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Finding Peter Putnam

The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind

You turn it over in your hands, still covered in his pencil marks, smudged with his fingerprints; an envelope singed in the spiral shape of his stove ring, yellowed glue clutching his pet bird’s tattered feather, a letter torn apart seemingly in anger and taped back together in remorse. Putnam thought it was important that the community know all the legal tricks the white CEOs and politicians used to keep them down, so Claude spoke about reapportionment and gerrymandering; he urged them to vote in local elections, to make their voices heard on school boards and in town halls. In Ohio’s Morgan Swamp on the southern shoreline of Lake Erie, among beaver ponds and vernal pools, nestled in a forest of yellow birch and hemlock, are tundra swans and four-toed salamanders, white calla lilies and river otters.

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