Blind Men Groping

The characters:

Bill Sr: Rev. William B. Spofford, Sr. (April 5, 1892 - October 9, 1972). Episcopal clergyman, editor of The Witness, Christian curmudgeon.

Bill Jr: Rt. Rev. William B. Spofford, Jr. (January 28, 1921 - ). His only son. Episcopal clergyman and bishop. (Pictured, ca. 1995, with Polly, his wife of 64 years, and 4 grandchildren)

Tim: Tim Spofford (September 22, 1945 - ). His oldest son, blogger.

The blog:

More than twenty years ago, my father (Bill Jr.) began to edit the papers that my grandfather, Bill Sr., had assembled before his death as a planned autobiography, with the title "Blind Man Groping." Dad's manuscript consisted of Grandpa Bill's articles, letters and other writings, together with Dad's introductory or contextualizing commentaries. Despite a lot of research, correspondence, and dust raised by combing old files and archives, the project was never completed. It has been largely dormant since 1984 or so, when I copied Dad's manuscript, in triplicate, to 3-1/2" floppies and consigned them to a desk drawer, in the successors of which they remained until recently.

Awhile ago, after hunting down a floppy drive (a WHAT?), I tried to retrieve the files. One disk after another, and one computer after another, produced, "Disk in Drive A: has not been formatted. Format now? Y/N" Nevertheless, eventually I was able to find, on my own hard drive as well as on Dad's Mac, the 40 or so files that made up his unfinished manuscript.

That manuscript will be published here, under its original title, changed only from singular to plural to include and honor both of the authors. The files from which the text is taken have very few clues of the intended sequence. I've used what clues there are to order the text as intended, as best I can, and otherwise will be publishing them in more or less chronological order.

Tim Spofford
Portland, Oregon