My Sundays begin early, and that’s only partially because I’m old and tend to wake up early anyway. (To quote Jimmy Buffett, “These days I’m up about the time I used to go to bed.”)
The main reason I’m up extra early on Sundays is, frankly, you. Since my column usually runs on Sunday, that’s the day I get the most emails, and they often start arriving before 5 a.m. I’m always curious what you have to say — especially since I usually find your reactions far more entertaining than anything I had to say in the first place.
Case in point: A week ago, I wrote a column with the headline “Terrible typos leave us in deep (stuff).” I got so many hilarious responses to that column, I decide to share a few of them with you this week.
Most of the responses were about some favorite typos you’ve seen through the years. Here are several of yours, along with a few of my favorites through the decades:
• I’ll start with my favorite reader-submitted typo. Deborah Cornelius of Chico said she ran a staging company with her daughter, beautifying homes that were on the market. Once, in a hurry while writing proposals, she hit spellcheck and hit “send” on the email. Imagine her horror to discover the following:
“Spellcheck ‘corrected’ the word ‘accessories’ that appeared in descriptions for the master bedroom and living room, and substituted the word ‘vasectomies,’” Cornelius recalled. “So my proposal stated that along with all the furniture, two vasectomies were included in the price. It was humiliating, shocking and finally hilarious because, well, we just had to laugh.
“So, it’s not hard for me to forgive typos. Life is a humbling experience!”
No word on whether the offer led to a home sale.
• Next, in the spirit of the typo that got this started a week ago, we present a memory from Chico’s Gary Estep: “I remember when Bob Pitts Shoe Store sponsored local athletic games on the radio, and the announcer said, ‘This game is brought to you by Bob Sh-ts Poo Store.’”
• From Rick Narad: “Back in the days when secretaries typed letters and we didn’t have spell-check, I ran a division of a county public health department. The most common typo (at least, that we caught) was leaving the “L” out of public. One time I didn’t catch it and got a snide comment from the recipient. I quickly explained that it was a reference to the STD control program.
“I was, however, grateful for proofreading the letter before signing it when my secretary left the ‘O’ out of county!”
• From Carl Steward, a great sports columnist and former colleague of mine in the Bay Area, on a serious dictation error that happened on deadline: “We had, ‘The player lay motionless on the artificial turd.’”
• It wasn’t a typo, but it was funny: The Jan. 13, 1968 edition of the Oakland Tribune ran an obituary on Nibs Price, a longtime Cal basketball coach, beneath the headline “Death Calls Nibs Price.” Here’s the kicker: The headline ran above a photo of Price holding a telephone receiver next to his ear. Every time I see it, I want to scream, “Hang up! Don’t answer that!”
• And now, my all-time favorite, which happened at an East Bay newspaper long ago:
Seems the local mayor had been signing a lot of proclamations and such, and the paper did a puff piece with a photo beneath the headline “Mayor’s pen is busiest in town.”
Only, guess what … the person who wrote the headline accidentally left out the space between the words “pen” and “is.”
Thus, you had a headline that said “Mayor’s penis busiest in town” beneath the photo of the local mayor, big smile on his face.
(At this point, go ahead and paint a mental picture of your personal favorite all-time mayor’s face above the headline, and imagine the reaction.)
Legend has it the publisher heard about that mistake in the middle of the night, and within minutes, everyone on the staff had been ordered to canvas their neighborhoods in an attempt to destroy every copy of that newspaper. They didn’t succeed.
There’s a joke in there somewhere about how the pen is mightier than the sword, but I’m not touching that one with a 10-foot accessory.
Mike Wolcott is the editor of the Enterprise-Record. He can be reached at mwolcott@chicoer.com.
