Column: The Nutcraker

A few weeks ago I decided to take a Friday off and relax at home. Seemed like a great idea and everything was going well until I got out of bed and checked my email.

While most of it was junk, there was one email that made me want to crawl right back into bed. It was from Melissa and had to do with a headline I wrote in the prior Wednesday's paper. Instead of putting "Season of promise for Lady Trojans", I had put "Season of promise for Lady Wolves". I'm sure a lot of people were wondering what the heck was going on, and some may have thought I was talking about Three Forks High School. That was not the case. Prior to owning this newspaper, I had covered Green River High School in Wyoming, who just so happened to be the Wolves.

Prior to my outstanding job at headline writing, I had probably had to correct myself about 200 times from putting Wolves in a story instead of Trojans. I know very well who I'm writing about, but being a creature of habit, I was so used to covering the high school team in Green River it was second nature to put Wolves. I am so surprised this happened nearly two years after I bought the paper, but it finally did.

I feel really bad and would like to apologize to the Lady Trojans for being a nincompoop.

What was really strange is that both Melissa and I read that page over and over and neither one of us caught the headline. It's one of those things that know matter how hard you are trying to find something wrong, sometimes it just does not happen.

It was the same type of scenario when Microsoft Word decided it would be a fun idea to change every Lewis and Clark Caverns, to Lewis and Clark Taverns. I've mentioned that fiasco before, and I will never live that down.

This is probably the perfect segue to my greatest headline gaff on all time.

My co-worker Stephanie had written a beautiful story about a local production of the "Nutcracker". She happened to be out of town that week so I was in charge of building her pages for the week.

I wanted to really display her great story and amazing pictures, and put together a beautiful package that would make her proud. Unfortunately when it came to writing the headline, I put "The tradition of the NUTRACKER returns". The page was proofed by three different people, none of whom caught the glaring error. It was another situation where I wanted to go back to bed. There were so many phone calls to the office pointing out my mistake. I can look back and laugh at it now, but it wasn't funny at the time.

I'm about ready to head out the door to the Divisional Basketball tournament in Billings. I'll make sure the story doesn't talk about Wolves, only the Trojans!