Even Doc Makes Mistakes

2/27/2009

Everybody makes a mistake or does something dumb every now and then. The exception, according to Peter Ellertsen, is himself.
“I’m perfect,” he said jokingly, “I don’t do dumb things.”
He then responded with a serious answer of a mistake he had made while working for the Oak Ridger in Oak Ridge, Tennessee for about two or three years when he was in his 20’s.
“The worst mistake I ever made was when I was writing about the county clerk in Anderson County, Tennessee,” he stated. “He had been charged with official corruption, the state’s attorney presented the evidence before a grand jury, the grand jury returned what is known as a ‘no true’ bill. Wrote it up and left out a word – that word happened to be ‘no’.”
He had said that the county clerk was guilty as opposed to not guilty.
When he noticed it, his first reaction to his mistake was a word that was “four letters long,” but didn’t feel that it was necessary to tell us what that specific word was.
While that was a serious mistake and had led people in the wrong direction, he noticed it the next day after it was published, and did not get in any trouble. However, he had to write the correction in the newspaper the next day.
“I didn’t get in any trouble because once I saw my mistake I had recognized the error and nobody wanted to make it any worse for me. People are allowed to screw up once.”
Peter Ellertsen says that he hasn’t made any more publishing mistakes since 1991, and that was the year he left the newspaper industry and went to work for the state treasurer of Illinois, did public relations, then later started teaching.
When asked what he had learned from the mistake he made in the newspaper, a lot of answers came to mind, but only told us one.
“You should never get so busy, and you will never get so good that you shouldn’t look over your work. Always make sure you didn’t write anything dumb.”