This is my four hundred and fiftieth story for the Patches.
I wrote two hundred and forty-six for Hunt Valley Cockeysville Patch from July
2011 to August 2012. From 2012 I have written as of today two hundred and four
for Towson Patch making a grand total of four hundred and fifty
articles/stories in 22 months. I think
this is pretty wonderful for a senior lady who is about to turn seventy-nine in
six weeks. Now I have been honored to have been chosen by the editor of
Frederick News Post, an online and printed newspaper from Frederick, Maryland
which is read far and wide in D.C., Maryland and Virginia, to write for him. I
had my own column there in a group called Community Columns. His name is Dan Rice. I stopped writing for Dan because he said he could not use any stories longer than 600 words. I cannot write 600 limit stories because I fill them up with a before, a middle and a nice ending. I need 1000 words,
and my Patch editor was Nayana Davis. So here is to my two editors “who
are so smart and wonderful to see and believe in me and my writings.”
Oh how Mom and Dad would have been proud of their baby girl
daughter. Mom would have been one hundred and six today, it is her birthday and
Dad would be one hundred and twenty one in November. Dad use to write columns
himself and he wrote letters to the editor of the Morning Sunpapers at least once
a week. He would comment on current events and they would publish each and
every letter that he handwrote to them each week. They tried to get him to buy
a typewriter even though his handwriting was pretty clear and concise. He could
not afford one in those days of nineteen hundred and forty-eight to nineteen
hundred and sixty four when he passed on. He would sit there in the late
evening at the kitchen table and handwrite the letter to the editor with his
trusty Schaeffer ink pen (no ballpoint pens in those early years had been
invented then) and he would fill the pen bottom up with ink from a black ink
bottle. Then he would neatly stamp his business size envelope and walk it to
the mailbox which was about two blocks away. Then about two days later, he would
look for it under Letters to the Editor and there it always was on the letter
page. He would call Mom and say “Lea, they published it.” He was so proud and
he would cut it out of the paper in order for him to tuck it away in a
scrapbook for further insertion. When he passed on, the Sun called us and asked
for some information on his life, so they could publish a nice obituary about him.
My brother Herbert gave them the information on how he had come to this country
with his folks and siblings when he was seven from Russia, legally.