Now and again some regular letter writers to the Pilot gripe about how we edit their contributions. I try to explain to them it’s nothing personal. We basically aim to correct grammatical mistakes and make sure it fits our style. For instance, you might prefer to write “twenty-five,” but our style is to use the number “25.” That’s standard style. Generally, you spell out numbers one to nine, but it’s the digits after that (there are, of course, exceptions but I won’t bore you with the details).

Often the most frustrating thing is editing copy down to fit the space we have available. Then you get into judgment territory — and some writers can get a little precious about their words. You may recall recently Assemblyman Chuck DeVore got a little hot when our copy editors chopped down one of his submissions to our “That’s Debatable” feature.

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Imagine this: You’re interning for CBS news and your job that day is escorting political luminaries like Colin Powell and Jesse Jackson to live on-air interviews with anchorwoman Katie Couric.

Easy, right? Cushy. Busy work for the intern. This way to the studio, sir.

Now how about with nearly 2 million people outside your door?

That’s what Heidi Schultheis had to deal with on Inauguration Day.

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For Mary Ellen Goddard her interest in history started when she and her husband lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Art Goddard, an aerospace engineer and project manager for Rockwell and later Boeing, was working there at the time. Mary Ellen was studying at Coe College in Cedar Rapids. Nearby was the Beach School.

“It was just a one-room school house that belonged to my neighbor,” she said. “And I always wondered about it.”

She started up an independent-study project on it at school, dug into the city’s archives and eventually wrote a booklet on it, which became the basis of an effort that led to putting it on the national registry of historic places.

She was hooked on this history stuff.

Art, meanwhile, spent so much of his career working during the Cold War that he developed an interest in the Soviet Union. Eventually the two were able to visit Russia in 2000 and finally see how the other side lived. When he retired he started volunteering more to keep pace with Mary Ellen’s activities at the Costa Mesa Historical Society. Mary Ellen, who is also retired from her job working on the archives at UC Irvine, went on from Coe to earn a master’s degree in public history from Cal State Dominguez Hills.

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