But I'm still trying

The mailbag runneth over. Here are some examples:

Mr. Editor: It really makes you look stupid when you run the same story twice on the same page and the same page twice in the same section. What are your proofreaders doing?

Joe: I can't understand why, all of a sudden, you've started running everything twice. If you have all that extra space, why not use it for TV listings?

Hey, Mr. Smarty Pants: A third-grader could do a better job. Any child would know not to put the same stuff in twice. Don't you have proofreaders anymore?

And to think these notes were from my friends. You should see some of the mail I received from people I've never met but seem to know an awful lot about my IQ and my personal hygiene.

Without offering any excuses, let me apologize to readers for the recent mix-ups.

Please allow me to ramble awhile about mistakes and the making thereof.

First off, we have proofreaders, but we don't call them that anymore. We call them editors.

I don't know when the last newspaper proofreaders faded into history. I remember when I was at the daily newspaper in Nevada, Mo., in the early 1970s we had a proofreader. She had an I-told-you-so personality that irritated the you-know-what out of everyone. But you know what? I recall we rarely had mistakes in the newspaper.

Sure, we made lots of mistakes, but our readers didn't see them, thanks to Miss Goody Two Shoes the proofreader.

I remember one mistake that made it into print. It was in a story I wrote about quarterly reports that listed assets and liabilities of the banks in Nevada. I typed a couple of extra zeroes in the First National Bank's liabilities column, which made it look like the bank was headed for the dump.

Mr. Swearingen, the bank president, called me the next day. In his kindly way, he told me that folks at the bank also made mistakes. "But," he said, "our customers never see them."

I remember Mr. Swearingen's comment every time a see a mistake in the newspaper.

Unfortunately, I think of Mr. Swearingen far too often.

I also remember the proofreader at The Examiner in Independence, Mo., who was in her 80s when I was there. She stayed more than 20 years more. When Audrey Stubbart was well over 100, she continued to work as a proofreader and was recognized as the oldest American with a full-time job. I don't recall that The Examiner had a lot of mistakes.

As far as I know, Audrey may have been the nation's last official newspaper proofreader.

So what should we learn from this?

One hard lesson is that our memories are faulty. We had mistakes in Nevada and Independence even though diligent proofreaders were on the job. We just don't remember. Or don't want to remember. Most of us like to think there was an age of conscientiousness and attention to detail that no longer exists. But I daresay even Mr. Swearingen's bank sometimes had to wrestle with irate customers who found fault with their monthly statements.

And while computers have radically changed how we do our jobs, there is still no foolproof system. Why? Because computers are operated by humans who make mistakes. These humans are related to other humans who made mistakes in the good old days. And we are begetting more humans who will -- guess what? -- make mistakes when you and I have turned to dust.

But we keep trying. And most of the time we succeed.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.