It’s winter break. The time when digital projects get reborn and spam folders get cleaned. As I haven’t been posting here much in recent months, I didn’t expect to find a lot in the unapproved comments filter. To my amusement (heck, amazement), an actual, non-robotic message of goodwill has reached me, just in time for the holidays!

Adding a hint of mystery, the message was sent on September 5, 2012, during a month in which I didn’t post a single item on the blog. (Shame on me.) Future Ed Golterman posts will get erased without a reading, and I can only imagine more are coming. (Oh, who I am kidding? I’ll read them, but won’t publish them.) But this one’s such a good-natured gem that I had to pass it along, in total. Enjoy:

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You dont know why some buildings survive
and others dont? Did you ever save a building,fight pricks for a decade. getting it on the Register, and aruging its economic value every day for a decade. And watch that building save a pissant hockey team? And,
may be a hard-endged sport-casinos downtown?

You have no platform, experience or
achievement from which to proport being an historian. An urban expert or economist. or preservationist.

In fact, Tom, you represent as you come close to mid-century in age, a complete generation that never experienced St. Louis as a real city. So you had no frame of reference or background in what makes a City7.

Unless you attend my presentation at UMSL
in 1998 0 What Makes a City.

You are not alone.

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I am not alone in receiving weird notes from this kook. That is true.