Friday, 10/25

You know how I've been mentioning/marveling at/whining about how strange, surreal, and busy things have been recently? Well, here's a little proof that I'm not totally incorrect about it--

I wrote a newspaper article a couple of weeks ago and totally forgot about it until I saw it in the Mining Journal Wednesday.

I mean, who does that? Who writes a newspaper article, submits it, and then totally forgets about it? I'm sure most newspaper writers don't do that. I'm sure other people who pen these articles for the History Center don't do that. I'm sure that freelance writers don't submit work to publications and then forget they did it. Nope; they don't, but I do.

I guess I'm just special that way.

The article was prompted by a story I told on my “And Put Up A Parking Lot” tour this past summer, the story of a local guy who suffered some horrendous injuries in World War II and then was kind of adopted by the rest of the community. When I told the story people had no idea that this had gone on, which made me think it would be a good subject for an article that thousands of people would read. So I wrote it up, submitted it, and then promptly forgot about it.

I'm glad I wrote the article, though. The story of Calvin “Jimmy” Bleau is one that more people need to know, a tale of both heroism and of a community coming together to honor him, and it also allowed me to give Loraine co-writing credit the story. She's done a lot of research on him, and (almost) everything I know about the story came from her, so from the very start I knew she'd share the byline.

And at least I remembered to do that.

At the moment I have a couple of other articles in various stages of research and/or completion. I'm now wondering if I'll submit those and then entirely forget about them. After all, I've now established a precedent for doing it, and nothing I do these days surprises me any more.

Sigh...

If you'd like to check out the article, just CLICK HERE. Otherwise, have a great weekend, and get ready to celebrate one of the best holidays on Monday. What, you don't know which one? Come back then and I'll talk all about it!

8-)

(jim@wmqt.com)