The Brilliant Among Us
Exceptional minds are found in unlikely people.
It was 1981 and an apple grower from Sunny Slope (Canyon County, Idaho), Steve Symms, had just defeated the powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Frank Church.
Awaiting Senator Symms in his Washington, D.C., congressional mail was the following letter with no return address and a postmark dated from Aberdeen, Idaho:
Senator Steve Simz, Sir,
Fluffy Frank’s furry-faced fishing friend, Fidel, (from fairly far from Florida), frequently fouls friendly foreign fields.
Castro continually contrives clandestine Communist campaigns — conquering countless countries. Can’t Congress control Cuba’s constant continental cavorting? Commie colonial conquest cannot continue!
This tyrant tramples the timid types – thereby thwarting truthful testimony.
Such sinister surreptitious sedition should stop, soon. Senate should show some sense.
Nincompoop neo-Neville no-nukes nuts need negation now.
Please provide proletarian protagonists prompt, painful punishment, prolong peaceful people’s pleasure.
All allegiant and authentic Americans anxiously await an answer (atheist anarchists alone are against action).
Sincerely signed,
The name signed on the letter (found in no phonebook and on no voter file in Idaho) was C. Clarence “Clem” Cornforth.
The address on the envelope was similarly peculiar. All that was written on the outside of the envelope was “Sen. Simz.” In light pencil someone (likely a postal worker) had written 20510, the unique zip code of the Capitol Hill post office serving the United States Senate.
Once a letter arrives at the Senate post office, all mail is sorted by Senator’s last name. It would not be a stretch to sort the last name “Simz” to the mail of the only incoming new Senator with a close and identically pronounced name, Symms.
Holly Landis, in her article for the SkillShare website, entitled “Alliteration: An Amazing Artistic Attribute,” explains that the repetition of sounds at the beginnings of adjacent words is a long-desired linguistic device in English poetry.
She gives examples of “picture perfect” and “jumping jacks,” but then notes that exact spelling is unnecessary as alliteration is also achieved by coupling words like “kid’s coats.”
Writing where meaningful alliteration is used to emphasize and ingrain a concept in memory is a skill, often honed and nurtured over a lifetime of writing. Alliterating more than two words in a way that makes any sense becomes increasingly difficult.
To alliterate entire sentences, or paragraphs for that matter, would take an exceptional mind, with better-than-average vocabulary and English composition skills.
To compose an entire letter to a Senator with each paragraph, including address, salutation, and complimentary close, In letter-perfect alliteration? That can only be described as “brilliant.”
But what is most striking about this letter is that it reveals that such a brilliant mind can hide behind any face, be found in about any locality, amongst any ethnicity, or within any profession.
The author of this letter may have been brilliant but probably didn’t work in politics, or government, or even as a professional writer or journalist. How do we know that?
Because they knew how to pronounce, but not how to spell “Symms,” and therefore likely didn’t read much where the Senator’s name was spelled out correctly.
And that likelihood explains why the American ideal for a “free society” inherently values diversity and includes individuals who bigotry and stereotyping would otherwise exclude. That way we don’t miss the hidden brilliance among us.
Trent Clark of Soda Springs has served in the leadership of Idaho business, politics, workforce, and humanities education.