After cranking out a take-no-prisoners critique of a court ruling out west that deemed the Pledge of Allegiance to be unconstitutional because it contains the words “under God,” yr. fthfl. crspndt. took a beating in the resulting mail from bleeding-heart liberals, atheists, agnostics, the occasional flaming feminist and some guy who professes to believe that it’s all part of the great conspiracy by the diabolical Trilateral Commission to take over the world.

If ignorance was cornflakes, I’d be General Mills, my newfound pen pals said, in effect.

Later, when I made sport of the 1913 painting “Black” which a Russian tycoon paid a million bucks for and then donated to St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, I found myself in deep doo-doo with the letter-writing art crowd.

Like any card-carrying agent provocateur, I enjoy such routine reader reaction. For, truth be told, when it comes to a columnist’s mail from the freight-paying public, the letter that suggests that the columnist’s hat size grossly exceeds his IQ is often more cherished than the rare letter that recommends he be elevated to sainthood. The former suggests that the columnist has succeeded in his eternal quest to touch a nerve; the latter can sometimes mean only that the columnist wouldn’t be nearly the prime candidate for canonization were he not of the same mind-set in the matter at hand as the author of the letter.

In the employ of an accomplished letter-writing wordsmith with access to either the Internet or the United States Postal Service, a fully loaded poison pen might legitimately be considered a weapon of mass destruction, I suppose. But the prose it can produce may also be a thing of beauty, as I was reminded this week in rummaging through some treasured old files in preparation for heaving them at long last into the recycling bin at the local dump. In the process I came across a packet of some classic shots that have been fired across my bow over the years.

One unhappy customer writing from The Other Maine described your humble servant as “a pathetic old fool,” and said the The Old Dawg appellation “aptly describes him – a mushy-gummed neurotic… Maine wouldn’t be nearly so much fun without the BDN. It always makes me laugh.”

Another, in an even bigger snit about a later column, wrote, “Whereas I imagine the reason Mr. Ward failed to use the quote from Shakespeare was due to his recognition that any faithful readers of his column usually must have the ward nurse turn the pages for them, due to the tight fits of their straitjackets, I do understand the point he was trying to make. It is, however, much like every other point Mr. Ward made in said column: categorically misinformed and erroneous…”

The offended client had responded in August of 1991 to a column that had run the previous December, but his delay, he explained, was really “quite simple: I find your editorial pages so insipid and obtuse that I avoid reading anything that appears there, for fear my intellectual abilities will come tumbling down as fast as the readership of your paper…” In my case, however, he was willing to make an exception to his rule when a friend mentioned the column nine months after the fact. (Now that’s a column with heroic shelf life, boys and girls.)

Most of the other correspondence in the file headed for the dumpster employs a similarly delightful carpet-bombing approach, albeit one ratcheted up a notch to the extent that there’s no use in trying to sneak it by my controller and official arbiter of good taste up at the newspaper. Ah, the good old days before we became a nation of pussycats, tempered in our correspondence by the heavy hand of political correctness.

A partial copy of Puck, the comic weekly, more than 100 years old, was included in the same file and will be saved. It contains a blurb taken from the old Brooklyn Eagle newspaper that somehow seems to dovetail with the reader complaints.

One old boy greets another by bringing up the chap’s recent arrest for public drunkenness, which, of course, the fellow denies. “Well, here it is in the paper, plain as day: Marcus H. Simpson, grain-dealer, of 814 Barclay St.,” says the first man.

“Lemme see the paper,” replies the offended one. “Well, truth is dead in this world. The newspapers are lying more than ever. The miserable liar of a reporter who wrote that! I told the judge my name was Thomas Jones, and that I lived in Hannibal, N.J. There’s no liar like a newspaper!”

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is

olddawg@bangordailynews.net.