Nathan Howard, 5, wins nationwide essay contest by expressing
his love for trains
Every day since June, Nathan Howard has asked his parents about
the mail.
The 5-year-old Hollister boy had gone on a vacation with his
family that month, riding a train along Amtrak’s Sunset Limited
route to Florida. During the trip, Nathan’s parents, Terry and
Susan, noticed that Amtrak was sponsoring a nationwide essay
contest for children 4-12 years of age to describe what they loved
about trains.
Nathan Howard, 5, wins nationwide essay contest by expressing his love for trains
Every day since June, Nathan Howard has asked his parents about the mail.
The 5-year-old Hollister boy had gone on a vacation with his family that month, riding a train along Amtrak’s Sunset Limited route to Florida. During the trip, Nathan’s parents, Terry and Susan, noticed that Amtrak was sponsoring a nationwide essay contest for children 4-12 years of age to describe what they loved about trains.
So Nathan and his older brother Joe, 8, entered the contest – Joe wrote his own essay while actually on board, but Susan waited until the family came home to have Nathan dictate to her why he liked trains. They mailed in his entry, and the questioning began.
“He thought he was getting a train – he didn’t really understand that only winners were going to get a train, and we tried to talk to him about it,” Terry said about the prizes being given away by Amtrak and Lionel, who have jointly sponsored the contest since 1999. “He’d forget for a day or so and then he’d remember and ask again and we’d roll our eyes. I was afraid we were going to have to buy him a train set, because I didn’t think a 5 year old would win. Then we got a certified letter saying he did win. And he started asking about the mail again.”
A few weeks after replying to the certified letter, Nathan finally received his train, which today is set up in the Howard’s living room, along with the train that will soon be circling the family’s Christmas tree. Nathan spends hours laying on the carpet, turning his train off and on and “watching it go.”
More than 200 children entered the contest, which began in June and ended Aug. 31. The 14 first-place winners, including Nathan, received Lionel’s New York Central Flyer train set, while a grand prize winner received the Santa Fe El Capitan train set. Nathan was the second youngest winner in the contest.
“I love the conductors and I love the train and the whole entire train,” Nathan said in his essay. “I like the sleeping cars and the dining car.”
Trains have always been one of Nathan’s favorite things, “ever since he knew what something on wheels was,” Susan said. Thomas the Tank Engine was a preferred toy and movie choice since he was about 2, his mother said, but his love of trains really grew after a visit to his grandmother in Florida shortly after Hurricane Katrina.
“You could only go so far by road after Katrina,” Susan said. “I think all boys are into transportation; ours have always been excited by trains, but after riding one, that excitement just grew.”
During this recent trip, the Howards had two sleeping quarters on the train, so that during the day, the boys could play games and watch videos in “their own room.” The family ate their meals in the dining car, Nathan’s favorite car on the train, and at night, Terry and Susan would each take one of the boys with them to sleep.
Staring out the windows of the train was “fun,” Nathan said. “We saw a lot of desert and big cactus. I saw lots of animals. And I liked the dining car. It had food and I ate a big chocolate chip cookie. It was huge!”
Joe, whose original photography recently took fourth place in his division at the San Benito County Fair, wrote his own essay on the train, but Nathan worked on his with Susan after the family came home.
“He just kept saying ‘and, and, and.’ I didn’t want to change it at all because I didn’t think they would buy that a 5 year old would say something the way I would,” said Susan, a seventh grade teacher at Southside School. “So I wrote it word for word the way he said it. Even when the grammar was bad, I thought to myself, ‘well, I can’t fix this.’ It really was more like a list. He just rattled off the things he liked about trains, and I just wrote them down.”
Nathan doesn’t seem to fully understand the idea that he won a contest – instead, he appears to just be happy to have his train.
“My dad gave us a train set like this one when Nathan was about 1-1/2 years old,” Susan said. “They loved it so much we couldn’t keep them away from it and now it’s in pieces in a box somewhere. And Nathan had a lot of big, wooden trains that we gave away because he wasn’t playing with them anymore. But this one is different. He’s pretty happy with it.”
