Rose Kacherian Rybak always had a love of reading and now at age 96 can once again count herself a published author. “Whale Ahoy!”, published this fall by PLAYS Magazine, is an educational and humorous tale to be performed by young actors about the crew of a whale- watching ship and a big game hunter’s devious plan to capture one of the giant creatures. It’s the latest in what has been a lifelong exercise in flexing her boundless creativity.
This skill is the product of years of experience. Rybak told the Weekly, “As soon as I found out about reading, I wouldn’t leave the library.” In second grade, her burgeoning talent led to her first published poem, “Spring,” appearing in her local newspaper in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for which she was paid one quarter.
When her family relocated to New York a few years later, she began submitting her work to the Hairenik Weekly and as a teenager in the Armenian Youth Federation covered many of its events in the newspaper. “I really appreciated the platform the Weekly gave me to express myself,” she said.
After graduating high school, she attended Hunter College for one year. She left to take a position as an advertising copywriter at the New York Herald Tribune. In the ensuing years, she married and subsequently left the Tribune to become a stay-at-home mom. She was not done with writing, however, and embarked on a career in playwriting in an unexpected way. As president of the Parent Teacher Association at her daughters’ school, she was invited to attend plays performed by the students. She thought to herself, “I should be able to do better than that,” so she volunteered to write the next play for her daughter Lynn’s fifth grade class.
Her daughter’s teacher loved the play, “The Day The Moonmen Landed,” which celebrates the diversity of cultures across the United States, and submitted it to PLAYS Magazine in Boston. Not only did they offer a contract to publish the play, but they asked for more. From there, Rybak wrote and published many more plays, some of which were included in anthologies available in public libraries. When her daughters grew older, Rybak returned to writing advertising copy, this time for The New York Times. She also had an unfulfilled ambition to complete the college education she had interrupted to devote more time to her family.
When she was about to retire from The New York Times, she learned about the Queens College life achievement awards, which gave academic credit for professional accomplishments, so she gathered her publications in a shopping bag to be evaluated by a professor at the college. “When the professor called me over, I put the shopping bag on the table, where it broke, spreading the publications and articles all over the place, at which time the professor announced, ‘You made your point.’” She was given credit for two years and completed her studies, graduating summa cum laude.
She also received an internship with the New York City Police Department to initiate a monthly newsletter for the volunteer Auxiliary Unit. This was a satisfying experience for Rybak, since her husband Edward was a police captain in the Public Information Unit office in the same building. Rybak served on the Board of Trustees for the New York Home for the Aged in Flushing, and she preserved accounts of the Armenian Genocide by interviewing resident survivors.
Rybak has kept busy in retirement, including writing two musical shows satirizing life at the independent living community where she now lives outside Philadelphia. Over the years, she collaborated with her daughter, Dr. Constance Shelengian, a music educator who composed songs to accompany many of her mother’s plays. Recently, they came across an unpublished work “Whale Ahoy!”, so they submitted it to PLAYS, now located in Newton, Massachusetts. According to editor Liz Preston, “It’s quite entertaining, with a good message and wonderful information about these beautiful, yet vulnerable mammals… it’s such a joy to read a play so well-written and carefully edited, with pitch-perfect dialogue.”
Rybak was also pleased to discover that her plays are being performed as far away as Germany. Helen Müller, an English teacher in the northern town of Rendsburg, had attended school for a year as a child in the United States, where she fondly recalls acting in “The Day The Moonmen Landed.” Müller told the Weekly that the play’s story about being an alien surrounded by foreign customs resonated with her at the time, and the play still has great significance to her life. This fondness led her to stage it last year with her class of particularly motivated students.
Rybak’s journey is a testament to the power of creativity and endurance. She tries to do as much as she can physically and emphasizes the importance of keeping mentally active. “The more you can do, the better your quality of life will be,” she said.
And you never know who it might inspire.
Paul Vartan Sookiasian
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