The single set of footprints in the sand — as millions of inspired souls now know — was that time when the Lord picked you up and carried you. It’s a metaphor: He is there when you need Him most, and so is the ubiquitous poem known as “Footprints in the Sand,” shared around the world on posters, plaques, T-shirts, Bible covers and much more.
But who wrote the poem that for years was attributed only to Anonymous?
After years of debate mostly confined to the Internet, “Footprints” could be headed to court. Basil Zangare, a 49-year-old Long Island man, insists the poem was written by his late mother during the Great Depression, even though she did not get around to copyrighting it for 50 years.
Zangare filed suit May 12 in a federal court against two women who each promotes herself as the poem’s sole author and true copyright holder. He claims they’ve made millions on “Footprints”-related merchandise, money he wants a part of.
After all those coffee mugs and framed copies, can anyone really own “Footprints in the Sand”? “Sure it’s possible,” said Zangare’s attorney, Richard Bartel. He looks forward to one day sending cease-and-desist letters to all “Footprint” pretenders who are “trading off the poem,” he says, calling it a simple case of infringement.
The heart of ‘Footprints’
At least a dozen people have insisted that the lines of “Footprints in the Sand” came to them alone, usually by divine spark, differing only by a few words here and there. The stanzas all tell a similar story: Narrator dreams he is walking on a beach with the Lord (sometimes God, sometimes Jesus).
After a while, narrator turns around and sees only one set of footprints. What gives? the narrator asks the Lord — you promised you would walk with me, even in the bad times, but I see from my lone set of footprints that you weren’t there! Ah, the Lord replies: The single set of footprints are when I carried you through the bad times.
The only problem is one of nagging details: proof of authorship, original publication, copyright, notarization. “Footprints” has been adapted into different languages, even a pop song co-produced by Simon Cowell.
The debate over who wrote “Footprints” begins the minute you do a Google search for it.
Zangare’s mother, Mary Stevenson, claimed she wrote “Footprints” as a teenager sometime around 1936. She used to give handwritten copies to friends in times of crisis or grief. According to her son’s “Official Footprints in the Sand” Web site, Stevenson, who died in 1999, told her family that a lawyer discouraged her from seeking a copyright claim when she first saw the poem attributed to “Anonymous” as early as the 1950s.
While moving to a new house in the 1980s, Zangare has said, his mother unearthed one of her original handwritten copies of “Footprints.” By then, “Footprints” was already a staple of the inspirational market, and Stevenson filed a copyright claim in 1984, which is included in Zangare’s complaint.
In 1995, a forensic document expert allegedly verified that Stevenson’s handwritten copy was at least 50 years old, according to Zangare.
Other claims to ‘Footprints’
One of the suit’s defendants is a 68-year-old Canadian poet and “itinerant evangelist” named Margaret Fishback Powers. She has said she wrote the poem in 1964, “searching for direction at a crossroads in her life,” according to her author bio, while on the shores of a lake at a youth camp in Ontario.
She sold the poem to HarperCollins Canada in a 1992 book deal, along with her autobiographical account of how she wrote it, lost it and rediscovered it once the world had already been moved to hang it on refrigerators and church youth-room walls. Several “Footprints” titles by Powers followed, with merchandise.
Powers’s San Francisco-based attorney, John Hughe, said Powers included the poem in a self-published collection of her work in 1986, and for what it’s worth, she also filed a copyright then.
Hughes said Powers has made “little” money from “Footprints” licensing — and what she did make, she put toward her youth ministry programs.
Meanwhile, there’s Carolyn Joyce Carty, the other defendant in Zangare’s suit. A self-proclaimed child prodigy and “world renowned poet laureate,” Carty surfaced in the “Footprints” debate earlier this decade, saying she wrote the poem in 1963, when she was 6 years old, as an epilogue to a longer story she called “The Footprints of God.”
Actually, she claims her grandmother first wrote it in 1922, and then young Carolyn wrote it. She also filed a copyright on “Footprints,” claiming it as her “contribution to society.” She maintains a wondrously baffling “Footprints” Web site where, among other things, she claims she wrote the lyrics to “In My Life” before the Beatles did.
Zangare has named only two defendants, but others have also claimed authorship, including an Oregon man named Burrell Webb. He has said he wrote the poem in 1958 after his girlfriend dumped him. (He has also said he paid for his own polygraph to prove it.)
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