He ranked in the middle of his class in school, but says in an interview with
Author and Artists for Young Adults (
AAYA) that he was more interested in baseball and riding bikes with his three brothers than he was in school. His mother, however, had other ideas about how he should spend his time, and in the fifth grade she made him read for twenty minutes each day. "I didn't want to read for twenty minutes," Janeczko remembers, "I had done my school work, that was reading, that was enough. I wanted to be out with my brothers, playing ball, getting into trouble." His mother prevailed, and at first Janeczko says that he started getting headaches from keeping one eye on his book and the other on the clock. Eventually, he says, "I started reading for longer and longer times, not because she was making me, but because I was finally starting to get into it. The Hardy Boys were exciting, dangerous, mysterious and funny. I didn't find out until much later that they were racist and sexist."
Janeczko attended the same schools as his older brothers, and remembers that when he was going to the Catholic High School his brother was "a thug and an outlaw and I was just this short little ninth-grader who called attention to himself by wearing a loud sweater vest." When his older brother graduated from high school his mother saw the chance to get her young son into a better school, so she transferred him to a school run by Christian brothers noted for their discipline and corporal punishment.
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