Sam Zitter, author of "Stars to Steer By"
By:Joseph Harvie
MONROE Sarai Zitter remembers her husband as a gentle, loving, family-oriented man. She recalled him as ambitious and someone who always completed what he pursued.
Sam Zitter planned on retiring early so he could free up time to write, a passion he had since before his service in World War II when he worked as a copy boy for the New York Post, Ms. Zitter said.
Retiring at age 62, Mr. Zitter was able to clear his schedule and write several novels, one of which was published just a few months ago, said Ms. Zitter, of Stiring Circle in Whittingham.
"Stars to Steer By" was the first novel Mr. Zitter wrote and was the first of his works to get published. Mr. Zitter began writing the story after his retirement from a marketing firm in 1985. Ms. Zitter said he finished the novel sometime in the late ’80s.
After finishing the novel, Mr. Zitter also began to pursue his college degree. Although Mr. Zitter worked in marketing for years, he never obtained a college degree. In 1997, this long-time goal became reality when he graduated from Montclair State University in Montclair at the age of 74.
The story "Stars to Steer By," told from several different perspectives, centers on the greedy wife and loving brother of the recently deceased character David. The story is a tale of the struggles one man will go through to ensure his brother’s money-hungry wife does not get full restitution from David’s will.
"Stars to Steer By," was published in 2004 by PublishAmerica Book Publishers of Baltimore, Ms. Zitter said.
Mr. Zitter died on March 9, 2003 and never got to see his dream fulfilled, but his family worked to make sure his novel reached the public.
She said the book became part of her and her family’s life after Mr. Zitter died. She enlisted the help of her daughter and Mr. Zitter’s cousins to try and get the book completed by deadline.
Ms. Zitter said she worked with her daughter to edit the novel and said it was like working in a group of three.
"When we were editing, if someone didn’t like something and the other did, we figured they were just agreeing with Sam, so we worked it as if there were three of us editing the story," Ms. Zitter said.
Surprisingly, the hardest part of getting the book ready for PublishAmerica was not the proofreading process but the amount of time it took to reformat the novel into a Word document, said Ms. Zitter.
"He wrote the novel with an outdated word processing program, and in the process of converting it to a word file, we lost the formatting," Ms. Zitter said. "I did the formatting line by line, and that’s what delayed the book."
Ms. Zitter said she did not have to edit much in the book, but she said she did change the last chapter to make it a little stronger.
Mr. Zitter planned to tour the East Coast to reach out to his target audience senior citizens Ms. Zitter said.
"He was planning that after it was published, he would stop at the senior communities up and down the East Coast to promote the book," Ms. Zitter said. "We will try to do some of that, but we will never be able to do exactly what Sam dreamed."
She said the book explains a little bit of Mr. Zitter’s personality as a kind and humorous man who always completed what he set out to accomplish.
"He had a very good sense of humor," Ms. Zitter said. "That was always a joke that I couldn’t stay mad at him because he had a sweet way of getting out of it."
Ms. Zitter said Mr. Zitter’s passing was difficult for her because they were in the process of planning their 50th wedding anniversary despite Mr. Zitter’s declining health.
"We were only a few weeks shy of our 50th anniversary when he passed away. We had invitations out, and I knew he probably wasn’t going to make it, and he didn’t," Ms. Zitter said. "That was probably the only promise he made to me that he didn’t keep."
The couple met while working for Adlai Stevenson on political rallies for the two-time Democratic presidential candidate, and, Ms. Zitter, said Mr. Zitter often got into trouble because of his left-wing political ideas.
"He got fired from the New York Post, because they suspected him of being involved in union activities. He wanted to be a reporter, and he was taken as a copy boy before he entered the Navy at 19 (years old)."
The Zitters circled the globe during their lifetime together, visiting several countries in various continents such as Spain, England, Scotland, Italy, Israel, China, New Zealand and Costa Rica.
"Stars to Steer By" can be purchased through Barnes & Nobel.com and Amazon.com.