About column philosophy

Maybe it is needed and maybe it is not, but I want to explain some facts of life regarding this column. Perhaps a bit of it is rationalization due to arthritis, but in the main it is a truth that I owe to the many wonderful and faithful fans this weekly exercise has brought. Fact: I am using more and more reprints and rewrites from the thousands of them done over the past 50-plus years.

It is a dream that I’ve now accepted as being nearly impossible, to take the best and put them in a book, or two books, or three. Many kindly folks have urged me to do this but the thought of such an undertaking is overwhelming … at least to me at age 87.

Is the material for such a project worthy? I feel it is because excerpts from the column have been reprinted in national publications from New York times to the Seattle P.I. and in between. The column has won dozens of professional state and regional yearly competitions, and four National Newspaper Association awards, including first place for both humorous and for serious topics.

There are many precedents for reprinting former publications with the best known one, the comic strip “Charlie Brown and Snoopy.” Schultz published the first one in 1950 and totaled 17,897 before his death in 2000. Papers began re-running them upon his death and are now back up to 1968. It is at the top of most comic pages. I’m no Schultz but the idea is the same.

Besides the hopefully unique looks at personal thoughts and adventures over these many years, the column has presented unnumbered reports on the people and issues that made up local, state, national and world history, both humorous and serious from the time of President Kennedy to the present. Recalling history is not only fun it is an important part of a well-rounded life.

So! Perhaps my picking out previous columns a lot of the time is a second option to turning them into a book. That is the plan and I hope it is alright with you good folks in the land of the Hungry Horse News.

To end this discussion, it was a joy to find a few quotes from the late Yogi Berra in Time magazine last week:

“Never answer an anonymous letter.”

“Ninety percent of baseball is pitching. The other half is hitting.”

“I take a two-hour nap every day from 1 to 4.”

It is a hobby with me to try making up a Yogi-ism every now and then. My last one is this, “Never lie about something if the truth seems honest.”

G. George Ostrom is a national award-winning columnist for Hungry Horse News. He lives in Kalispell.