[at-l] Best AT Photo - EVER

[ellen at clinic.net (Bob C.)]

>"...Now I realize that most legit publishers would not stoop to stealing
>ideas."

I took a magazine writing course at the University of Illinois in the mid 1950s.
The key assignment was to write a magazine article and find a magazine to
publish it.

 I was spending my summers harvesting sea moss, a sea weed that is used as a
 filler for shoe polish,  powdered puddings, tooth paste and such, and chose the
 sea weed as my subject. I gathered some pictures and sent the piece off to the
 leading Maine nostalgia magazine. I got a letter back saying they had already
 assigned a similar article to one of their regular writers, but that they would
 pay me $25 so they could use my article for "caption material."

  Well, the May after my graduation in January, the piece appeared, slightly
  edited and expanded and under the byline of their leading staff writer. Proof
  of the theft was a big box in the middle of the piece with a recipe for "sea
  moss pudding." My instructor had insisted I include a recipe, and since I
  couldn't find one, I made a recipe up. I watched the magazine's letters column
  for months afterwards to see if anyone would complain that the recipe didn't
  work. No one ever did.

  23 years and several editors later, the magazine gave me it's annual
  "environmental award," a giant molded brass plate on a giant slab of Maine
  Pine -- and just in time to. I had been covering the environment for 10 years
  and my editors had begun mumbling that "no one cares about the environment any
  more."

  The award, with the help of a Supreme Court decision affirming that my stories
  about Maine having mislaid 400,000 acres of public land were true, kept me
  going another decade in a truly fun and useful job.

   Weary