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Relying on her “writing muse,” to help her create new stories, 87-year-old Beatrice Law, a lifelong resident of Dayton, has been writing since the 1960s.
Law’s biggest supporter over the years was her younger sister, Ruth Bartley. “I was 13 when Ruth was born,” Law said. “I held her when she was less than an hour old and was told to handle her carefully as she was born without a hip socket.”
Law helped Bartley to stand alone and learn to walk. “We were very close,” she said. And Bartley liked all of Law’s stories, including a special Christmas story she wrote in 2012, “A Night Out for Mrs. Claus.”
“Ruth tried everything she could think of and called everyone she knew to try to get someone to make my story into a movie for children,” Law said. “We just weren’t hitting the right people, so nothing happened.”
“The first story I wrote was published in our church Sunday school paper, and they paid me $37 for the use of it,” Law said. “In those days, that was a lot of money!”
That idea for that first story, titled “Miracles Still Happen,” just popped into Law’s head. She said to this day her muse continues to plague her until she finally writes the stories down, longhand, on a small writing tablet.
“That first story lead to more stories,” Law said. “Every time I sat down and wrote a story, my muse would be appeased for a period of time and leave me alone.” Law said that to this day if she doesn’t take the time to write down what comes into her head, she will be kept awake at night thinking about the stories.
When Law was a young girl growing up in Parkside in Dayton she started working at age 12 as a baby sitter. By the age of 14, she had taken over her brothers’ newspaper route. “Girls weren’t supposed to have routes back then,” she said. But undaunted, she did it anyway, building the 60 customer route to 100 before turning it back over to her three brothers a year later. “They couldn’t handle the route between the three of them and I handled it all by myself,” she said.
Law set the stage for a lifetime of perseverance in those days, earning 34 cents a week on the newspaper route. And once she started writing stories for children, she didn’t stop. “I’ve written about 50 stories in my life,” Law said. “None were published after my first story because I haven’t been able to figure out how to get that to happen.
Ideas for her stories came from those for which they were written — the children themselves. “I would talk to the boys and girls and ask them what animal they would be, and I would give animals in my book the name of the child. Almost every child will answer that question immediately when asked.”
Law’s beloved sister was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer in April 2014. “She was having pain in her back and shoulders and chest, and doctors ran tests and found the cancer in her bone marrow and organs,” Law said. “It had a good hold on her, but she fought very hard.”
Bartley’s cancer progressed rapidly, and shortly after her 74th birthday in October of last year she died. But not before she made her big sister promise that she would try to have her story published.
The five-page, handwritten story follows the adventures of Mrs. Claus when she took an ill Santa’s place and delivered all the toys on Christmas Eve. “She had a glorious time going up and down chimneys and leaving toys for the children,” Law said. “And she told Santa that she now understood why he loved going out on Christmas Eve because it was such a joy.”
And though she kept her promise to her dying sister, her story has not yet been published. “It’s just a hand-written story with no illustrations,” Law said. “I’d love to get it published and have someone create the pictures.”
Law plans to continue writing as long as her muse fills her head and urges her to put pen to paper. And though she doesn’t use a computer or typewriter, she has kept all of her stories and is grateful for the life she shared with her beloved sister, who was always her biggest fan.
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