Harold Holzer, one of the country’s best-known authorities on Abraham Lincoln, will speak at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne tonight, so if you’re into Lincoln, you might want to attend. Hey, it’s free.

In a way, though, the story of Holzer the Lincoln scholar is pretty interesting in itself.

Most scholars come from academia. That is, they are university professors who specialize in one topic, and that lets them spend their careers doing research as part of their jobs.

In the world of scholars, though, there are these rarified creatures called independent scholars.

They hold regular jobs and do their research on their own time, unpaid, digging deep into narrow topics ranging from pilgrim badges to dead presidents.

Holzer is one of those. He became fascinated with Lincoln at an early age, but after attending City University of New York, there were many things he wanted to do, including work in television and learn about politics.

According to his biography, Holzer started his career as a weekly newspaper editor at the Manhattan Tribune. Holzer says that’s sort of an inflated description of his journalism career. He actually started as a cub reporter, but the paper was so bad everyone left and he sort of became editor through attrition.

Later he was a political campaign press secretary for Bella Abzug and Mario Cuomo, a speechwriter for New York City Mayor Abraham Beame, public affairs director for Public Television’s WNET in New York, head of the New York State Urban Development Corp., and vice president for external affairs for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the job he holds now.

The list of what he’s written and the honors and appointments he’s received during his career is four pages long, so rather than get bogged down, let’s just say he’s written 450 articles on Lincoln and written or helped edit 34 books on Lincoln, and he’s constantly on the road, giving addresses about Lincoln.

So I asked him, the jobs he’s held don’t sound like part-time gigs, so does he work 18 hours a day or 24?

Twenty-four, Holzer answered. Then he explained why he is so fascinated with Lincoln.

It all started in fifth grade, he says, when his teacher showed up with a hat full of slips of paper with the names of famous people on them. Each student had to grab a name and do a report on that person.

Holzer got Lincoln, and the man fascinated him. Photographs seemed to show a man who was suffering for all of the nation’s sins and problems. His writing was impressive, but it was understandable even to an 11-year-old schoolboy because he used simple, one-syllable words.

Since that day, Holzer has spent his free time researching Lincoln, frequently visiting the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, which had the nation’s largest collection of documents on Lincoln until it was closed earlier this year. Some way to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth.

It was at the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne that Holzer met museum director Gerald McMurtry, who advised him to specialize in some aspect of Lincoln that no one else had ever looked at. Holzer settled on iconography, the study of political image making.

McMurtry even told Holzer to send him the first paper he wrote, and that if he liked it, he would publish it. True to his word, McMurtry published Holzer’s first scholarly piece in the Lincoln Herald when Holzer was 24.

Holzer’s side career as a scholar was on its way.

All his life, Holzer has devoted every vacation to doing research on Lincoln, and every Friday night, Saturday and Sunday has been spent writing.

Becoming a recognized scholar, though, takes time. Yes, Holzer says, he’s written more than 400 magazine articles, but the first 300 were written for modest publications. It takes time before a scholar gains enough credence to have articles accepted for magazines such as Life and American Heritage.

The visit to Fort Wayne tonight will be a little bittersweet. For 30 years, Holzer says, the Lincoln Museum here was one of the centers of his life. Now it’s gone.

He recalls making an appearance in Indianapolis recently and seeing three items on prominent display that had been part of the Lincoln Museum here. It stirred strong feelings about what had happened to the museum here. It was like a kick in the head, he says.

And it all started when he picked Lincoln’s name out of a hat. One wonders what would have happened had he chosen someone else.

Holzer recalls that a friend who was standing behind him picked Genghis Kahn that day in fifth grade nearly 50 years ago. The friend became a rock ’n’ roll promoter.

Holzer will appear at 7:30 p.m. today in the Rhinehard Music Center at IPFW. He will speak on the education of Abraham Lincoln. The lecture is free and open to the public.