How to get a newspaper editor's attention

(This post first appeared in The Independent Journalist, the freelancing blog of the Society of Professional Journalists.)

The calls, emails and tweets started flowing in around during the holidays, coming across my desk at a rate of about half a dozen daily. Many more landed among my colleagues. They usually say something like this:

"I wrote this piece and thought you might like it," says the introduction to one email.

"Sure, it's a blog post, but it's a subject that interests everyone," says another.

"I'd love to write about sports. I'm a big fan," says one caller.

This time of year, aspiring writers drop hints, notes and whole unsolicited stories on newspapers like new snow with the intention of publishing those stories and getting paid for them. I think of it as a different kind of holiday tradition: as Christmas-related bills mount, these optimistic writers try to salve their financial wounds by banging out what they consider "news" and expecting a newspaper editor to read it as such, thus publishing it in the next day's paper and paying generously for the writers' work by week's end, or at least before the next credit card statement arrives.

But most of these gratuitous pitches and contributions wind up deleted, erased, ignored, because their writers failed at good reporting.

Sure, newspapers long have relied on contributing writers or freelancers to report news particularly when their full-time staffs were swamped with other work. The need for freelancers is acute now since newspapers nationwide have cut about one-third of their staffs over the past decade.

But today as decades before, newspapers do not accept anything and everything submitted to them for publication as "news." The stories appearing in today's print pages or online are products of careful planning, research and attention to detail. Even breaking news coverage requires rapid incisive analysis by teams of reporters and editors — freelancers sometimes among them — to determine how and why something happened and why it's what journalists like to call "newsworthy."

So, before you ship that free-form story to the nearest newspaper, stop for moment to understand first what it takes to attract a newspaper editor's attention:

First, you have to read the newspaper — This sounds pitifully obvious. In reality, it's pitiful how many solicitations that come to newspapers are ignorant on their face, as the writers are blind to the newspaper's greater purpose. Each paper serves as a kind of window onto the community, and the communities themselves are distinct. Thus, what interests readers or is newsworthy in St. Louis may not warrant similar attention in Sheboygan, Wis., or Syracuse, N.Y. Reading the newspaper carefully every day reveals the distinction. Consider how a newspaper is organized and edited, and where certain topics routinely appear. In other words, study the newspaper before trying to write for it.

Sell the story, not yourself — Prospective freelancers often try to tell their life stories when all an editor wants to know is whether the writer's idea is worth attention. Concentrate on explaining the story's importance in one or two short sentences, focusing on the key questions all news stories try to answer: who what, when, where, why and how.

Remember, there is no "I" in news — What you think, feel or believe about the news is not important; don't try passing off a recent blog post or journal entry as a news story. Cite only the facts in a story pitch; leave out your opinion. Because everyone has an opinion, but not everyone has the facts.

Provide verifiable sources — Newspapers aim to steer clear of bias in its news, leaving that instead to the commentary pages, thus some editors may want to check the validity of a freelancer's idea before committing to it. Providing at least three independent sources that editors can contact if they wish will sell a story pitch better than if there are none.

Send your pitch to the proper place — Story ideas relating to sports should not go to the news or features editors. Find out who the editors are that work with freelancers and accept story ideas, and craft pitches and queries to them specifically.

Pay attention to quality, quantity — Besides determining the proper editor for submissions, make sure to spell the editor's name correctly. For that matter, pay careful attention to fixing spelling and grammar errors before sending any correspondence. Most newspapers also adhere to "style" guidelines outlined by The Associated Press. Furthermore, if a story calls for a specific length, say 500 words, avoid writing even one word more than that. Not following such a simple direction may prompt time-challenged editors to hit the "delete" key.

Keep an open mind about being edited — Even the world's best journalists need editors, so don't think your work is much better. But don't take editing personally. Accept that stories may be trimmed or adjusted for length before publication. Tight, precise writing and rigid adherence to a prearranged story length go a long way toward preventing this.

Small potatoes are better than no potatoes — It used to be that newspapers paid well for freelance work. These days, big paychecks are rare, $25 to $50 per published story being typical and non-negotiable.

Don't be discouraged, but don't be a pest, either — Upon making a pitch, if a newspaper editor has not yet responded, wait three or four days before following up politely, professionally. It may be that the editor has been busy, or is keeping an eye open for other ideas.

My mother, my grandparents, and Pearl Harbor

(Editor's note: This post originally appeared a year ago and has been updated to reflect new information.)

On a bright Sunday morning 70 years ago, my mother looked out her parents' kitchen window and saw black smoke rising in the distance.

Then she saw planes soar out of the smoke, and the whole world was forever altered.

That morning, my mother watched the attack on Pearl Harbor from her home. She was a child, living across the harbor from the U.S. Navy yard. My grandparents' house sat on a hill slope, their back yard overlooking the battleships moored in port a couple miles away, and on this Sunday morning in December my mother and grandparents saw the smoke, heard loud bangs coming from the same direction, left their unfinished breakfast sitting on the kitchen table, and went outside for a better look.

They heard the planes before seeing them. A whining roar, as if from a million large, angry mosquitoes, echoed across the hillside, gaining in volume, until the planes appeared as black darts flung across the bright sky. My grandmother remarked how unusual it was to see military maneuvers on a Sunday. My grandfather noticed these planes were unlike any he had seen parked on the airfields.

The planes came closer at incredible speed, and there were more of them each passing moment. It occurred to my grandparents that they should move back closer to the house when one plane, so close now the Rising Sun emblem on its fuselage was clearly visible, wagged its wings on approach to the slope, pitched starboard and with the tip of one wing carried off my grandmother's clothes line.

My mother recalls seeing the pilot's face. She says that given enough artistic talent, she could draw it now, 69 years later, from memory.

Everybody ran back into the house to watch the black smoke and noise intensify across the harbor, and it was at about this point when they saw a bright flash followed by the swelling bubble of an intense shock wave envelop the harbor and race up the hillside to rattle the kitchen windows. The USS Arizona, already critically wounded, burst nearly in two as the ammunition magazine ignited.

At that, the event became profoundly personal: What should we do? Where should we go? Neighbors were walking out into the streets crying, shouting, comforting each other, even as the planes continued to zip overhead. My grandfather, who had joined an all-volunteer civilian defense corps a year earlier as tensions heightened between Japan and the United States, expected he would be called to do … something. But no word came; the few phone lines around the island were jammed.

Hours later, a Jeep came down the street. The military police officer behind the wheel was going around asking every able-bodied male, particularly those who had guns, to meet in the town center for further instructions. My grandfather expressed concern about leaving my grandmother and mother alone, to which the Jeep driver responded, "Look, we're expecting an invasion by the Japanese. If you don't get down to the beach now to try stopping them, we're all screwed anyway."

So, my grandfather packed his only gun, a small-caliber pistol, and boarded a truck en route to a long shallow beach a few miles past Honolulu where Japanese landing craft loaded with troops were expected to appear overnight. Dozens of civilians in several trucks made the trip with him, including one man who brought the only weapon at his disposal: a pitchfork.

Upon arrival, the men busied themselves initially by digging shallow trenches and building defensive positions behind rocks and trees. Then they waited, the only sounds coming from the surf, the only light from the moon. And waited.

And waited.

By daybreak, the threat of invasion had subsided, though the intensity wrought from the previous morning never did. My grandparents' friends who were driving to meet them were strafed and killed en route, their bodies found in their car a block away. And thereafter until the war ended, the Hawaiian islands, not yet one among the United States, were under U.S. martial law. The rationing and blackouts common elsewhere in the nation during this period were many times more constraining in Hawaii because of difficulty protecting the islands' supply line to the mainland. And the happiest times of my mother's childhood ended as the freedom she had to play with friends and roam was curtailed by stringent rules on civilian movement except for essential needs such as school, work and hospital visits.

The onset of war ended my grandfather's job, servicing the pineapple harvesting equipment owned by Dole foods, as many industries on the islands shuttered during wartime. About a year later, my grandparents and mother left for California, riding a cargo ship under destroyer escort.

There was one humorous moment out of it all. When my grandfather returned from his beach patrol early on the morning after the attack, he went to put his gun away and noticed a box of bullets sitting open on the bedroom dresser. That's when he remembered …

He had forgotten to load the gun.

Freelancers can be problem-solvers

(This piece first appeared in The Independent Journalist, the freelancing blog of the Society of Professional Journalists.)

Look around. No matter where our eyes land, we see words.

It may be just one small word, such as “off” or “on,” but the process that led to printing the word required someone to come along and write it. Decisions were made, assignments were given and the words we see around us were formed.

If prospective and novice freelancers keep that in mind, the emotional challenge of finding writing and editing assignments will become little easier to take. Understand that the world needs writers of all kinds, and that one of those particular needs is bound to fit a freelancer’s special talent.

Of course, nobody will know that until it’s made obvious to everyone. Thus, self-promotion and marketing are as important as the actual creative actions of writing and editing.

This is tough for most freelancers just starting out. The very notion of having to sell themselves and do it daily takes them out of their writing and editing comfort zones and plops them in front of risk, challenge, uncertainty, frustration — things certain to make even average people squirm and sweat. Worse still, shopping for clients takes time away from the writing and editing processes.

Thus, marketing is where a freelancer’s ego runs up against reality. And repeatedly banging into reality this way can be bruising.

There is, however, one element of reality working in a freelancer’s favor that can cushion the psychological blow and act similarly as a sales tool.

You see, people who know how to use words effectively are, above all else, problem-solvers. They bring to bear talent and wisdom nobody else has or can use in precise ways, and that precision helps answer questions, surmount obstacles and open doors for other people.

Whereas managers organize a given situation and technicians wrestle with the fine details of it, writers and editors are responsible for communicating initial needs, communicating the problem-solving processes, communicating the analysis and conclusions of the final result. And let’s face it, nothing gets accomplished without strong, effective communication at multiple levels.

Thus, freelancers are instrumental. They find and write the words that help address important issues. They are, in essence, problem-solvers. And if prospective freelancers think carefully about this before tackling the onerous task of self-promotion, that task may start to seem less onerous. By pitching themselves as problem-solvers, freelancers expand the definitions of who they are and what they can accomplish. Clients will see them as more than just communicators, too.

It’s a psychological game, certainly, but it’s one all freelancers can win. And once they start to play, it can become much easier to switch their careers from “off” to “on.”

Your first task as a freelancer: Suck it up

(This post originally appeared in The Independent Journalist, the freelancing blog of the Society of Professional Journalists.)

Hall of Fame hockey player Wayne Gretzky is synonymous with excellence on ice, but it turns out he also had superb advice for the prospective freelancer.

"You miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take."

Sure, he meant that about hockey in particular. But in general, Gretzky's wisdom stretches wide to encompass whatever we do in life and prompts thoughts about what we stand to lose when we fail to take chances.

For writers or editors eyeing independence as a way to a life-sustaining career, opportunities abound. Everyone, no matter their skill set, requires help with words, either creating them or crafting them, and your skill in these areas may be all another person or organization needs to convey the optimum message of the moment. Moreover, the market for effective, engaging communications continues to grow exponentially.

Yes, newspapers as a medium are going away, but the demand for what they try to offer their communities — responsible, accurate reporting — has not diminished and in the wake of social media has grown more acute. Besides personal engagement, we as a society also hunger for dispassionate views that help hone those engagements.

So, yes, the opportunities for freelancers are more and varied than ever. And it's time to take your shot.

Your goal, then: suck it up. Don't chicken out.

"But how?" you might ask. "Where should I start?"

The easiest, simplest and perhaps most flippant answer is, "At the beginning." But aspiring freelancers can have trouble distinguishing the well-traveled path from the one least taken. They need advice, however small, and guidance, however approximate, to start moving in the proper direction.

In truth, the beginning can be anywhere. What matters is clearing the path beforehand, accepting sacrifice before reward. Biting the bullet.

Sucking it up.

Here are a few things that must be cleared out of your path:

Procrastination — The phrase, "Do not put off until tomorrow what you can do today," should hang from a sign in front of all freelancers. They are their own bosses, they are their own staff, they are the sources of their own motivation. Workers who are confined to cubicles have their environment as a sprawling reminder to stay busy; freelancers have only themselves. The best help in this area is a schedule that delineates working time and non-working time — and rigid adherence to that schedule. If the working time you set for yourself goes from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., with two or three breaks spaced between those hours, then stick to the schedule. If you prefer a more liberal structure to the working day, fine. Regardless, work when the schedule says "work," and nothing less.

Distraction — This tends to provoke procrastinate and in general comes in the form of television, video games, social media, peripheral noise and activity, among other things. Remove them, or somehow set them aside, and keep them there. Author Anne Lamott says, "Turn off Twitter. ... And don't clean house." Author Carl Hiaasen wears noise-dampening headphones when he writes. And I, presuming to include myself at their level, gave up television a couple years ago when it became obvious my remote was getting a better workout than my keyboard. Indeed, that sacrifice has helped, if not quite to the extent that I can join Anne's and Carl's company.

On the other hand, silence and isolation may only amplify the ringing in one's own ears, whereas a distraction or two instead stirs the imagination. In author Stephen King's view, "Any day's routine interruptions and distractions don't much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes the pearl." In other words, be comfortable: cherish what you can work with, expunge — really expunge — what you cannot.

Surprises — Said expunging speaks to planning. The more one has even the dreary little details of freelancing mapped out, the better one can navigate through or around them. Work flow, illness, budgeting and networking all are issues that take time away from writing and editing but are essential up-front considerations for every freelancer. Attend to small details early and the bigger ones that arise later will be easier to handle.

Generalization — You could write or edit anything and everything with the notion that volume means security. Look around though and you will find that successful freelancers do not have vague notions about what they are doing. They took the time to research the marketplace for needs not already addressed, or rarely so, by other freelancers. They chose specialization and hewed closely to a small number of subjects, educating themselves each day on the finer details of those subjects. Armed with unique knowledge, freelancers can attract expert clients, instead of the other way around.

Boredom — Banality abounds. The key is not letting it slip into our work. A person in a cubicle somewhere may not have that option, but freelancers, as noted above, possess the power to chart their own course. In an earlier post on this blog I noted ways to stay busy between jobs and they are just as effective for helping break out of monotony. However, if the urge to leave freelancing as a career in pursuit of other excitement still seems too tough to shake, try talking through it with other freelancers; they may have been in the same hole and found ways to climb out.

Freelancing should be fun, something you want to do every day. Unless you suck it up and clear the road ahead of obstacles, the fun will seem only further and further away.

 

A short guide to San Francisco

San Francisco's Coit Tower atop Telegraph HIll, as viewed from Russian Hill

Fog poured like milk from the northwest over the Marin Headlands toward the orange icon spanning Golden Gate and in minutes blotted both from view, then just as quickly raced across San Francisco Bay and vanished on approach to Oakland, the burnished glow across the water restored.

"It's like that here," a 30-year Bay Area resident told me later. "People say, wherever they are, wait 10 minutes and the weather will change. Here, it's literally true."

San Francisco proper is home to nearly 4 million people who already know this and maybe blot it from their minds as they struggle against the nerve-fraying tide of traffic and tourists. But to the wide-eyed ignorant such as myself, years removed from his last visit, this glittering jewel around a rocky, rolling thumb of land 47 miles square has abundant capability to impress and mesmerize.

Those capabilities are triggered first by the weather, which visitors notice the moment they debark from whatever they're riding. Upon my arrival, I was a five-hour flight removed from a sticky, 100-degree summer that had not varied much in a month. Yet the air swirling around the open jet door at San Francisco International was half as hot, hardly sticky and sweetened by salty plumes wafting from the sea. Exposed to it fully 10 minutes later, and feeling chilled 10 minutes thereafter, I realized I never thought to pack a jacket or light coat because I believed summer to be much the same everywhere. In fact, San Francisco never really has a summer as the rest of know it, and never really has a winter, either. It warms most noticeably in September and October between the waves of ever-present, sea-smelling fog, and snow is as rare here as it is in, say, Los Angeles. Fortunately, light fleece windbreakers with "SF" stitched into the breast are as abundant as sea gulls and apparently popular enough even among locals that it's possible for visitors to blend into the street crowds.

And, boy, are there crowds, up one hill and down another, lining the Embarcadero, munching at Ghirardelli's, and bobbing atop packed ferries plying the bay. At times, one might wonder if the whole world is here, and judging by the variety of languages heard in the hotels and restaurants and sightseeing excursions have justifiable cause to believe that's possible. It turned out that the time I visited, mid-August, coincided with the height of "holiday" across Europe, when virtually everyone there who can pursues a change of scenery. Thus, I heard in a place halfway around the world from our mother continent  British English and French, German and Portuguese, Russian and Greek, as well as Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, variations on Arabic, and almost as many American dialects as there are Americans. Much of that verbal polyglot was just at Fisherman's Wharf, the former home of one industry, actual fishing, and now home to another, tourism and T-shirt shops and sea lions who sun themselves on floating docks near the shopping-mall-themed Pier 39. Thus, the former Yerba Buena, founded by Spanish colonists in 1776 and forced to grow up fast in the wake of the California Gold Rush a mere 73 years later, is as much a city of the world as London, Paris or Prague.

Also much like those cities, San Francisco also has the trouble of the world heaped on its 44 hilly shoulders: poverty amid plenty. Walk in any direction and chances are good one will see examples of homlessness and despair within a block or two of starting out. The 30-year resident told me he has watched his color-dappled metropolis, once mildly busy, transform into one streaked with grime, beset by gridlock and rife with homeless. This all happened over the last decade and a half, he said, behind the first tech boom-turned-bust rolling out of nearby Silicon Valley, when jobs dried up but the skyrocketing cost of living did not. A subsequent smaller tech boom in the late 2000's improved matters somewhat, but San Francisco remains in the throes of a swelling gentrification that has pushed all but small portions of the city beyond the reach of middle-income Americans. The 30-year resident himself pays over $1,000 per month for less than 1,000 square feet of living space.

"I don't like what I've seen," he said. "In some respects, it's not a pretty place anymore. But I can't imagine living anywhere else. Most people who live here can't imagine that, either."

Tourists are left to imagine plenty, however, with such sights and scents as San Francisco has. There's the aforementioned Golden Gate Bridge, a symbol of America as much as the city, and Coit Tower, the stunning art deco topper on Telegraph Hill and probably the best urban beautification project one can conjure. The Transamerica Pyramid remains San Francisco's tallest structure, though the insurance holding company that gave it that name no longer resides there. And hill after hill is shrouded in the curious mix of Victorian and modern architecture recognized as uniquely San Franciscan.

As for scents, one also wonders how an upstart restaurateur can make it around here. The city's eclectic epicurean opportunities are as many and varied as its visitors and they too occupy nearly every street corner, thankfully crowding out the chain gangs that unartfully decorate American suburbia. In Chinatown, of course, sits a raft of good food served up by greasy spoons as well as finely appointed eateries, but there is a wealth of international cuisine dotting the other 60-plus neighborhoods on the peninsula. I liked Au Roi, a cozy Thai place on Post Street near Lower Nob Hill, that serves to-die-for salads, and Caffe Roma Coffee Roasting Co. on Columbus Avenue in North Beach, where java lovers will find a powerful house blend that cuts through a drinker's foggy morning like a gale. My spouse, on the other hand, fell in love with Salty's Fishwich near Pier 41, where, served through a street side window, one can order a hunk of haddock wrapped in seasoned slaw and served on a huge bun. We ate there twice.

So, to summarize, I would advise bringing with you to San Francisco a camera, a healthy appetite and a tolerance for scenes of despair. Above all, bring a jacket. Because no matter the time of year, it gets chilly here.

Will fewer copy editors mean more lawsuits?

A friend of mine lost his job as the economy began careening along a precipice. He was laid off after his employer's accountants, perhaps fearing for their own job security, removed the welcome mat one morning as he approached from the parking lot.

At the front door, guards who knew my friend on a first-name basis greeted him cordially, took his security pass and presented him with a water-stained cardboard box filled with his belongings. Nobody was there to say thank you for his decade of commitment and loyalty; the guards had performed the same curt ceremony two dozen times already over the past six months.

The day after my friend's exit, a brace of attorneys visited his now-former employer. Not because he had hired legal eagles in response. Instead, these attorneys were sniffing for negligence and thought they might smell blood in the building. Because the night my friend was laid off, the employer made a critical error that went public.

My friend, you see, had been a newspaper copy editor. His job, simply stated, was to ensure other people looked good. He caught reporters' errors and corrected them before publication, and by extension made the newspaper look good. But before his last night at work the editing staff already suffered a shortage of bodies. News stories that should have been scrutinized closely were pushed through in a hurry to meet a deadline. So on the first night he was gone, some errors were missed, including a libelous one that wound up in print and online the next morning before an estimated 1 million sets of eyes. The attorneys showed up at the front desk before the security guard had finished his morning coffee.

Today, the newspaper still publishes and it has laid off more employees, perhaps to defray legal costs. My friend found a new job outside of journalism. He corrects errors now in the private sector. How much money was required to solve the newspaper's libel problem, I do not know; maybe enough to have kept my friend and a couple other copy editors on the payroll a year or more.

Now, sure, there's no telling that the newspaper would have avoided trouble for certain had my friend still been there. But fewer editors tends to mean more errors, and not just at newspapers. A recent New York Times article cited book publishers' propensity for cutting corners as the reason for the rise of spelling and other errors in books and manuscripts. These publishers used to have copy editing staffs, too. Another report, this one by the BBC, highlighted an entrepreneur's claim that spelling errors on merchants' websites in the United Kingdom have drastically curtailed online sales there.

And this all matters … how? Well, the point of editing, of perfecting one's communication, hews to professionalism. A lack of errors implies attention to detail that extends to other services and products. Sure, we all want to see our names and our kids' names published in the paper properly, if for no other reason than personal pride or bragging rights. At the same time, we want drug manufacturers and home builders and airplane mechanics to work with accurate printed information, because communication errors in those fields require much more than a printed correction.

The people who collect and disseminate information for print, online and broadcast have come under considerable pressure lately. Their numbers have dwindled, they're forced to do more with fewer resources and they must perform faster and longer in this burgeoning, 24-hour-deadline world. Volume matters and speed matters in that world, yet fewer watchdogs are standing by to account for accuracy and credibility. Meanwhile, media conglomerates continue to reap prodigious profits year after year, in large part through savings gained through editor layoffs.

I wonder then about the target-rich environment for litigators this shaving for savings' sake creates. You see, news copy editors not only push for proper spelling and grammar, they also are trained to recognize nuance, particularly where slander and libel are concerned. The case used to be at many news publications that copy editors were paid more than reporters because they were considered to be like the armor on a tank ‒ protection. It has been said that all copy editors make good reporters, but not all reporters make good copy editors.

This philosophy persisted in print journalism until the Internet brought publishing to everyone's desktop and made anyone with a half-formed thought, a keyboard and an Internet connection capable of sending “news” circling the globe in seconds. While all of us were agog over the potential, there rose the misconception that the “delete” key cured all ills.

But electronic words are like hard lead on cheap notebook paper; the erasure never comes off completely. Our Web marks, once made, leave an impression that delete keys cannot expunge, and that impression can last decades. And as the technology improves, so does the ease at plucking out these stray, unwanted marks after the fact, which then opens the question: Were these errors honest, or did they result from carelessness or negligence?

That distinction also is becoming easier to detect. Thus, the next question from an attorney might be: If copy editors were laid off for the sake of saving a few dollars, might that act alone constitute contributory negligence?

I imagine that one day soon there will be a brace of attorneys knocking on the door to test that possibility. Look at the empty copy editing desks around you and pray your publication can pass the test.

Remembering my father and father-in-law on Memorial Day

This weekend, amid the smells of barbecues and fresh flowers at gravesites, and the sounds of children playing and new flags snapping in the breeze, my thoughts will be with two men for whom Memorial Day was custom made: my father and father-in-law.

My dad was a Depression-era child who came of military age as tension mounted in Korea and would have missed war entirely had he gone to college instead of the Navy after high school. So when most of the young men he knew in school were just learning to shave, he was learning how to keep his clothes dry while bunking on the damp anchor-chain deck aboard an aircraft carrier plying the Pacific.

He chose the military because he had no money for college. And he opted for the Navy because a favorite uncle served in that branch. The same uncle had jumped off a sinking carrier into burning oil during the Battle of the Coral Sea in 1942, and my dad remembered seeing the scars across his arms and back from that and thought of him as a true hero.

My dad did nothing so risky during his service, but his contribution was no less important. He parlayed an interest in photography into a post with Naval intelligence, helping to map out battle plans. He served on two carriers during a duty spaning the end of the Korean conflict and the return to peacetime. Although he never picked up a gun, his work in the dark recesses of the carriers disseminating classified information was weapon enough. Even now, more than half a century later, he refuses to discuss what he worked on down there.

My father-in-law, Gene, on the other hand took his life into his hands nearly each day he set out from port. A dozen years older than my dad, he was among what Tom Brokaw called "the Greatest Generation," and his duty took place aboard the cramped, creaky decks of Liberty ships sailing to stock American troops and their allies. While with the Merchant Marine, Gene sailed both oceans, crossed back and forth through the Panama Canal and saw more of the world than an Illinois farmboy ever expected.

He does not speak of his service; I had to pry stories out of him. And what I heard amounted to fascinating and frightening tales. He recalled the days he crawled to his post at watchout, hand over hand, as storms crashed his ship and three-story waves rose over the deck like granite cliffs, and the nights when he saw flashes of fire knifing the inky black as ships on the fringes of the convoy were torpedoed and sunk. More often, he rode the center of the convoy, on the ships loaded with armaments. Gene said he had to force out of his mind thoughts of what might happen if a torpedo hit one of those.

And so while many Americans everywhere celebrate a three-day weekend and the first nice weather of spring, I content myself with the images and stories passed along from my father and father-in-law. Instead of barbecue, I recall from my childhood the musty smells of yellowing yearbooks embossed with the carriers my father sailed on and filled with photos of 3,000 or so of his colleagues. Instead of enjoying the pageantry of parades, I prefer sifting the dusty snapshots of my father-in-law in his Merchant Marine uniform, so large it seemed to hang on his small frame.

They would prefer I go out and enjoy my weekend. But it's not really my weekend, you see. It's theirs.