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Phyllis remembers life on the ranch with no pleasure. "We were two or three miles from the next neighbor, and there were no children to play with. There was nobody in the school but my brother and me and an occasional farmer's child. Often we couldn't get a teacher, and Mother would teach us."
Phyllis's father died when she was twelve, and the widow was forced to move again. "We went back to Ogden, Utah, to my mother's home. My aunt was a widow, too, so we lived in a sort of communal home—we never had a home, and to have a real home, after I got married, was just marvelous."
Giddy Going. At the University of Utah, Phyllis McGinley suppressed a natural appetite for scholarship—"I knew I was bright, but I also knew that in that period and in that environment, brainy women were not appreciated. I made myself over into a giddy prom trotter. I wasn't all that pretty— my teeth stuck out—and so I had to try harder. I didn't learn very much at Ogden, but I had what I always wanted all my life: the society of people, friends, beaux."
Even so, it was on campus that the giddy prom trotter's brainy side began to show. For as far back as she could remember, the muse had been coaxing her thoughts toward verse, most of it not much better than her first quatrain, composed at six:
Sometimes in the evening When the sky is blue and pink, I love to lie in the hammock And think and think and think.
"From then on," says Phyllis McGinley, "it never occurred to me that I wasn't going to be a poet." The conviction spurred her to enter a university competition offering cash prizes for the best poetry, short stories and essays. For two years running, Contestant McGinley, submitting pseudonymous compositions in all three categories, won all the honors—and all the money. She also began sending poetry to New York magazines, and in 1929, after some of them were bought, she invaded this receptive market in person.
As a precaution against the possibility that her verse might not produce an instant livelihood, she took a job teaching English in a junior high school in New Rochelle, 17 miles north of New York City. She sold a few verses to The New Yorker, then got a plaintive note from Fiction Editor Katherine White: "Dear Miss McGinley: We are buying your poem, but why do you sing the same sad songs all lady poets sing?" Phyllis took the hint, began turning out light and amusing verse.
In New Rochelle, her principal showed something less than approval of the new schoolmarm's extracurricular pursuit. One day he summoned her to the office, brandished a copy of The New Yorker with a McGinley poem in it, and confided the hope that this moonlighting would not interfere with her classroom commitments. At the end of the year, the schoolteacher decided not to let classroom commitments hobble her muse. She resigned.
Unexpected Banns. The poet in Phyllis McGinley marked time for cautious years, however, before zeroing in on her life's theme. Measured against the high standards she had set as a little girl, New York in the Depression 1930s was not