Believe it or not (I know you will), I have even more from Gerald Ford's office and will offer something next time around. Today, it's a grab bag of old correspondence, probably more meaningful to me than to you.
Apparently, Sen. Robert Kennedy's office sent me something in 1966, perhaps a transcript of congressional UFO hearings, though I don't recall. Here's a note attached to whatever it was.
Say what you want about Fate Magazine, but it's a survivor, still publishing decades after its start. As the editorial office letter indicates, I wanted to write for Fate. I actually did write a piece, submitted it and -- the story of my early writing life -- was promptly rejected.
Finally, here's a great old letter from the editor of the former Syracuse Herald-Journal, giving me permission to use something -- doubtless, for another hopeless article I submitted to some poor editor with better things to read than my teenage ramblings. At any rate, I love the letterhead with the illustration of the old newspaper building. Long ago, the Syracuse dailies, owned by the Newhouse Co., moved into a sprawling new facility and imported an elaborate state-of-the-art printing press from a foreign country. In the interim, the afternoon and evening Herald-Journal and Sunday Herald-American were dropped , and all daily editions now bear the name of The Post-Standard, originally the morning newspaper distributed by the company.
While my letters to the editor about UFOs appeared in all three newspapers in the sixties, my very first saw print in The Post-Standard in the summer of 1965. Some kids find their first thrill on the baseball diamond, hitting that initial home run, while others glow over catching their first fish. And still others reject all of that, discovering instead that nothing, but nothing, beats the first time you see your writing and name on the printed page.
