Some of Soaring's editors have been good, even great writers themselves. Doug Lamont and John Good come to mind immediately. More commonly, editors have relied on other soaring pilots who have been very talented writers with modest flying abilities: e.g., Joe Lincoln and Gren Seibels. A few of these writers could both write and fly: The prolific world champion George Moffat comes to mind immediately.

An editor's job is mostly to get other people to write and then prepare their output for publication. Since Soaring has almost no budget for editorial, that means persuading, cajoling, and arm twisting, plus hoping enough unsolicited pieces come floating in that can be salvaged.

My [then] wife and I were once prevailed upon to write up the results of the Nationals at Hobbs. The results were "OK" but what I remember most was How.Much.Work.It.Was. Tanya was my crew and in charge of our twin girls, who were all over the airport. She nevertheless sort of kept up with her writing day to day. I didn't even think about it until after I got home, at which point I had to pull out the score sheets, refly the days in my mind, and try to reduce that to words.

Word count. As anyone who has read anything I've posted knows, it's impossible for me to be brief. Getting our joint effort down to the limit that had been set for us (governed by the page layout and allocation of the magazine) was another challenge.

My ex was a copy editor for a big NYC magazine so that was an advantage. Still, we passed the near-final piece back and forth several times as we both returned to the real world after being away from our jobs more than two weeks. I'm not saying this joint assignment was the proximate cause of our divorce, but it was stressful.

In short (well, relatively speaking), it's easy to say "hey, if you don't like what's in the magazine, write something yourself." Most of us can't. If good writing were easy, anyone could do it. So we rely on the few who do it well and the many who are "OK" with a lot of help from a good editor.

I used to read and reread my early issues of Soaring (1965 thru, say, the early 1970s) because the authors really did make me feel like I was there. I still read through the magazine quickly, and settle into an article a bit more deeply. But like a lot of other things in life, I don't expect Soaring will ever be the same. Pre-Internet, I used to complain about it and even, as an SSA Director, push for change. Now I think we're fortunate to still have a printed journal at all given the loss of classified ad income to the online channel. The fact that it's better now than it was for a long time is just a bonus.

Chip Bearden