Closer to Home...

I know you must be just aching for yet another post boasting about my recent flurry of traffic from all over the world (where the heck is Malta?), but it's time to go hyper-local for a moment.

Susan Mangasarian, much-beloved 84-year-old matriarch of St. George's Episcopal Church in Maplewood, NJ, led the local CROP Hunger Walk for the third year in a row Sunday on a beautiful fall afternoon. The walkers, representing several local churches, raised $2,500 for international and local hunger relief.

Previous walks have been covered in the local weekly, but this year -- big-time PR guy that I am -- it finally dawned on me that we might even be able to get some coverage in the Star-Ledger. After an advance call to a former co-worker from my ink-stained days in the 1980s, photographer Tim Farrell was dispatched with a long lens and a willingness to extend himself to get just the right perspective.

Susan later told a Star-Ledger reporter that fighting hunger has been a key issue for her since childhood. She was born in this country, but her parents were Armenian, and her mother often told her about how hungry the family was when they were surviving the Armenian Massacre in 1915. But the Ledger ended up running just a photo and caption, above. (No link, as the photo ran only in the print edition of the paper.)

That's me, the paunchy guy in the middle -- I'm saying, "you get what you need, Tim?" (That's how big-time PR guys chat up the press.) The photos of Farrell are by my wife, the lovely Web Goddess, who also documented Susan's two previous excursions. The Web Goddess also captured 56 seconds of live-action footage of this year's walk.