Oops Oops Oops

In the early winter of 1976, I left Cal Poly to take a job as nightside reporter for the Fresno Bee. On one of my first shifts, the city desk received word that a sheriff’s rescue team was bringing down from the Sierra three teenagers who had been trapped in a blizzard.

I headed to the hospital emergency room, and as the deputies stood by--maintaining what only later would seem a mischievous silence--I scribbled down the youngsters’ account of a modern ordeal by hunger. They described wandering through whiteouts, burning socks to kindle a campfire. One said that, after a third day without food, he had gulped down wood spiders for nourishment.

Back at the newspaper, I wrote the account as fast as I could to make deadline. The editors put the story on the front page, and I congratulated myself on a swell debut. Six months later, in a bar called the Silver Dollar, I happened to meet the daughter of one of the rescue team deputies. I let it slip that I was, in fact, the author of that London-esque account of survival.

She laughed in my face.

“It was all made up,” she said. “My dad said they found them holed up in a cabin, with food, a heater, everything.”

All at once, my stomach hurt. The bar seemed to wheel about. I mumbled something and slunk away, feeling more than stupid. And, until now, I told no one.

*

Alas, this was not to be my last bonehead moment in journalism. I once, in a long ago obituary, described the deceased as having been related to “the late Judge” So-and-So. The next day a very much alive judge called to say he was not amused. Some lapses involve grammar, producing firm, but not unkind letters from retired English teachers. And from time to time, the brain strangely locks, skewering some simple fact.

And so it was that last Wednesday my column contained a reference to one Jack Cooper, interim city manager of Hawaiian Gardens. The man’s name is Simpson, Jack Simpson. I knew it was Simpson all along. I have no idea where Cooper came from; it just fell out of my head and into the column, like some errant coconut from on high.

The reaction to such errors is always the same. At first you blush, and then you begin to feel physically sick. You get angry. You want to blame deadlines or computers or editors, but you know this won’t fly. You say at least the context was correct, but you know that won’t cut it, either. You start to doubt yourself, and it slops all over your life. Your breath turns sour. Your car won’t idle. Your jump shot quits falling. You begin writing sentences that begin with that god-awful “you” construction.

And the hex can last a long time. Once a colleague chastised me for writing that a Los Angeles police chief had “snuck” into a room. “Sneaked,” I was told, was the word. The funk over that one did not lift for several weeks, until I read in the New York Times’ etymology column that “snuck” was an example of popular usage evolving into correct usage, that sneaked, in fact, had come to seem almost archaic. Upon reading this, I happily snuck out of the house and headed for the nearest basketball court, to rediscover my jump shot.

*

Newspapers only cost a quarter or two and often are called history’s rough cut--emphasize “rough.” Errors happen, and usually no one dies as a result. It’s not the same as when an air traffic controller confuses left with right and sends a jetliner hurtling into a mountain . . . or when a surgeon removes the good kidney instead of the failed one . . . or when engineers designing a nuclear reactor flip-flop the blueprint.

This is not to suggest, however, that newspaper mistakes are a trivial matter. I can remember as a kid my family’s excitement over a short notice in the Bee about my father’s promotion to sales manager of a farm chemical company. I can only imagine how confused and angry the reaction would have been if the paper had misidentified my dad as, say, Jim Cooper.

Moreover, in the columnar line, a blown fact can become a thread by which those who disagree with a premise can unravel the whole piece: Who, they demand, should care about the opinion of someone who can’t even get a name right?

There really is no adequate response, although a sense of humor helps. Herb Caen employed the phrase “all too exclusive” when ‘fessing up to inaccurate items. Jack Smith made his annual allotment of mistakes a running theme of his much-missed columns. In truth, about all there is to do is apologize, ratchet up the self-editing and soldier on, recounting the counsel of Monseigneur Bienvenu in “Les Miserables”: Err, fail, sin if you must, but be upright. To sin as little as possible is the law for men; to sin not at all is a dream for angels.”

And also vow, again, to do better--and I will.

Or my name isn’t Peter H. Cooper.