Newbery Medal-winning author makes $130,000 endowment to Joliet Junior College Foundation

The Joliet Junior College Foundation recently received a $130,000 endowment from acclaimed author and Newberry winner Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.

Naylor is a 1953 JJC alumna, longtime JJC donor and an award-winning author.

“I was able to complete JJC in three semesters and had two teachers who were absolute tops.”

—  Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, award-winning author and 1953 JJC alumna and long-time JJC donor

She received the Newbery Medal for the children’s novel “Shiloh.” Naylor’s young adult Alice McKinley series is among the most frequently challenged and banned books for its graphic portrayal of the experiences of an ordinary girl growing up without her mother.

Naylor’s 149th book recently was accepted for publication, according to a news release from JJC. According to Naylor’s website, she’s also had 10,443 rejections through the years.

And Naylor was happy to include JJC among the organizations she wished to support.

“I made quite a bit of money with my writing,” said Naylor, now 91. “So I’m just looking for places that I really wanted to contribute to.”

Kristi Mulvey, executive director of advancement and the JJC Foundation, said in the release that the Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Endowed Scholarship at JJC will help future JJC students pursue their education.

“Endowed scholarships are a great way for donors and alumni to leave their legacy at our institution forever,” Mulvey said.

Joliet influenced Naylor’s writing

Naylor was 12 when she moved with her parents from Anderson, Indiana, to 210 Fourth Ave. in Joliet.

Anderson was “a nice town,” with two grades to a classroom, Naylor said.

Her parents had met at Anderson College, and the family attended an Assembles of God Church.

But living in Joliet was “a change in so many things,” Naylor said.

“In many ways, it changed me – and opened me up to sort of a different world,” she said.

For instance, Naylor’s classmates in Anderson had names such as Janet, Marie, Timmy and Richard. Her new classmates at Washington Junior High were called Yvonne, Shirley, Lou and Francis, she said.

That sparked Naylor’s curiosity to learn their personal stories.

“I thought, ‘Where did these names come from?’ ” Naylor said. “And where did these people come from?”

Naylor recalled struggling with arithmetic and memorizing long poems. She walked to school since she lived a block away “in a wonderful house.”

“It was the first time I had in my life what I wanted most of all – a room to myself with a desk,” she said.

When walking to school, Naylor passed the Richards Street United Methodist Church, which her family joined, she said. They joined that church (now closed) and Naylor sang in the teen choir.

“My parents wanted a church where teenagers were welcome,” Naylor said. “I think it was one of the smartest decisions we made.”

Foundations of her writing

Naylor said she wrote her first story in kindergarten and by first grade was writing and creating little books on the backs of scrap paper. She was asked to compose a poem for the principal’s birthday in the sixth grade.

Naylor was a freshman at Joliet Township High School the second time she read an original poem aloud. It was a long, humorous piece about Christmas shopping.

Everyone laughed, including the teacher, who “laughed so hard she had tears running down her face,” Naylor said.

“The class clapped a lot, and the teacher said it was very good,” Naylor said. “I had so much fun writing it. I felt just wonderful.”

Her teacher was skeptical, however. She asked Naylor to remain after class and asked her if she had copied the poem because it was that good.

“I was so flabbergasted and embarrassed that I didn’t try to argue with her,” Naylor said. “I still remember in my mind wondering, ‘How do I prove this?’ I was trying to think if I scribbled it first on another piece of paper and if I tore it up and it went in the wastebasket. All the rest of the year, I avoided her.”

She published her first story at age 16 when a former Sunday school teacher asked her to write a baseball story for her magazine, she said.

The teacher turned magazine editor paid Naylor $4.67 for “Mike’s Hero,” Naylor said.

“My allowance at the time was only $5 a week,” she said. “I had to buy all my clothes and pay for my lunch, so that was a big deal.”

In high school, Naylor read monologues in speech class, participated in choir, madrigals, the operetta and the senior play. She became the senior poet for her high school class “because they couldn’t find anyone else to do it,” she said with a laugh.

After graduation, Naylor studied education at JJC, when classes were held at Joliet Township High School.

“I was able to complete JJC in three semesters and had two teachers who were absolute tops,” Naylor said in the release from JJC. “Catherine Wood, for speech and drama, where I learned to project my voice and entertain a class, and Mr. Puddicombe for physiology, who made every session informative and interesting.”

Her JJC years were challenging not because of the classes but because she had married young to a man who was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

Naylor later wrote about her struggles in the book “Crazy Love: An Autobiographical Account of Marriage and Madness.”

She returned to Joliet in 2013 to speak at the Joliet Public Library Black Road branch about her career and to promote the last book in her 28-volume Alice McKinley series, “Now I’ll Tell You Everything. “