WCMessenger.com: To err is human, and sometimes quite humorous

Typographical errors (typos) are the bane of any newspaper person's existence. It is embarrassing for something like that to happen in a function performed by someone who is literate and well educated.

However, it does happen and while some in the business might choose to skip over the topic, and since I'm one of those old warhorses put out to pasture, I can 'fess up to some lulus without too much damage to the reputation since they didn't happen at this publication. Plus, they're funny enough to be entertaining, which the editor and publisher of this newspaper requires that I try to do on a regular basis.

One of the major typos in my career could never happen again under the circumstances in which this one occurred. It happened in the early 1960s when Texas state banks still observed Gen. Robert E. Lee's birthday. I found a line drawing of a bust of Lee and put together an ad for this particular bank's observance of that holiday.

Another peculiarity for that day and time was a carryover from the 1930s. No bank would use a sign or an ad that had the word "closed" in it due to the many bank "closings" during the Depression.

With those caveats, I constructed the ad: "No business will be transacted at This Bank on Jan. 19 in observance of Gen. Robert E. Lee's birthday."

Then, "Gen. Robert E. Lee was one of the great heroes of American history….blah, blah, blah."

Unfortunately, I was young and trusted my ad compositor who almost never made a mistake. The paper came out and the bank president called and asked, "When did Gen. Robert E. Lee change his profession?"

I looked at the ad and, of course, the error jumped out at me. We'd misspelled "heroes" in a manner that, phonically at least, named Lee one of the great prostitutes of American history.

Thankfully, the bank president had a sense of humor. When I apologized profusely and said there'd be no charge and that we'd run a corrected ad and an apology the next week, he said, "Oh, no. I want to pay for the ad and run it again. I've never seen such response to an ad. We haven't been able to do any business today for people coming in and kidding us."

A second, funny typo occurred in a minister's column. The minister had performed my marriage ceremony, so I knew him well. And, he'd been doing the column for the newspaper I was editing and publishing before I moved to the town.

On a weekly newspaper, my Wednesday evenings were spent combing through the latest issue and critiquing it with an eye toward positive improvement. This particular Wednesday evening I'd just settled into my chair with the paper and my red pen.

The phone rang. I answered and this familiar voice on the other end said, "You'll be hearing from my attorney."

I said, "Preacher, what do you want?"

"Have you read my column yet?"

"No, I was just settling in to critique the issue."

"Well, look in the second column, third paragraph."

I looked, read and recognized immediately that the first sentence was supposed to read, "You never know what the impact of your sermon is going to be." However, we'd left the "r" out of sermon.

Stifling a chuckle was impossible. The preacher said, "You know the worst thing of all?"

"No, this is pretty bad. So, what's the worst thing?"

"No one has said a thing about it."

Whew.

A newspaper I knew of but wasn't associated with at the time (thankfully) had a major faux pas that a typographer-printer did deliberately. It was supposed to be a picture of his fiancée with the appropriate announcement underneath it. Just prior to his putting the paper on the press, he exchanged the picture of his fiancée for a picture of a witch (it was October 1961). He printed the paper with the witch's picture. Then the typographer-printer calmly walked out of the door and disappeared from that part of the country.

Thankfully, over the years, newspapers have become much more professional and those glaring errors don't occur nearly as often as they did.

Humans being, well, human, it is next to impossible to print a newspaper without a typo somewhere. Every profession suffers errors. Ours just haunt us in black and white and sometimes in living color.

Willis Webb is a retired community editor-publisher of more than 50 years. He can be reached by e-mail at wwebb@wildblue.net.