching has always been gratifying and satisfying, and what I discovered is that young writers work particularly well in a group setting,” says Boone, who in 1991 founded Young Chicago Authors, “a home for teens and young adults looking for ways to express themselves—and finding a diverse community to inspire and support them,” and served as its president. It started as a writing workshop for high school sophomores (chosen from an applicant pool of 100) who would gather on Saturdays in a Wicker Park apartment.

In 2009 he received an award from the Coming Up Taller Leadership Enhancement Conference at the White House for transforming the lives of YCA enrollees.

As vice president and education director of Chicago-based Foundation for Student Athletes (formerly known as Athletes for Better Education) from 1984-1992, Boone encouraged dribblers to become serious scribblers.

“One of our programs featured a weekend basketball tournament for 15 schools,” recalls Boone, who grew up in Winnetka, attended New Trier Township High School (Class of 1959), and taught English at Highland Park High School from 1970- 1978 before working as a special education consultant at HPHS from 1984-1990.

“The athletes,” the Glencoe resident adds, “would show up on Game Day, drop their papers off, and then hit the court for basketball games.”

Boone’s prose has appeared in all kinds of books (from textbooks to a teaching memoir to a book of short stories to a sports biography, written with Gerald Grunska, about Chicago Cubs great Hack Wilson, among other works); magazines (Sports Illustrated, Baseball Digest); and newspapers (Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, The Reader, Newcity). The headline of one of his pieces that ran in The Reader was, “All About a Bout.”

For his 2011 book of short stories, Forest High (Amika Press), Boone crafted stories of educators and their students at a fictional high school. In the final chapter, “The Caddy,” he writes, “I love everything about (Pine Acres, a golf club). That’s why I came back. I love standing all alone in the bag room at night. It’s dark in there except for a little light reflecting off the metal clubs. It smells of leather and earth. In the whole world, there’s nothing like the smell of the bag room at a country club.”

Former New Trier English teacher Dave McKendall inspired Boone more than any other instructor did. Boone took a McKendall-taught class in his senior year at the Winnetka school.

“He asked good questions,” Boone says. “He led good discussions of books, and when he graded papers he wrote very helpful comments on them. Teaching was fun to him. It was in his classroom where I thought, ‘I want to become a teacher someday.’”

Boone majored in English and minored in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, where he first met his future wife, art major Sue, at the Phi Delt house. They got married in 1964 and raised children Fanny, Sarah, and Charlie.

Fanny tutors and spearheads fundraising events at Glencoe Study Center, which provides a slew of educational services, including test preparation, private and small group tutoring, ESL classes, creative writing classes, creative writing counseling, supervised study, project support, distance learning support, and GED.

Boone earned his M.A. in English at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York, the first graduate school in the United States that offered a curriculum focused specifically on teacher education. He taught English and Social Studies to fifth and sixth graders at Staten Island Academy from 1964-1967, before accepting a post as an English teacher at Frankfurt International School in West Germany; his tenure in Europe lasted from 1967-1969.

Boone completed his Ph.D. in English Education at Northwestern University in 1975.

A 2019 Glencoe Hall of Fame inductee and the Willow Review’s Featured Illinois Author of the Year (also in 2019), Boone was named Volunteer of the Year by North Shore magazine in 1993 and Chicagoan of the Year by Chicago Magazine in 2003.

He’s working on a novella these days. It’s about an Iowan named Ollie who has a gift for telling sports stories and has to go into hiding in Chicago following a fatality in a bombing.

“One of my favorite moments as a teacher took place when I spoke to a group of students at DePaul University,” Boone says. “They thought I’d just lecture that day. I also gave them a writing exercise, asking them to describe a time in their lives that they were grateful for having learned something, such as gloving a ground ball in baseball or hitting a backhand in tennis or finding a way out of a situation in which they were lost.”

It didn’t long for Boone to hear classroom music to his ears, or, in his words, “the sound of pens moving across paper.”

The Glencoe Study Center is located at 706 Green Bay Road, #6, in Glencoe. Call 847- 835-5430 for more information.