Staff Writer, Hendersonville Times-News

January 20, 2006 (blueridgenow.com)

To The Editor: The informative news article which appeared in the Sunday Times-News commemorating Benjamin Franklin’s 300th anniversary to be celebrated by the Smithsonian Institution in our nation’s capitol sparked my interest.

What may have been an oversight on the part of the Associated Press writer was the historic fact that Franklin was a Founding Father and member of the Constitutional Convention.

He was also a believer in reincarnation, who at the young age of 22 wrote his own epitaph which Carl Van Doren, writer and editor during the late 1800s, has called the most famous of American epitaphs, which I quote herewith:

“The body of Benjamin Franklin, printer, like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding, lies here, food for worms, but the work shall not be lost, for it will appear once more in a new and more elegant edition, revised and corrected by the author.”

This material was borrowed from the book, Strangers Among Us, by Ruth Montgomery, published in 1979 with the subtitle, Enlightened Beings from A World to Come. Montgomery was for 25 years a syndicated columnist on political affairs in Washington.

Fred Chaffee

Hendersonville