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I read footnotes, I always have, perhaps it seems like good manners to read everything

someone else has written for you, like cleaning your plate when you're a kid.

Or maybe it's because a footnote is where you put the bit of information that doesn't

quite fit the main story, but at the same time is too important to leave out.

And to my mind, the thing that is important and doesn't fit, is often the most important

thing of all.

So I read footnotes, and occasionally that leads me somewhere entirely unexpected.

Like the footnote at the very end of a paper in the Journal of Criminal Justice, entitled

Damned Upon Arrival, volume 23, number 4, pages 313-323-1995.

Lead author, Penelope J. Hanke, second author, James H. Gundlock.

It made me go all the way to a little town in Alabama to have the man who wrote the

footnote explained to me 30 years later, just what it meant.

Could you do me a favor?

Can you read the footnote for me?

Small print.

...