Mistakes-and provocations-keep Wildcat lively

To err is human.

Most errors are soon forgotten unless, however, they are set in print.

Blame it on deadlines or on print mechanics, but a mistake in the newspaper is going to get noticed, maybe even denounced by the Arizona Legislature if the "mistake" is in fact intentional.

The Arizona Daily Wildcat has had its share of errors, ones that might have been laughed at the day the paper hit the newsstands and ones that could be laughed at 30 years later when the mistake had nearly been forgotten.

Mistakes of all types have run in the pages of the student publication, each of which was probably horrifying to the person responsible for the error.

Paul Allvin, who worked on the Wildcat from 1986 to 1991, has his worst memory noted on the pages of the Wildcat alumni site. Allvin realized, a little too late, that the banner story he wrote as a freshman about Dr. Jack Copeland was wrong.

"I wrote that he admitted transplanting the wrong blood-type heart, almost killing the patient. In fact he had acknowledged that another doctor on his staff had performed the wrong transplant," Allvin wrote on the Wildcat alumni web page.

Only a few years earlier another physician was the target of another student error.

In the text of a preview story, an unnamed physician was identified as a former heroin addict.

OOPS!

Even though the doctor remained anonymous in the article, the mistake could have affected the reputation of UA physicians.

A correction box ran a day later, Feb. 2, 1989, but a day can seem like an eternity for those affected by the error.

Timing can be everything in the newspaper business. The year end wrap-up of the Wildcat in May 1998 was responsible for another error.

Don Bolles, The Arizona Republic reporter who was murdered on June 2, 1976, was remembered on the pages of the Wildcat more than 20 years later as Don Bowles.

"The reason- no one checked. And the story flow at the time was unorganized due to the time of year," Amy Schweigert, a Wildcat staff member at the time who was not responsible for the mistake, writes in e-mail. "Bottom line, there was a lack of communication about this important issue."

Then there are the funny errors, nothing to break a sweat about.

Joe Salkowski, a former Wildcat reporter and city editor, recalls his favorite mistake made about 10 years ago that can be blamed on outdated means of print production.

"Every once in awhile, a photo would come unglued from the flat and we would run an empty space - usually with some text like 'photo here'- where the photo was supposed to be," Salkowski, who now works for The Arizona Daily Star, writes in e-mail.

"Well, that happened once in our Arts section," Salkowski writes, "leaving us with an entirely empty frame over a cutline explaining that this was a photo of cast members from the Invisible Theatre."

Another printing error of the same magnitude, but a decade earlier, was not the subject of a laughing matter, at least not to Jay M. Parker, who worked at the Wildcat from 1971 to 1973.

Apparently, according to staff members at the time, Parker "went berserk" after seeing an Oct. 24, 1972 issue of the Wildcat in which the position of two pages had been reversed, an error on the part of a young girl employed by Hi-Color Lithographs of Tucson.

A headline printed on a mock paper that circulated later in the Wildcat newsroom captures the fury of Parker's rage: "College Newspaper Editor Held In Murder of Print Shop Employee."

Staff members facetiously wrote that the print shop employee "was hacked to death with a sharpened pica stick in an alley outside her home by Jay Parker," who, in 1972 called the mistake "inexcusable and a moral outrage."

Other Wildcat staff members are quoted calling Parker as a "long-haired freak" in the mock news article.

And maybe that would explain his later actions in what was supposed to be a conventional undertaking.

Every fall the paper was required to put out a fashion issue to promote businesses.

In 1973, a time of controversial foreign policy and poverty, Parker, who is now a professor and director of international relations at West Point, says he cared very little for the assignment.

"At a time like that who cares about bell bottoms and spring dresses?" he says.

With the help of staff and photo editor Tim Fuller, a twist was added to the bourgeois undertaking "and justly so," Parker says in an interview.

A 16-page mockery of fashion was printed on March 28, 1973, "which was gone from every newsstand by 7:30 in the morning," Parker says.

The picture that caused the dash to the newsstands - an unidentified male and female dining outside in the morning. For the occasion, the two are fashionably dressed in their birthday suits.

After the project was complete, the results came in-advertisers were enraged, businesses were furious and an Arizona legislator fumingly referred to the Wildcat as "a sorry, absurd and an obscene excuse for a paper," Parker says.