The Greatest Correction in The History of Newspapers
As told by Gene Weingarten
One morning in 1986, I was working at the city desk of the Miami Herald when I saw a sports editor walk in, open his newspaper, stare at it goggle-eyed, go completely pale, slam it shut, and look around furtively, as if for an escape route.
What he had seen was a passage that he knew he was responsible for, resulting in the following feces-consuming correction, which I print here verbatim:
"Last Sunday, The Herald erroneously reported that original Dolphin Johnny Holmes had been an insurance salesman in Raleigh, N.C., that he had won the New York lottery in 1982 and lost the money in a land swindle, that he had been charged with vehicular homicide but acquitted because his mother said she drove the car, and that he stated that the funniest thing he ever saw was Flipper spouting water on [coach] George Wilson.
"Each of these items was erroneous material published inadvertently. He was not an insurance salesman in Raleigh, did not win the lottery, neither he nor his mother was charged or involved in any way with a vehicular homicide, and he made no comment about Flipper or George Wilson. The Herald regrets the errors."
The explanation? For a ''whatever happened to'' story about the 1966 Dolphins, the editor had made up some fanciful dummy type, to estimate length. It somehow got in the paper. Oddly enough, Mr. Holmes was never heard from.
