I-N is for Intriguing News

Katherine Shaw: Another gracious scribe

This is a story about how I, Cathy Lessmann, the Crossings secretary who sits alone at a computer, day in and day out, discovered that there is a wide Crossings Community out there that I didn't know existed. It's a marvelous story that has taught me that our name, Crossings Community, Inc., is exactly that: a community, not just the handful of individuals who sit on the board and keep the business going. Here's how the story goes:

Three years ago, our board decided to begin archiving Law/Gospel articles on our website, beginning (naturally) with the writings of our co-founders, Robert Bertram and Edward Schroeder. I took the responsibility for getting permission to post these articles (if they appeared in publications, which most of them do) and also for getting them into an acceptable format for posting. Tom Law, our web master, agreed to create the appropriate space on the web site and post the articles as I sent them to him.

That sounded easy, especially after I purchased a state-of-the-art scanner, but it wasn't. To begin, I learned that Michael Hoy (former Crossings President) had a portfolio of Bertram articles that filled six binders. Yikes! Then I discovered that the scanner did not work well on underlined and old or faint copy. That meant that many articles needed to be retyped. (Keep in mind, we're talking about one hundred and fifty or so articles, many of them thirty and forty pages long, with extensive footnotes.) My heart sank as I realized that I simply could not manage this task by myself. I needed help -- and lots of it!