Not long ago Steve Murch – this publication’s managing editor – wrote a column bemoaning the failure of some area coaches to provide The News with stats from their team’s games. Steve noted the importance of such information’s publication not only to the readers of The News but to the athletes and their families.

With area baseball leagues beginning a new season, Steve’s comments are again timely.

Shortly before Steve’s article appeared, I had sent my friend Charlie Girard a clipping from The Alpena News that my Mother had saved. It noted a triple I hit in The Alpena Youth Softball League some years before. Occasionally, I have to put Charlie in his place.

But Charlie responded with a clipping his Mother had saved that put me in my place. His clipping described a winning home run he hit in that same league. Charlie won back then and he won again 60 years later.

Tributes come large and small but they are all important especially to our young people. We all want our kids, grandkids – all kids – to do well and to receive acknowledgement for doing so, just as Charlie did for doing well and I did for doing semi-well.

It’s not just the kids who appreciate tributes; we all do. They set us apart if only for a moment. But I’ve come to believe that the finest tributes are the simplest ones, those brief clippings in which we are simply remembered.

Here’s two: one for Frank, who was a sailor; the other for my dear friend John Kaufman.

Frank had been a seaman for nearly 50 years. He was the first mate on a Great Lakes freighter, the Ben W. Calvin; my uncle Ralph was the Calvin’s skipper. One day many years ago the Calvin was steaming up the Detroit River with a load of coal from the coal docks at Sandusky, Ohio. Frank was in his usual position on the bridge peering out into the Calvin’s evolving passage when he suffered a massive heart attack and was gone.

A few weeks later, while visiting my uncle on the Calvin, I learned of Frank’s passing and took the time to page back in the ship’s log. There it was – the entry: a date, a time, and this, “Delayed 45 minutes Hanna Furnace Dock to remove the body of Frank Monroe.”

As a young man, I remember asking myself: “Is that all there is after close to 50 years?” Of course, there had been more; his colleagues and family had grieved – there had been tributes. But over the years I have come to realized that brief entry for Frank was a tribute as well. Most of life’s sailors wash away from its shore with no entry being made in any earthly log.

My best friend John was a professor at California State University in Pomona, Calif. At the age of 64 he fell victim to an aggressive cancer. In just a few weeks time he was gone. There were many tributes paid to John.

A couple years ago, yet feeling the remorse of his passing, I wrote to a colleague of his at the college where John had taught. I told him I had no specific reason for writing other than to remember John.

His colleague replied expressing his understanding and saying he too missed John. He told me that shortly before he died John had been in his office and when he left had forgotten his hat – left it hanging on a rack.

John’s colleague told me that however long he occupied that office John’s hat would remain resting there.

The good professor sent me a picture of John’s hat waiting on that rack. I keep this,”clipping” in my center desk drawer – a tribute to my old friend John.

Doug Pugh’s Vignettes run bi-weekly on Tuesdays. He can be reached via email at pughda@gmail.com.