Every time we are called into a meeting for the purpose of introducing a big special publication my adrenaline begins to flow. The same thing happened when we met with the publisher on April 26 to talk about an upcoming issue – Sketchbook 2004.

We are indeed proud of this edition and I want to thank all who made my job easier and worked with me in getting the information I needed to publish. However, no matter what, there will always be some people who will be pleased with what you have done and some who will be displeased.

I mentioned in the second paragraph in the &uot;Off The Wall&uot; column published on May 5th that usually after a publication has hit the newsstands someone will come up to me and say, &uot;Why were we left out?&uot; or how disappointed that they may be when their news wasn’t included. This same thing happened again on Monday morning. To avoid this situation, I also wrote in that very same column how a person could make sure that they wouldn’t be left out.

I was assigned getting information on civic leagues and church news and asked readers to mail or call me about your news and a phone number on where to contact me. I also gave other reporters’ assignments so they could receive material for their news features.

I just about breezed through civic leagues but when it came to the churches, information started coming very slowly. As the deadline neared for us to turn in our material, I wrote a column on May 15 and mentioned how information was coming in very slowly and pleaded with the public not to let the edition be printed with your information being excluded.

In desperation and as my deadline for church news grew even shorter, I took my telephone directory and just went down the list of churches to get as many as I could before I sent them to be published. This is very time consuming when you have so much other work to complete. That is why I solicited your help in getting this news. I want to wholeheartedly thank those churches that sent information to me as soon as they read the columns.

Now, I have a suggestion for other churches that I did call. It would help if when your answering service picks up the call that the pastor’s name and time of services would be included. Many of these services only told me to call back later or to leave my name and they would get back to me. A very few churches didn’t have any answering service at all.

I apologize for those churches that didn’t make it into the directory but I feel I made an effort and can’t afford to have any regrets because it can run your blood pressure up.

To those churches who sent me mission statements and wanted to know why they were not published, the simple fact is that we were running out of space for other features so we had to cut some of the material.

I received some calls from readers about other places that they would liked to have seen in the publication but overall I received positive comments about the edition and several additional ones were sold on Monday.

We at the Suffolk News-Herald have a unique working relationship and enjoy working as a team. I think that everyone did an excellent job. Those Suffolk News-Herald employees who were not pictured in the booklet but worked extra hard to make Sketchbook 2004 a success were as follows: Retail Sales Department, Advertising Director Rebecca Hill, Earl Jones, Sue Barnes, April Carter, Leslie Burkey and Christine Drames; Classified Sales Department, Linda Bundy and Gene Denison; Compugraphic Artists, Freda Robertson and Hope Rose and Circulation Director, Shirley Forehand.

If any of our readers have any kind of criticisms or comments about the 2004 edition, I know that the publisher, Andy Prutsok and the entire staff feel as I do for you to express them to us and we will definitely include them with our new ideas for Sketchbook 2005.

Evelyn Wall is a News-Herald staff writer. She can be reached at 934-9615, or at evelyn.wall@suffolknewsherald.com.