Here's a screenshot:
Fritz found his, then I searched for mine and got the above result.
Years ago we both wrote several entries for The Dictionary of American History, a ten-volume reference work published by Charles Scribner's Sons. It was an interesting job, although toward then end things got a little crazy because the final edits were happening during the summer when we were in and out of town on vacation.
Anyway, up the street at the local county library they have a set. I went in to see it one time, just to look up my own name. It looked pretty official.
Now you can buy them, for petessakes, as if someone would pay up to $9 for an encyclopedia entry.
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I notice that they omitted my entries on Mother's Day and nickelodeons -- possibly because they were shorter than the other two.
As I was saying earlier, this is probably the hardest I've ever worked in writing, in dollars/hour, at least. Perhaps it's no surprise then that I'm quite proud of what we produced.
I was particularly proud of my entry on nickelodeons (the early theaters, not the kiddie TV channel), which I thought crammed a lot of narrative into the 200-word limit. Here it is, in its entirety:
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NICKELODEON, an early type of motion picture theater, so named for its five-cent admission price. ("Odeon" is derived from a Greek term for theater.) Nickelodeons were preceded by penny arcades, where patrons peered through viewers at short moving pictures. The arrival of narrative-style films, like Edwin Porter's famous 12-minute The Great Train Robbery (1903), created the need for a new form of presentation. The name "nickelodeon" is usually credited to entrepreneurs John Harris and Harry Davis, who in 1905 opened a simple theater in Pittsburgh where projected films were accompanied by piano. By 1910, thousands of nickelodeons had appeared nationwide, many of them little more than converted storefronts with wooden benches for seating. Nickelodeons often repeated the same films all day and evening, and were popular with working-class patrons who could not afford live theater, the leading entertainment of the day. The success of nickelodeons increased demand for more and better movies, leading in turn to the creation of new motion picture studios and helping establish film as a mass entertainment medium. Ironically, that rising popularity led to the end of nickelodeons, as they were replaced by larger, custom-built movie theaters. "Nickelodeon" later also became a term for a coin-operated musical jukebox.
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Thank you for allowing me this forum to talk about myself.
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