Working the Angles

DEBRA FIEGUTH
CW Senior Writer

Two women, two countries, two books - one poem. While Canadians have long accepted Margaret Fishback Powers as the one who penned the famous "Footprints" poem - until 1987 attributed only to "author unknown" - in the U.S. there's a different version of the story, one that gives credit to an American woman.

The Canadian version says Powers wrote the poem near Kingston, Ontario in 1964, at the time of her engagement to Paul Powers. The American version says Mary Stevenson wrote it in Chester, Pennsylvania in 1936 as a sad and motherless 14-year-old.

Powers chronicled her story in the 1993 HarperCollins book Footprints: The True Story Behind the Poem that Inspired Millions. StevensonÕs version is told in Footprints in the Sand: The Inspiring Life Behind the Immortal Poem, written by Gail Giorgio in 1992 and published by Gold Leaf Press.

Both are biographical. Powers tells of growing up in a loving, sheltered family, then meeting her future husband, whose background was tough and unhappy. When she decided to marry him, she knew her life might not be as easy as it had been. So after a walk on the beach at Lake Ontario with her fiance, she was inspired to write the poem to show how God promised he would take care of her no matter what.

Stevenson's life, on the other hand, was difficult from childhood. She lost her mother when she was six, and her father, in his struggle to raise his six children alone, often treated her harshly. Her brother was killed when she was 10. Locked out of the house one snowy night, she saw a neighbour's cat walk across the snow, leaving its footprints behind. A girl with an active imagination, she dreamed about being on a warm beach. Then she pulled out a pencil stub and a piece of paper and wrote the poem.

The poems differ slightly in their wording, but they are based on the same premise: when the writer sees only one set of footprints, it is then she is assured that the Lord was carrying her.

It's clear that the poem has inspired millions. What's not clear is for how long. Author Giorgio believes she encountered it before 1958 "because that year I listed it in 'My Secret Self Diary' which is stored in a box of high school memorabilia." That would have been hard to do if the poem was only written in 1964.

Mary Stevenson died in January 1999, but her close friend Kathy Bee, whom she met in a night club in Hollywood in 1979, where singer-songwriter Bee was performing, has taken up the cause of proving Stevenson is the rightful author. (Bee was carrying around a card in her wallet that had the poem inscribed on it. She was astounded to find a hand-scribbled copy of the same poem, dated 1939, in a cardboard box at StevensonÕs home.)

Bee encouraged Stevenson to get the poem copyrighted, which she did in 1984. Margaret Powers had her version copyrighted in 1987. Both copyrights are in the U.S.

(This is a puzzle: How could the same poem be copyrighted twice in the same country? Perhaps the slightly different versions account for that.)

Bee says she has been contacted by people who claim to have had copies of the poem as far back as the 1940s. Though Stevenson never published the poem, she hand-wrote many copies, giving them to people who liked them and sending them, and other poems, to soldiers in the Vietnam War.

A few years ago a forensic scientist, Kurt Schwalbe, donated his skills and time to analyzing the 1939 copy of the poem. He concluded, by examining both the paper and the graphite used to pencil the poem, that it was, indeed, authentic. A Web site dedicated to Stevenson (www.foot-print.com) includes an image of that tattered and yellow copy.

Powers says she lost her original poem in a move from Ontario to British Columbia in 1980 when six boxes went missing. That's how she accounts for its widespread use-someone found the poem and began distributing it. But Kathy Bee says she had the poem prior to 1979, at least a year before it went missing from the move.

Then, in 1987, perplexed and discouraged, and trying to decide whether to launch a lawsuit against "the infringers," Powers suddenly remembered she had a handwritten copy of the poem in her wedding album. Although she decided in the end not to sue, she did manage to convince Hallmark Cards and several other companies of her authorship, and eventually began reaping royalties from its use. HarperCollins Canada has printed more than 170,000 copies of PowersÕs Footprints book in 22 printings since 1993, as well as numerous other related books.

HarperCollins vice-president Lloyd Kelly says lots of people have tried to claim ownership of Footprints. "Some of them are ministersÕ wives. It can be a rather embarrassing situation." Kelly is skeptical of Stevenson's claim to have written the poem. "ItÕs highly questionable, in my opinion."

That doesn't deter Kathy Bee from working on behalf of the late Mary Stevenson. "IÕm not quitting," she says. "I'm just waiting to see what IÕm supposed to do next."

It's not likely that either side will ever convince the entire world of who is the rightful author. A Web search using the words "Footprints in the sand" turns up 4,600 sites! Most of them are based on the enigmatic poem. (The exceptions promote travel in Florida or refer to genealogy or estate planning.) One of them is an Islamic poetry site.

And a quick scan of the first several dozen sites listed shows that the vast majority - many of which sell calendars, bookmarks, lapel pins, candles and even those sandals that have "Jesus" engraved in the soles - attribute the poem to "author unknown," or have no attribution at all.

The poem is a runaway. There's no stopping it now, especially with the Internet taking it to millions more people. Companies all over the world are making money by selling trinkets featuring Footprints.