Search to Divine Authorship Leads 'Footprints' to Court

No?

Then you might consider the marketing prowess of one of the suit's defendants, 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 A. Hughes (who once helped a business called Bath and Beyond reach a nice settlement with the megalithic Bed Bath & Beyond, according to his résumé), said Powers included the poem in a self-published collection of her work in 1986, and for what it's worth (not a lot), she also filed a copyright then.

To date, Powers -- with counsel -- has been the most aggressive and monetizing Footprinter. She is currently traveling and couldn't be reached (or served with papers, yet), but her attorney said he has occasionally persuaded tchotchke manufacturers to attribute the poem to her. Hughes said Powers has made "little" money from "Footprints" licensing and what she did make, she put toward her youth ministry programs. If you were to walk the floors of a Christian products trade show, Hughes guessed, "about a third" of all the "Footprints" products would have a license from Powers, or at least credit her. ("It's even on an ashtray," Hughes offered, as well as a large, engraved garden stone, which happens to be sitting in his office.)

"It's clear that Margaret is the real author," Hughes said of the suit. He tangled briefly with Stevenson or her representatives about a decade ago when a caretaker for Stevenson unsuccessfully attempted to get a trademark for "Footprints."

"If [Zangare] has any document between 1936 or 1964 that shows Mary Stevenson wrote the poem, then let's see it," Hughes said.

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, and it is unclear, from a brief e-mail exchange with a reporter, if Carty understands what it means to have written something. 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.

"Basil Zangare's lawsuit is frivolous and has no merit as far as I am concerned," Carty wrote in response to an e-mail sent though a link on her Web site, adding that she "never collected one single penny for my work. [It] is free and available on my Web site for the public to download." (Bartel, Zangare's attorney, said he was able, a few weeks ago, to order "Footprints" material from Carty online, "and it cost 14 or 15 dollars. . . . She is trading off the 'Footprints' poem.")

Although the lawsuit says that Carty lives in North Carolina, she declined to provide The Post with any details about where she now lives: "Sorry, that is private information. Just to let you know, Zangare has been unsuccessful at having those papers served. I have not received any notice." ("She's a ghost," Bartel marveled, saying he hired private investigators to track her down, following leads in several states. "It's amazing about the World Wide Web -- these people can be all over the Internet and impossible to actually find.")

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.)