Writing the wrongs daily

"A letter to the editor is democracy in action. Get in the act and write," urged actor Ed Asner in 1981, when he was co-chairman of National Letter-Writing Week.

Asner - who won Emmys for his role as a hardboiled newspaper editor in the hit TV series "Lou Grant" - needn't have worried. Veteran letter writers take their craft seriously.

The Tribune receives hundreds of letters a day. Most are submitted by e-mail or through the newspaper's Web site. A fair number are faxed or mailed.

Some submissions that never make it into print still grab our attention. For example, a writer from Tampa was convinced he held Amelia Earhart's skull, but he hasn't seen it since he gave it to someone he now can't find.

Another Tampa writer says he has proof that Lee Harvey Oswald was aiming at Texas Gov. John Connally, not President John F. Kennedy, in Dealey Plaza.

The Tribune has a dozen-plus readers who closely follow the news, sports and opinions in the paper and then submit letters - sometimes even twice a day - about what they read.

Who are some of those frequent letter writers? What are their jobs? Why do they write? Here is a look at a few of those who regularly appear in print.

Dwayne Keith, 49, of Valrico, commutes about 30 minutes to his job as operations manager of Marine Towing of Tampa, where he has worked for 10 years. He started dispatching tugs on the night shift for another company when he was still a University of South Florida student. He votes Republican and says he listens to a lot of talk radio.

When he reads the paper, "If I see something, I pretty much stop reading and race to the keyboard and start banging away. I've spent an hour or 30 seconds. It varies. I like to write. It's therapeutic to just get it off my chest. In fact, if it weren't for the Tribune, I'd need a therapist. I'd be shelling out dollars for it," he says, laughing.

Keith's last published letter took Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to task for her comment that "this system has worked" following the Christmas Day suicide-bomber attempt on a U.S.-bound flight. Calling her Janet "Incompetano," Keith said, "The system didn't work and it doesn't work because it is a bureaucracy."

And what do his wife and 17-year-old daughter think about his letter writing?

"My wife's not real thrilled about my letters. She thinks I'm making a target of myself," Keith said, "but she knows I'm passionate about politics. My daughter just hopes her teachers, who she imagines don't agree with me, don't associate her and I."

She's feeling better after her recent second kidney transplant, and because of that, Mary Sheppard knows a thing or two about the health care system. A retired telephone company supervisor, she and her husband, a retired Clearwater firefighter, share their Riverview home with a powder-puff bichon frise.

"I'm a registered Republican, but my views have changed so much I'm thinking about changing to Democrat," Sheppard says. "I thought the Republican Party was the elite, that they kept the Democrats in line, but ..." her voice trailing off.

Sheppard was born in West Virginia; her father, a coal miner, was a Democrat. She moved to Florida in 1973, and writes mostly about politics.

"I was a child of the '60s, and we thought we were going to change the world, but it didn't turn out that way," she says. Her letters often appear on the opinion pages, and recently she took another writer to task for his comments regarding a Tribune editorial about health care reform legislation.

"I feel it's time government put the American people ahead of special interest groups like the insurance companies. (Jack) Bolen might not care that millions of his fellow Americans do not have health care, but I do. He may not care that the insurance companies can pick and choose who they will insure, but I do. And most of all he may not care that insurance premiums are the fastest-rising cost, but I do. We need to move on without him."

She recently celebrated her 60th birthday and hopes to someday walk the Appalachian Trail.

"I guess I'm a bit of a Pollyanna. I would like to see everybody get along and nobody tell anybody how to live and have a little more patience with one another," Sheppard says.

Turning slightly red-faced, Ray Brown, 56, of Apollo Beach, sheepishly admits that a couple of months ago he submitted a letter to the Tribune under his brother's name to skirt the paper's policy about the frequency of printing letters from the same person. It was the Letter of the Day.

"I hand-write it first if something comes to mind after watching one of the talking heads," says Brown, who likes Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. "Then I get on the computer, but sometimes I just change everything as I go along."

Brown lives with his older brother, George, and both are single. He is a former merchant marine and works as a security guard in North Tampa.

"Don't believe it when the Homeland Security secretary says it's safe, because we have a real problem when two uninvited guests can gain access to the White House for a state dinner with no clearance check and have access to the president, and a Nigerian who was turned in by his own father because of his extremist ambitions goes unchecked and is allowed to board an American airliner," Brown wrote in a letter published early last month.

"I just try to feel the pulse of what's going on and if nobody else has written about it I try to make a point with a little humor, a little irony," he says.

The pain in her neck and back is chronic since Cathy Starnes, 45, was involved in a December 2008 accident in which she was rammed from behind by an SUV at a red light. But it's just another challenge for the Plant City resident who was widowed before her daughter, now 21, was born.

"I'm a Christian and I read my Bible every day, so sometimes the inspiration to write comes from that," the lifelong Floridian says.

One of her most recent letters, published Jan. 8 when the weather here was unseasonably cold, was short but pithy: "If P-P-President Obama attends m-m-more global warming m-m-meetings, then God will c-c-cause the U.S. to b-b-become p-p-permafrost. T-t-twenty-four degrees in F-F-Florida! Analyze that, Copenhagen."

Starnes was the editorial page editor of her student newspaper in high school and went on to graduate from Yale in 1986 with a degree in history.

"I became a volunteer in 1992 for George H.W. Bush, and I worked at the front desk in the office, which was on Gandy Boulevard. It didn't end on Election Day," she says. "I kept coming back week after week."

Today, she is a substitute social studies, math, science and music teacher for elementary and middle school students in Plant City and Brandon. She also teaches piano at Roydon Music in Brandon. She's working on a special project, arranging video game music for the keyboard.

Ernest Lane of Trinity is smiling because another of his letters has been printed in the Tribune.

Like most of the retired Army officer's letter submissions, his latest is brief. He intentionally tries to limit his comments to the Tribune's suggested 150-word length, figuring that will help his chances of being published.

"The spending freeze the president offered is a joke," he wrote in a recent submission. "Although your editorial calls it 'most federal spending not related to national security,' in reality it exempts so much that it amounts to little more than a rounding error. Don't forget that it's a 'freeze' to spending levels that have been obscenely increased in the last year. And if it's so important, why not start now instead of next year? He wants a commission to offer debt solutions. Isn't there one already, called Congress?"

He served in Vietnam as a lieutenant in charge of a platoon. He has a neurological condition, dysarthria, that affects his speech.

"I used to like to debate, but I can't do that anymore. I am somewhat limited in what I can do."

Because of his military background, he moved often, but he has lived the longest in his Pasco County home, with his wife of 42 years. He also has a grown son and daughter.

Lane says he usually votes Republican, but he says that's only so he can vote in GOP primaries. He calls himself a libertarian.

He remembers his first letter, which was printed in The Washington Post in the 1980s when he was stationed at the Pentagon. He says the Army instituted a policy prohibiting officers in uniform from carrying an umbrella, and he wrote that the generals who make the rules don't have to park far from the building and walk in the rain.

Lane's conclusion doesn't surprise us. Good letter writers usually give us something to ponder or scratch our heads over. And they usually make their point with style.