BELATED NOTE: E.B. White had a birthday the other day,
posthumously, of course.

Our very favorite quote of all time – which we’ve published
before – was written by White and appeared in the July 3, 1943, New
Yorker. We think it bears repeating:

“Democracy is … the line that forms on the right. It is the
don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through
which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high
hat.

“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the
people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of
privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the
libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.

“Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at
the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been
disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It the
mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee…”

White wrote fiction, such as “Charlotte’s Web,” but he sticks in
our mind for a small volume called “The Elements of Style.”

Co-author was William Strunk Jr. and anyone who’s taken a
college English course is familiar with the importance of “Strunk
and White” in mastering – or, at least, attempting to – the written
word.

The edition in the newsroom, the fourth, contains standard items
of acclaim on the back cover. “No book in shorter space, with fewer
words, will help any writer more than this persistent little
volume,” said the Boston Globe.

Sez it all.

BIG VOID: The folks at Planet Smethport are looking to fill a
“big void” in its history of several McKean County communities.
Specifically, they would like to see historical photos of oil
development in the communities of Rew, Bordell, Wolf Run, Cyclone
and Ormsby.

Ross Porter made that request and also passed along a note from
Thomas Cunningham of Cyclone who had written him, “I live in an old
Pennzoil house as most of us up here do, and just was wondering if
you’d have any history on it or photos.”

(For those of you wondering about “Planet Smethport,” it’s a
website created by Smethport Area High School students “and the
greater Smethport, Pa., community located around the Planet.”)