Correcting a mistake

As someone who has worked in journalism for more than 20 years, I’ve found that one of the worst places one can make a mistake is in an obituary. It’s the story of someone’s life. People keep them in scrapbooks and share them with friends and family. Unfortunately, upon receiving the new February issue of Digger back from the press, I discovered that we made a doozy of a mistake. The issue includes an obituary for Jim Schmidt, the well-known and well-loved collector of Japanese maples, and owner of Don Schmidt Nursery. Before getting into the nursery business, Jim served in the U.S. Navy until 1965, when he was honorably discharged. However, that’s not what our article said. We were rather upset when we discovered this mistake, which managed to sneak through three drafts without being caught! We have created a corrected version of the obituary which sets the record straight. You can download it here (PDF). If you’d like a printed version of this corrected obituary, contact us at ckipp@oan.org and we will get it to you. We regret the error. One of my colleagues who knew Jim well said he is probably looking down from above and laughing at the whole thing. I hope so.