{"id":3363,"date":"2025-11-07T09:47:33","date_gmt":"2025-11-07T17:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=3363"},"modified":"2025-11-07T09:47:33","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T17:47:33","slug":"the-power-of-the-written-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2025\/11\/07\/the-power-of-the-written-word\/","title":{"rendered":"The Power of the Written Word"},"content":{"rendered":"

A number of weeks ago, I heard from a new reader who had encountered Second Watch<\/em> for the first time. It turns out that in real life he had been one of Doug Davis\u2019s roommates at West Point back in the sixties. As a result of that interaction, a case of mistaken identity sixty years in the making has now been corrected.<\/p>\n

Each week after the blog posts, I read ALL comments. I may not respond to all of them, but I do read them. Last week one of the commenters asked if it was possible that another blog reader had attended school in Calgary back in the sixties. I happened to know that the second woman had indeed spent time growing up in Calgary, so over the weekend I sent both women the following email:<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, I had a friend named Donna Lee Angeleri. The Angeleris lived up the street from us on Yuma Trail in Bisbee, Arizona. There were seven kids in their family and seven in ours, so when we paired off by age, Donna and I were a pair.<\/p>\n

Mr. Angeleri worked for the mines but lounged around the house in what I\u2019ve since learned is often called a “wife-beater\u201d undershirt. And, although I never knew it at the time, he was true to form.<\/p>\n

Every year, Phelps Dodge shut down the mines for two weeks and everybody went on vacation. One year the Angeleris left town for shut down and never returned.<\/p>\n

I missed Donna dearly, and eventually I started looking for her. Decades later, I dedicated Web of Evil,<\/em> the second Ali Reynolds book, to Donna in hopes of finding her. The dedication reads like this: For Donna A., the last missing piece of my childhood. I\u2019ve been looking for you for years. That worked. Months later someone put us in touch.<\/p>\n

Sometime in the early 2000s, Donna called me and we spoke on the phone for the better part of an hour. During that call she told me that her mother had been the victim of domestic violence. When they left Bisbee, Mrs. Angeleri and her kids been forced to live for a time in an aunt\u2019s garage in southern California. Mrs. Angleri was a good Catholic who never divorced her husband. Years later, when her he was dying, she took him in and cared for him until the end.<\/p>\n

Donna grew up, married, and got a good job working for Motorola in Phoenix. She told me she was surprised to learn that she had a friend from Bisbee who had searched for her for decades because she didn\u2019t believe anyone from back would even remember her. Nonetheless, she made it clear that she had no desire to resume our friendship because she didn\u2019t want to revisit all those bad old times. I\u2019ve abided by her wishes. I deleted her phone number and have made no effort to be back in touch.<\/p>\n

After the Angeleris left town, their house eventually sold, and two years later a family named Conway moved into it. They had two kids\u2014Diana who was a year older than I was, and Joey who was the same age as my brother, Arlan.<\/p>\n

For backwater Bisbee, the Conways were out there. The whole family rode bicycles. In Bisbee, bicycles were for kids not grownups. And the kids called their parents Joe and Sally rather than Mom and Dad. Diana played the piano, practicing for at least an hour every day. Nonetheless, she and I quickly bonded. We both loved reading, and we made weekly treks to the Greenway School Library\u2014which was open one day a week during the summers\u2014hauling books back and forth in the Busk family\u2019s Radio Flyer wagon.<\/p>\n

Mr. Conway had been hired as an announcer at the local radio station. Unfortunately, his job lasted for only two short months. At the end of the summer they left town, moving on to California, but Diana and I stayed in touch as pen-pals. The summer before I started high school, I took a train from Tucson to LA and spent a week with Diana and her family at their home in Sherman Oaks. We continued to correspond all through college, but after that, we lost touch.<\/p>\n

In the early eighties I began looking for Diana in earnest\u2014to no avail. It was as though she had vanished into thin air, and that\u2019s when I wrote the following poem, hoping that someone who knew Diana might read it and put us back in touch.<\/p>\n

Maiden Names
\nfor
\nDiana Conway from Judy Busk<\/em><\/p>\n

We were young girls together,
\nEleven or twelve at most,
\nYet our conversations soared to galaxies afar.
\nWe carried books by wagonload,
\nDug for fossils, climbed a rock or two
\nAnd swore that they were mountains.
\nWe lost each other later in a maze
\nOf married names that easily removed all trace
\nOf those two friends together.
\nI think of you, Diana, and I know
\nOur paths must be in parallel.
\nI only hope someday they\u2019ll cross again.<\/em><\/p>\n

That didn\u2019t happen, so a few years later, I tried again. While writing the first Walker Family book, Hour of the Hunter<\/em>, the main character was named Diana in honor of my long-ago friend, and part of the dedication said, \u201c\u2026 to Diana Conway, wherever she is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eleven years later, that dedication mention finally paid off. While attending Left Coast Crime in Anchorage in 2001, I met a woman who held up a copy of Hour of the Hunter<\/em> and demanded, \u201cWho\u2019s the Diana Conway in this book?\u201d I explained that Diana was a long lost childhood friend. \u201cWell,\u201d the woman told me, \u201cI know someone named Diana Conway, and she lives right here in Anchorage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Minutes later, I was speaking on the phone\u2014well, blubbering rather than speaking\u2014to my long-lost friend. Diana had attended seventeen schools in the course of grade school and high school. I had attended exactly two. She was a bit taken aback to hear from me because she hadn\u2019t been searching for me in the same way I had been for her, but just like that, our long-interrupted friendship was back on a penpal track and stayed that way until the middle of the pandemic. After that we lost touch once more, and I\u2019m sorry about that.<\/p>\n

Once we reconnected I was thrilled to learn Diana\u2019s and my lives really were in parallel because she
\nalso became a writer. She wrote reading comprehension essays for the annual achievement tests all kids had to endure back in the day. She also wrote a weekly column for an Anchorage newspaper.<\/p>\n

Given all this you can see how having one of my blog readers reach out to another in search of a long-lost friend really touched me. I hope the two of you have the same kind of joy in reconnecting that I found with both Donna and Diana.<\/p>\n

Regards,<\/p>\n

JAJance<\/p>\n

That was what I wrote over the weekend. I\u2019m writing this on Monday morning, and I\u2019m thrilled to report that those two friends, following a long mixup over married names, are now back in touch with each other!<\/p>\n

I\u2019m counting it as a blog miracle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A number of weeks ago, I heard from a new reader who had encountered Second Watch for the first time. It turns out that in real life he had been one of Doug Davis\u2019s roommates at West Point back in the sixties. As a result of that interaction, a case of mistaken identity sixty years […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The Power of the Written Word","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-Sf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3363"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3364,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3363\/revisions\/3364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}