He also loved attention and had a flair for drama. Though not the class clown, he enjoyed saying and doing outrageous things. "I would say out loud things that other kids seemed reluctant to say," he once recalled. "I liked to shock people--to leave them lurching, not laughing." His sense of life's quirks was heightened by a serious bout of rheumatic fever when he was a young teen. The illness, which had the potential to debilitate him with a weakened heart for the rest of his life, or even kill him, left Koertge with a "sense of the insubstantiality of my body and made me alternately tentative and foolishly bold."
"People Started to Call Me a Writer"
Koertge began writing in high school. "It was certainly something I was drawn to partly because it was something I could do," he remembered. His interest in the field led him to the University of Illinois, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1962, and then on to the University of Arizona, where he received a master's degree in 1965.
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