BATON ROUGE — WBRZ's 70 for 70 will profile some of the personalities who have been on Channel 2's air since it began broadcasting 70 years ago.

This week on 70 for 70, it’s the story of a little boy who dreamed of being a writer and telling stories about his home in Pointe Coupee Parish.

Ernest Gaines was born on a plantation in Oscar in 1933, where he attended the only school for African-American children in the town in a tiny church.

Gaines’ family members were sharecroppers, and a good education wasn’t in his reach, so when he was 15, he moved to California, where his life and his dream took a turn.

“I went to the YMCA. There I got in the boxing ring with a guy who beat me up, so I didn't want to go back there again, and I went to the library,” Gaines recalled.

It was here that he discovered his passion for literature and became a voracious reader.

After serving in the Army, Gaines spent years at San Francisco State and Stanford universities, where he studied literature and mastered his craft. He eventually evolved into one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.

Gaines recalls how it took him 10 years of writing before he published his first book, but when he started his career in 1956, he wrote some of the most influential pieces of American literature.

His work even made it to the big screen with a cinematic adaptation of "A Gathering of Old Men" starring Louis Gossett Jr. and Holly Hunter in 1987 and a movie based on “A Lesson Before Dying” starring Don Cheadle in 1999.

“There were not many books, not any books in this whole library about Black lives. Then, I thought if I could write, all these books here were written by somebody,” he said. “So I started writing.”

Gaines was eventually presented a National Medal of the Arts by President Barack Obama in 2012. Since 2007, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation has also honored aspiring Black writers with the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.

Gaines passed away in 2019, but his spirit lives on in both his writings and his family’s work to preserve the church where his journey to learning, reading and writing began.

“I just want people to, I hope, read,” Gaines said. “I don’t want them to know Ernest Gaines.”

You can find the full 70 for 70 list here.