Dad received a letter from a famous man and there was a spelling mistake

I was trying to think of a topic for today. I found one and I wrote it very beautifully and hit submit and lo and hold, the gremlins got in and wiped it out. Oh woe is me, so I will get Word tomorrow and lo and behold, it will never, ever, ever go in the wasteland of articles lost.


My dad was a prolific letter writer to the editor of the Sunpapers for letters from the public. He hand wrote his letters and he had a very nice and clear handwriting. One day, he gets a letter from the editor at that time, HL Mencken (HL was always written that way) I think his name was Henry. I shall look it up and he says to dad in a typewritten letter, "Mr. Sohmer, we no longer will accept handwritten letters due to the possibility of erros." Dad then proceeded to continue to hand write them with his trusty Schaefer ink pen and they kept on publishing them until the day before he passed on. Dad could not afford to buy a typewriter. Dad also had his own weekly or bi weekly column in the Baltimore Jewish Times and it was called Comments and Opinions by Joseph B.Sohmer.When Dad died, we got a phone call from the Sunpapers and they wanted information on his life to write a nice obituary on him and my brother filled them in on his life. HL passed away in 1956 and Dad passed away in November 1964. So Dad continued on writing until 1964. They wrote a nice obituary about him.


Dad is gone now for 51 years and so is HL.When Mom died, we found the erros letter and if I could find it now, it would be worth a good deal of money because HL was famous for his writings and observations.


I think Dad would be proud of his baby girl for all her writings and her observations, comments and opinions and her feelings about him now. My little grandson called me last night and he said the teacher gave each one about 5 words and they were supposed to write their thoughts to finish those words in probably a paragraph. The teacher read them and she liked his a lot. I told him I could not wait to read it, because I knew it would be wonderful.


Before, I started this article and I was sorting through a few of my other thoughts in older articles that I had written in 1000 online stories/articles since about 2010, I found that one of them had been translated into another language which I could not read. It said to click English and it would appear, but it did not. My friend Dr.Richard Vatz, a professor at Towson University had written something too and he and I were translated in that language. I shall get in touch with him and see if he knows what language it was in and wow, that is kind of an honor too.




So Dad would be proud of his baby girl and his grandson because we are following in his footsteps and we are writers too. HL would be maybe, kind of proud of me, because I type the stories and probably I would not get his erros letter,


though he is gone for years now too. Maybe he would notice there is a space here that should not be here. What the heck, a space is a space, as Gertrude Stein said "a rose is a rose is a rose."


So here is to you, HL from ESC about JBS and ETC. Erros makes for a really great story and memoir. Elita Sohmer Clayman