NAMES IN THE NEWS : Chance Spawned Writer Gage

NEW YORK — Author Nicholas Gage says his writing skills were unleashed in a chance encounter with a salty-tongued teacher when he was a struggling, 13-year-old refugee.

Gage writes in the Dec. 17 issue of Parade magazine how as a seventh-grader he met Marjorie Hurd Rabidou in Worcester, Mass.

Told to choose a hobby, Gage said he “decided to follow the prettiest girl in my class--the blue-eyed daughter of the local Lutheran minister.”

“She led me through the door marked ‘Newspaper Club’ and into the presence of Miss Hurd, the newspaper adviser and English teacher who would become my mentor and my muse.”

Gage wrote an essay for the school paper about his mother, who was killed by Communists during the Greek civil war. Hurd sent it to the Freedoms Foundation in Valley Forge, Pa., where it won a medal.

Gage was a reporter for The New York Times and later recorded his mother’s life and death in the book “Eleni,” and his father’s story in “A Place for Us.”