News Flash from Old Story

If I ever write another book, it will have to be fiction. I have made that decision based on the fact that I am old. Old people have so much material floating around in their minds sometimes facts kinda blend together. And, when things blend together in one's old mind, mistakes can come rolling out.

And, I'm becoming more confident that this condition will only get worse.

Last night in an email from a former student, I was reminded one more time that maybe my recollections of how things happened and who was really responsible might be a bit different from what I recorded for posterity in my most recent book Lessons with Love.

I now know of at least two glaring errors of fact in that volume, and I'm sure that if I put out a call for all readers to submit any further corrections needed for a second edition, the list would be long enough to write another book. Hey, there's an idea!

Anyway, I must report the truth, like I always do, as an old-school journalist.

The two glaring errors in the book, ironically, have to do with pies. I have a feeling there was a little bit of horror leading to one error when I incorrectly used the example the famous TV episode of Lucy trying to remove all those pies from the conveyor belt.

I included that parallel in the chapter about parent conferences while trying to describe the frustration of having an endless line of dedicated parents wanting to know if Johnny or Jill would survive in life with that 99.04 average in honors English class. Almost without fail, my line of parents never ended until long after the night custodian had turned down the heat.

Well, Lucy's famous scene seemed like a good comparison. Only problem was Lucy was not trying to take pies off from a conveyor belt. It was chocolates, Stupid!

Well, the lady who proofread my book shortly before its publication made the correction. Even though she was a Cornell graduate, I still doubted her and changed it back to the wrong facts. After all, I remembered pies and a lot of them, associated with desperation, so pies it was gonna be.

A few readers brought the mistake to my attention AFTER the book was published, much like that guy a few weeks ago who called Sandpoint Magazine and said that maybe the publication did NOT have the correct address for Sarah Palin's first home on North Fourth Avenue.

Both awakenings to my total and, oh so public, ignorance felt equally bad.

Well, I've fessed up to the chocolate debacle in an earlier blog post, but now I've got to fess up to the actual pie debacle. Seems a bean counter---or should I say PIE counter---who ought to know, says that David Jones did NOT consume nine pies in the 1973 Sandpoint High/Ponderette-sponsored pie eating contest.

At this point, I'll step in and say there was no way in hell I was gonna know that David did not, indeed, gobble down nine pies, as documented in my story, because I have learned that he cheated just a tiny bit to win the contest. Thirty-five years later, I have learned the facts.

And, they follow---straight from the pie eater's mouth. Well, maybe from his keyboard in Oregon where he teaches school.

First, a confession--I did not eat nine pies. While the “fracas “ with the pie-throwing ensued, one of those bad boys, like Chester Schilling (or someone) plopped a pie on my head.

All the filling stayed on my head, but the pie plate was empty. So it was 8, not 9. I vividly remember the fight, and how sick I was afterwards.

To this day I do not eat “anything” cream pies. (Oh, I was a junior that year.)

So, there you go. David has fessed up, and I have fessed up about the wrong facts, which, in part, resulted from that form of untruth which we all know as a "lie of omission." He could have told the truth, but if he had, a lifetime legacy of high school triumph would have rolled off the conveyor belt and gone "plop" on the floor.

So, there you have the rest of one of the more traumatic stories of my life. Oops, maybe it's not all corrected publicly yet because I recall a while back when my former teaching colleague, Florine Dooley, wrote and gave me another twist to the pie-eating debacle, a moment in SHS history which almost got me fired early in my career.

Maybe I AM going to have to write a new book with all the corrected facts, and to save face, I'll label it all fiction. But then again, I guess you can get in trouble doing that too.

Remember that guy who got chewed out by Oprah for duping her and all the other millions who read his "memoir"? Then, again, I'll bet his bank account didn't suffer.

All in the perspective, I guess.