By Jim Hagarty
Today, marks my entry into my second month of blogging.
That parade you hear going by your place this morning? Just one of the many taking place in cities and towns across the world to mark the occasion of Month Two.
A friend looked over my blog last week and couldn’t believe I had produced so much in such a short time.
But in classic fashion, it took me 50 years to become an overnight success.
So it’s confession time. Most of what I write here is new and fresh. But at least once a day I go down the stairs to the dusty Hagarty Archives and drag out some nugget or another.
Over the years, I have had more than 1,000 newspaper and magazine columns published. Fortunately, I have most of those now in digital format.
But it has been a hogwrestle.
I had no digital copies of most of what I have written over the years. I did keep scrapbooks of a lot of it. But being lazy and unwilling to retype all those stories into my computer, I had to photocopy them all, carefully cut them out, feed them through my scanner and use a great “optical character recognition” program to enter them into a word-processing program. Even then, the struggle was not over as OCR is never completely accurate. So I had to read through every sentence of every column, making corrections along the way.
There were whole swaths of material that I had not kept. This required me to spend hours in our local community archives, photocopying my stuff from the hard-copy newspapers they still have.
I probably could have found King Tut with less trouble and in less time.
And I am tormented by the writing I did but which I will never find. I don’t know how good it was, but it’s gone.
My goal is to corral all this stuff into a series of books which will sell like crazy, allowing me to live a semi-luxurious existence. Or at least as well as the neighbour across the street who has two Corvettes (really).
So now and then, if you are discerning, you might notice a story of mine has a Dead Sea Scroll quality to it. That one might have emerged from the Hagarty Archives.
To get to those, you go down into my basement, open a trap door, climb a ladder down to the subbasement in which you will find another trap door. The files are in boxes, right behind Tut’s old coffin.
