On March 17, 2008, my friend Paul Guffin left us. He lost a long battle with cancer, just at the moment when his dream was about to come true – an innovative and creatively rich TV series that would have been called Secret Heroes.

It’s appropriate that I post a tribute to Paul at this site as it was the reason Paul first contacted me early in 2007. I got an e-mail from this stranger in California who’d checked out my website, said he was working on a new TV spy series, and wondered if I’d like to be a script consultant. “Send me a sample,” says I. Then the adventure began.

For the next year, Paul Guffin became my teacher and hero, nothing secret about it. He sent me scripts and talked about his philosophy of good storytelling – character, character, character. In Paul’s vision, Secret Heroes was carefully imagined to be something of an anthology series with mostly ordinary people pulled into patriotic duty during the American Revolution, World War II, now. Paul’s scripts were diverse in their settings, plot twists, relationships, and, of course, characters. He was especially proud of his “355,” the code-number for a femme fatale helping George Washington.

From the beginning, I was inspired by Paul’s stories and concept. I got carried away, perhaps, when I thought I’d try my hand at a Secret Heroes script myself. What I got was a generous and patient script-doctor who pointed to the many glaring weaknesses of the first drafts – “Who’s the everyman? The guy everyone will relate to?” “Don’t give directors instructions, they’ll have their own ideas.” “Need a gun there, make it dangerous.” “Get this guy in more scenes. He reminds viewers this is a spy show.”

I not only had to try to rise to the challenge of Paul’s craft, I drew much from his irrepressible energy. I don’t know how anyone who ever knew Paul Guffin could avoid being enthusiastically drawn into his imaginative and optimistic presence. When I first heard his voice, the dynamism was all there, in the sounds of a man on a mission. A man who knew precisely what he was doing. And then the education changed.

Last fall, Paul called and said it was time I knew something about him. He described the cancer he was fighting and what it was doing to his strength. He said he had been worried what I might do if I’d known about this, he didn’t want me to leave the project. Not now – not after he had finally made the contacts that were, as he put it, “giving us wind in our sails.” Something changed that day, and it wasn’t me leaving – not for a reason like that. It was when Paul said he felt free to tell me this because of my blindness. He’d told my wife I was his secret hero, and we two wounded warriors now had much in common. Well, more than ever, he had certainly become mine.

Over the winter months, it came together, the Secret Heroes sales package. The details aren’t important here – but the time had come to go meet the Powers That Be. And then the sickness really struck. A sickness you could hear in his voice, but not in his words. And then.

And then those of us who knew him have his legacy. A legacy inside us, of memories, of what he gave and taught us, of his being the type of man we’ll all recall as the very image of courage. The obit in Paul’s hometown paper described him as a simple man of eloquence. Absolutely true. But this cannot be a legacy that ends like this. Perhaps Paul would say something like “It’s time for you too to be a spy – find the secret heroes in your life. They’re not always easy to see. They’re not always easy to find.” Just perhaps, you’ll also find them – as created by Paul Guffin – on a small screen near you. The vision is not ended.

Wesley Britton

The official obit for Paul, through the East Valley Tribune and the Arizona Republic newspapers, has been archived online through Legacy.com.