Also remembering now that we had never officially announced on the talklist that our
LbNA Lifetime Achievement Letterboxing Award 2007 honoree list has been up and
running for about a month now ever since Thanksgiving! It's number 127 on our website
index at http://alum.wpi.edu/~p_miner/Letterboxes.html

We hope that this summary of North American letterboxing history as we saw it develop
will be of interest especially to those newer letterboxers of the past few years who are
unfamiliar with how letterboxing took on its own style of adventure here on this continent,
and to whom we owe our special gratitude for this wonderful turn of events!

Certainly there are bound to be those among the newcomers who won't understand at all
our intentions in honoring these early North American letterboxing pioneers and their
accomplishments, and will simply need to squawk about why they can't have the stamp,
too! (or at least that's how it seemed to be in the past, but maybe folks have gained a
little maturity since then!:-) At any rate, these honorees haven't "won" an arbitrary "Oscar",
but have by our standards earned a special place in North American letterboxing history
for "Lifetime Achievement", so please join with us in applauding their efforts!

And, to those who feel we are simply being "old curmudgeons" who don't like some of the
directions in which North American letterboxing is currently being pulled (even by some
former LA-LA recipients - and just take a look at "Joshua's Dilemma" and our "SWOH
Graveyard" to get a clue about how some of us feel about that!), all we can say is please try
to honor the ESSENCE of the GAME! We repeatedly hear from newbies that the game is
changing, and it's just our tough luck if we "can't keep up with the technology", but we
believe they are completely missing the point! It is not the superficial "technological
trappings" we care about at all, but rather the integrity of the game itself! All
"technological changes" do for games in general is make them more "glitzy", with icons
and neon lights on the scoreboards, "expert commentators" and astroturf instead of real
grass, but the rules of engagement for any particular game still remain essentially the
same - you still need to throw or hit a ball to a certain place to score a point for that
particular game! Suppose we suddenly decided, as we have probably all seen little
children doing in their play games, that you don't have to actually hit the ball to call it a
"homerun" - just run around the bases for fun, would it still be baseball? Or if people
decided that they didn't want to bother trying to knock the pins down in a bowling alley by
rolling a ball from behind a certain line, but just walked down the lane and knocked them
all down manually, or decided that rolling gutter balls counted as strikes, would that still
be bowling??? These are the type of game changes (postals, virtuals, cooties, etc.) we are
concerned with in letterboxing because they do not preserve the integrity of a game
whose essence we feel includes a clue, a search and a find! Yes, as children, we've all
bent the rules in games we have played or changed them to suit our whims, but there is
still general agreement as to what normally constitutes any particular game, and I hope by
now that most people realize that, for North American-style letterboxing at least, it is
about the hunt and not just about acquiring stamp images! So, once again, please join us
in congratulating these special folks who have over the years done so much to help
establish and play our favorite game so well!

Cheers,
Wanda & Pete