Our bonus is this which came from the Front the day after last week’s dispatch was received. 

Dear readers,

In yesterday’s (last week’s) Dispatch I had 59 years reduced to “almost half a century”. And, no, I didn’t sneak this in to check if you were paying attention (and some of you were). I now suspect this Freudian slip slipped in because “nearly half a century” has a nicer ring to it than “nearly six decades”.

No, the actual reason for my error is that I don’t have the luxury at my disposal of an editor. Those true unsung heroes of the literary world- the editors and translators.

Tina Arena- Unsung Hero: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E_naDXcMNw

A further snippet from the Wikipedia entry on B. Traven’s ‘Deathship’

“Just before the German version went to press, the publisher wrote to Traven asking for publicity information and photographs. The author replied:

My personal history would not be disappointing to readers, but it is my own affair which I want to keep to myself. I am in fact in no way more important than is the typesetter for my books, the man who works the mill; … no more important than the man who binds my books and the woman who wraps them and the scrubwoman who cleans up the office.”

So this from my dad’s anecdotes (he told it to me in Dutch, this is my English translation):

JULY‘07- Jacobs was the best bookbinder in Oberhausen. He was always busy and earned good money, but he was a tiny man, who for years had been threatening to hang himself from the highest tree in Oberhausen. All of a sudden, he did; from the lowest branches of the highest tree in Oberhausen. Because my father was the Chairman of the Dutch Association, it was his duty to notify Mrs. Jacobs. I was only a little boy, when my dad took me along for ‘support’. When Mrs. Jacobs heard what had happened, she asked: had her husband used the highest tree in Oberhausen? When my father confirmed that, she burst out laughing. After a while my dad started laughing with her, and in the end all three of us where laughing our heads off. After all those years, I can still picture the scene. Poor woman.

A friend sent me this link  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1-cES1Ekto it tells the story of Alfred Wegener whose 1915 Theory of Continental Drift caused him to be dismissed as a crack-pot only to be posthumously reinstated as a genius.

Aboriginal Australia produced a large number of unsung heroes. History is replete with the names of explorers who ventured into the barren inland. The “native boys” who made it possible for some of these explorers to survive and succeed by leading them to water are all but forgotten and often weren’t recorded in the first place, certainly not by name.

And then of course there are the unsung Aboriginal heroes of the present.

Bay City Rollers- ‘Yesterday’s Hero’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u-rYzSSs7U 

Dag,

Frenk