WELCOME TO "THE FINE PRINT", the musings of Michael Schrader!

The genesis of "The Fine Print" was a series of "letters-to-the-editor" I wrote to the Farmington Press-Leader when I was a candidate for District 1 County Commissioner of St. Francois County, Missouri, in 1994. While I did not win the election, I did end up with my very own newspaper column - "The Fine Print". "The Fine Print" ran in the Press-Leader until after I had moved to Arkansas. The column was basically dormant until July 1996, when I begin writing it again regularly for a new newspaper in the small town of Beebe, Arkansas, called the Neighborhood Journal. "The Fine Print" was a regular feature of the Journal until its demise at the end of 1999.

The column again lay dormant for the next eighteen months until I acquired a web address and taught myself how to make web pages in July 2001. For eleven years, new columns, as well as archives, were posted regularly. At about that time, there was much upheaval in my world, which prevented me from writing much. Other than a dissertation and some academic papers, there have been few columns written during that decade, and those that were written were published in the Port Huron Times Herald, the local paper of Port Huron, Michigan. It should be noted that the Times Herald columns were written as a "community columnist", and not as "The Fine Print", as I did not have editorial control and I did not title them. In the Michigan index, I am including them with a [TH] notation to indicate this; any column from that period without the [TH] notation is a "The Fine Print".

I tried to post a new article on the average of once a week, but as time went on, I posted more sporadically. Depending on the topic and the size of the article, it can take me anywhere from three to fourteen hours to compose and post an article, so, unlike writing for a newspaper, I am not slavishly committed to a weekly schedule ; sometimes I may post more than one a week, sometimes it may be several weeks between postings. Sometimes, it may be several years and two states.

Because I have written upwards of two-hundred columns, I have broken the indexing of columns down into subindexes reflecting key periods in time. Because I have lived in multiple states since I started writing, I have decided to index the columns by geography, which so happens to follow a logical chronology as well. The six subindices are as follows:

INDEX 1: Missouri. This covers the period up to January 1995, and contains the columns published in the Farmington Press-Leader.

INDEX 2: Arkansas. This covers the period from January 1995 through December 1999, and includes all columns published in the Neighborhood Journal. Although I moved from Arkansas to Texas in March 1999, I was still writing columns for the Journal until it folded in December of that year.

INDEX 3: Texas. The web-based columns posted in 2001 and 2002.

INDEX 4: Oklahoma. The web-based columns posted in 2003 through 2012.

INDEX 5: Michigan. This covers the period I was working on my dissertation, from 2013 through 2018. Columns that appeared as a "community columnist" in the Port Huron Times Herald are designated with a [TH]

Dr. S.