It’s a wonderful privilege and honor that I have to visit with you each week, and I do appreciate the time you take to read these thoughts that I have assembled.

I’ve been working here at the Sentinel for a decade now, and writing, assembling and editing copy for the daily opinion page for the majority of the years that I have been employed here.

I work on editorials, choose columns from the syndicates, select an editorial cartoon and lay the page out. As is the case with many things in life, when you do something over and over again, you tend to get into ruts and can become careless.

In the 26 years that I have worked in newspapers, I have made some really bad mistakes. Typographical and grammatical errors are, unfortunately, something that just comes with the territory.

Every now and then, I’ll get a letter, telephone call or email from a reader about mistakes that are made in the paper. Readers deserve accurate, informative and entertaining news every day. It also needs to make sense.

On Tuesday, we ran an editorial about voters in New Jersey going to the polls to decide the fate of a ballot initiative about language in the state’s Constitution barring idiots and insane people from voting. Iowa’s Constitution has similar language. I wrote the editorial, had run spell check (a diabolical tool meant to help writers that actually can do more harm than good) and corrected my numerous misspellings of the word “Constitution.”

I didn’t have a title for the piece, so I decided to type one in on the page after I had formatted the rest of the page. Like an idiot, I misspelled the word “idiot” in the headline. This is the raw material that Jay Leno has made a nice living showing to others.

This is the kind of thing that usually raises the proofreader questions. (I misspelled it in the headline for comic effect -- yeah, kind of lame) Back in the days before desktop publishing revolutionized the way we produce a newspaper, a great deal of copy was handwritten or typed on a typewriter. In order to get this copy into the format you are reading, it would be typed again.

When I started in the business, a company called Compugraphic controlled the market. The words were typed into a huge machine and were exposed onto film. When you were done with whatever you were working on, you would advance the film and cut it, then put the film through a processor, wait for it to dry and then manually paste up your pages.

This system was good for catching mistakes, because if the typist was interested in what they were typing, they many times caught errors that I had made. If their fingers wandered and made typographical errors, we would correct them on the next can of film. Doing manual pasteup also was a good way to catch mistakes. There is something special about holding paper containing words in your hands that helps you see mistakes. Looking at the words on a computer screen just isn’t the same.

During those days of using film, many times we would try to cut corners and reuse ad layouts, making only the changes that were needed. Weekly grocery ads were saved to be scavenged for words and clip art. I recall two times when we made some really funny mistakes that made it into print. Of course, they weren’t funny then, but the perspective of time has a way of clarifying things.

The store (which will remain nameless, but is not in Le Mars) often featured Chicken Hindquarters on sale at a good price. One week, the ad (proofed twice by the customer) read that Chicken Headquarters were on sale. The same grocery store later had Boneless Ice Cream on sale. I think that one made Leno.

Sorry for the mistakes, I will try to do better. There’s an old joke in the newspaper business: “doctors bury their mistakes, ours become history.”

As always, I welcome your comments. You can reach me by email at tstangl@lemarscomm.net, telephone 712-546-7031, x40 or toll free 1-800-728-0066 x40.

Thanks for reading, I’ll keep in touch. Feel free to do the same.