Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great (8 page)

   
AFTER three weeks of day camp my favorite activity is still pottery. Mouse, Russ Bindel, and Sam Sweeney agree. The four of us haven't switched activities yet, even though we are supposed to try something new every week. Denise says by the end of the summer we should each have a really good bowl to take home with us. My mother is not as happy about pottery as I am. This is because I come home covered with clay every day. It even gets in my hair and ears. The only bad things about pottery are I have to put up with a lot of shampoos and Mom is always chasing me with the QTips.

   
Russ Bindel's mother runs the camp office. She's pretty nice. Russ looks just like her. He's a year older than me, but so small he looks about eight. And between Russ and his mother I have never seen so many freckles.

   
Sam Sweeney reminds me of Peter Hatcher. He thinks he knows everything. And when his clay elephant broke in the kiln he blamed it on me and Mouse for making too much noise while it was baking. Denise told him it wasn't anybody's fault. And maybe he left too many cracks in his elephant because besides breaking in half one tusk also fell off. Sam is the only one of us who doesn't use the pottery wheel. He's always making animals, and elephants are his favorite. I can't imagine what he does with all his elephants. Mouse and I call him Babar in private.

   
Of course we can't stay at pottery all day. That's our main activity, from 9:3o until lunchtime. After lunch we are supposed to have a quiet hour. We usually break up into small groups and sit under the trees. Most of our counselors play the guitar and we sing a lot. I have learned some very unusual songs at day camp. One is about Ann Boleyn, who was married to King Henry the Eighth of England. But when she didn't have any boy babies he decided she should have her head chopped off. And in this song she is back haunting King Henry's castle, "with her head tucked underneath her arm." I like to sing the song but I don't like to think about her walking around like that. She reminds me of the Headless Horseman.

   
This morning Denise asked me to go to the camp office to tell Mrs. Bindel that she is expecting an important phone call. Mrs. Bindel was running some papers off on a very old-fashioned machine.

   
"Don't you have a photocopier?" I asked.

   
"No," Mrs. Bindel said.

   
"We have one in school. How come you don't have one here?"

   
"They're very expensive. We make do with this old mimeograph."

   
"Isn't it hard work to crank out all those copies?"

   
"No," Mrs. Bindel said.

   
I watched her for a while. "Want me to help you?" I asked.

   
"That's very nice of you, Sheila. But you better get back to your activity. And tell Denise I'll come and get her when her phone call comes through."

   
I still didn't go. Because all of a sudden I had the greatest idea of how to show the Tarrytown kids that I
was
an expert at something besides bandaging legs.

   
"We had a class newspaper last year," I told Mrs. Bindel. "I used to run off the copies in the office. Nobody had to help me. I did it all by myself."

   
"That must have been very interesting," Mrs. Bindel said.

   
"It was. I could use your old machine if we had a camp newspaper, couldn't I?"

   
"Well, I suppose so. But we don't have a camp newspaper."

   
"We should," I said.

   
"But we don't," Mrs. Bindel told me.

   
"Maybe we will!" I called, running out of the office.

   
I ran right into Mr. Healstrom, the director of our camp. He caught me so I didn't fall down. "What's your hurry?" he asked.

   
"Oh, Mr. Healstrom! You're just the one I want to see," I told him. "Do you know what we need here?"

   
"No, what?"

   
"A newspaper. A camp newspaper! And I've decided it's my duty to start one."

   
Mr. Healstrom said, "That's a very good idea."

   
“I knew you'd think so. I'll be in charge of everything." I said. "And I'll run off the copies on the mimeograph machine in the office. Even though it's old-fashioned I know I can work it."

   
"You may need some help, Sheila. Suppose I let you announce your plans this afternoon. Then you can form committees and get started."

   
"I don't need committees," I said. "I'm very experienced. I know exactly what to do!"

   
"Running a newspaper is a big job, Sheila," Mr. Healstrom said. "And nobody does it alone."

   
"I can do it, Mr. Healstrom. You'll see. I've even got a name picked out."

   
"What is it?" he asked.

   
"It's a surprise. You'll find out next Friday when you read the first issue."

   
"Well . . ." Mr. Healstrom said, "you seem determined to try it on your own. So, good luck!"

   
"Oh thanks, Mr. Healstrom! Thanks a lot!"

   
I ran back to pottery and told everyone about our camp newspaper.

   
"When's it coming out?" Mouse asked.

   
"On Friday," I said. "And I'm going to be very busy between now and then. I may have to skip pottery. You know, it's a big job to put out a paper all by yourself."

   
"That's just what I was thinking," Denise said. "What you need is a committee. Maybe you could get a reporter from each group to tell you what's going on.',

   
"I'll help you," Mouse said. "I'd like to be a reporter."

   
"I don't need any reporters," I told everyone. "I can do all that myself."

   
"But if I'm a reporter we can work together," Mouse said. "We can be a team."

   
"It's
my
idea and
I'm
doing everything!" I told her.

   
"Well, if that's the way you want to be about it," Mouse said. I could tell that Mouse was wishing she had thought up the idea of having a camp newspaper. And Russ and Sam were really surprised that I knew so much about it.

   
"Is my mother going to type the newspaper for you?" Russ asked.

   
"Of course not," I told him. "I'll type it myself."

   
"You know how to type?" he asked.

   
"There's nothing to it!" I said.

   
That night I wrote my first story. I called it "Babar Strikes Again." It was all about Sam Sweeney and his clay elephants, but of course I never mentioned him by name.

   
Starting the next morning I made my rounds of all the activities. I carried my pad around with me and kept a pencil tucked behind my ear. I jotted down all kinds of interesting things and story ideas such as "Libby the Dancing Skeleton" and "The Real Reason Denise Goes Barefoot." I discovered that at lunch. I was crawling around listening to bits of conversation when I noticed the bottoms of Denise's feet. She was sitting on the grass, leaning against a tree, and the bottoms of her feet pointed up. I don't know how I ever missed seeing them before. They are covered with warts! No wonder she doesn't wear shoes.

   
The next day was very hot, and as I trudged around from activity to activity I wondered what Mouse, Russ, and Sam were doing at pottery. I didn't come up with any new story ideas so I wrote a weather report, arranged a list of Do's and Don't's about the camp bus, and made up a crossword puzzle of counselors' names. I offered a prize to the first person to hand it in with all the right names.

 
  
On Thursday I went to the office to type out the first edition of my camp newspaper. I figured it would only take a few minutes and then I could go back to pottery. I was starting to miss Mouse and my regular camp routine. Mouse and Russ were probably having a lot of fun with the pottery wheel, and with me out of the way they'd each have extra turns.

   
But after typing for the longest time I was still working on "Babar Strikes Again" and the wastebasket was full of my mistakes. Finally Mrs. Bindel told me she really had to use her typewriter and I had better handwrite my newspaper on the stencil. I said that was fine with me because everyone in New York knows I have the best handwriting in the whole fourth grade.

   
I found out pretty fast that it's not so easy to write your best on a stencil. I kept goofing. And none of my lines came out straight. They all ran downhill. I threw away the first two stencils and made up my mind that the third one would be it, no matter what!

   
Across the whole top of the page I printed:

   
NEWSDATE

   
by Sheila the Great

   
That looked really neat except it took up a lot of room, so by the time I got to my crossword puzzle on the bottom of the page, I had to make it very small. I think I spelled "counselor" wrong, but you can't erase when you're using a stencil so I had to leave it that way. By the time I finished drawing little pictures of all our activities along the side margins of my newspaper, it was time to go home. And was I glad!

   
On Friday morning I was ready to use the mimeograph machine. I thought I'd zip out the seventy-five copies I needed and still make it back to pottery. Denise would probably let me use the wheel the whole time because I haven't had a turn all week.

   
But I discovered that you can't just zip out copies on an old mimeograph machine. For one thing, the machine uses a special kind of ink. And after half an hour my hands were full of it but the machine didn't have enough because every page came out blank. So I poured in a ton of ink and then when I cranked out the first few copies big blobs of purple were all over the paper and you couldn't read anything I'd written.