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Search For True 'Footprints' Author On Path To Court

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The Washington Post

Published: June 15, 2008

The single set of footprints in the sand - as millions of inspired souls know - was that time when the Lord picked you up and carried you. It's a metaphor, people: He is there when you need Him most, and so is the ubiquitous poem known as "Footprints in the Sand," shared around the world on posters, plaques, Bible covers and all things decoupage.

But who wrote it? After years of debate, "Footprints" could be headed to court. Basil Zangare, a 49-year-old Long Island man, insists the poem was written by his late mother during the Great Depression, even though she did not get around to copyrighting it for 50 years.

Zangare filed suit May 12 in a federal court against two women who each promotes herself as the poem's sole author and true copyright holder. He said they have made millions on "Footprints"-related merchandise, money he wants a part of.

After all those coffee mugs and framed copies, can anyone really own "Footprints in the Sand"? Is a resolution possible?

"Sure it's possible," said Zangare's attorney, Richard Bartel. He looks forward to one day sending cease-and-desist letters to all "Footprint" pretenders who are "trading off the poem," he said, calling it a simple case of infringement.

Only it isn't. Which is sort of poetic, no? For years it was attributed to "Anonymous," which has a sweetness about it, a mysterious provenance indicating a profundity that transcends the mortal pen.

Dozens Of Claims

At least a dozen people have insisted that the lines of "Footprints in the Sand" came to them alone, usually by divine spark. The stanzas tell a similar story: Narrator dreams he is walking on a beach with the Lord (sometimes God, sometimes Jesus). After a while, narrator turns around and sees only one set of footprints. WHAT GIVES? the narrator asks the Lord - You promised You would walk with me, even in the bad times, but I see from my lone set of footprints that You weren't there! Ah, BUT, the Lord replies:

The single set of footprints are when I carried YOU through the bad times.

The only problem is one of nagging details: proof of authorship, original publication, copyright, notarization, that sort of thing.

The debate over who wrote "Footprints" begins the minute you Google it, and then wish you never had.

Zangare's mother, Mary Stevenson, claimed she wrote "Footprints" as a teenager sometime around 1936. She used to give handwritten copies to friends in times of crisis or grief. According to her son's "Official Footprints in the Sand" Web site, Stevenson, who died in 1999, told her family that a lawyer discouraged her from seeking a copyright claim when she first saw the poem attributed to "Anonymous" as early as the 1950s. While moving to a new house in the 1980s, Zangare has said, his mother unearthed one of her original handwritten copies of "Footprints." By then, "Footprints" was a staple of the inspirational tchotchke market, and Stevenson filed a copyright claim in 1984, which is included in Zangare's complaint.

Good Arguments, Little Proof

Which doesn't really mean much because anybody can file a copyright, on anything. In 1995, a forensic document expert allegedly verified that Stevenson's handwritten copy was at least 50 years old, Zangare said. That doesn't prove a lot, but, reader, could you just have a little faith?

No?

Then you might consider the marketing prowess of one of the suit's defendants, a 68-year-old Canadian poet and "itinerant evangelist" named Margaret Fishback Powers. She has said she wrote the poem in 1964, "searching for direction at a crossroads in her life," according to her author bio, while on the lakeshore at a youth camp in Ontario.

She sold the poem to HarperCollins Canada in a 1992 book deal, along with her autobiographical account of how she wrote it, lost it and rediscovered it once the world had already been moved to hang it on refrigerators and church youth-room walls. Several "Footprints" titles by Powers followed, with merchandise.

Powers' San Francisco-based attorney, John A. Hughes (who once helped a business called Bath and Beyond reach a settlement with Bed Bath & Beyond, according to his resume), said Powers included the poem in a self-published collection of her work in 1986, and filed a copyright then.

To date, Powers - with counsel - has been the most aggressive and monetizing Footprinter. She is traveling and couldn't be reached (or served with papers, yet), but her attorney said he has occasionally persuaded tchotchke manufacturers to attribute the poem to her. Hughes said Powers has made "little" money from "Footprints" licensing and what she did make, she put toward her youth ministry programs."It's clear that Margaret is the real author," Hughes said of the suit. "If Zangare has any document between 1936 or 1964 that shows Mary Stevenson wrote the poem, then let's see it," Meanwhile, there's Carolyn Joyce Carty, the other defendant in Zangare's suit. A self-proclaimed child prodigy and "world renowned poet laureate," Carty surfaced in the "Footprints" debate this decade, saying she wrote the poem in 1963, when she was 6 years old, as an epilogue to a longer story she called "The Footprints of God."

The Write Meaning

Actually, she said her grandmother first wrote it in 1922, and then young Carolyn wrote it, and it is unclear, from a brief e-mail exchange with a reporter, whether Carty understands what it means to have written something. She also filed a copyright on "Footprints," claiming it as her "contribution to society." She maintains a wondrously baffling "Footprints" Web site where, among other things, she claims she wrote the lyrics to "In My Life" before the Beatles did.

"Basil Zangare's lawsuit is frivolous and has no merit as far as I am concerned," Carty wrote in response to an e-mail sent though a link on her Web site.

Although the lawsuit says that Carty lives in North Carolina, she declined to provide The Post with details.

Zangare has named only two defendants, but others have also claimed authorship, including an Oregon man named Burrell Webb. He has said he wrote the poem in 1958 after his girlfriend dumped him.

Last fall, in an online article for the Poetry Foundation, a Brooklyn journalist and literary sleuth named Rachel Aviv traced elements of "Footprints" to a sermon delivered in 1880, and raised the tantalizing possibility that nobody really wrote "Footprints in the Sand." Those who have claimed to, Aviv noted, may be suffering from the collective "accidental plagiarism" that Carl Jung explored in his paper "Cryptomnesia" more than a century ago.

Confusion Abounds

Everyone knows a cryptomnesiast, of one sort or another. It's your cousin who stood up at Peepaw's funeral and tried to pass off the "Do not cry, I did not die" poem as his own; or those crafty tykes who keep submitting bits of Shel Silverstein as original verse to The Post's kids' poetry contest. It's the woman who sends you a sympathy card after your dog dies, with her handwritten version of the (also disputed) fable about dogs waiting for their masters in Heaven. It's your church pastor or corporate motivational speaker who keeps coming up with those amazing "I-recently-met-a-man-who" anecdotes.

So why go after the origin of "Footprints" now?

"Because someone is trying to take credit for it," Bartel said, for the plaintiff.

"'Why now?' is my question, too," said Hughes, but he's confident a judge will dismiss the suit. "Mary Stevenson and her family have had 20 years to bring this suit."

And a lot has happened since "Footprints" caught on. It started out as a tranquil walk in the soft-focus mists, but, jeez, you turn around and it's

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