Careless errors can be costly ones.
“Ho-hum,” you might be saying. “Why is he stating the obvious?”
Unfortunately, because it’s true. And it’s a lesson I learned again recently after writing my April feature, “Time to Heal," which tells the tragic story of the London School explosion that killed more than 300 children.
The explosion should not have happened, but it did largely because school officials carelessly decided to cut corners. They saved a few pennies at a huge cost of life.
Growing up in Texas, I was vaguely aware of the 1937 explosion. What I didn’t realize until after the story was written was that my grandfather was one of the rescue workers at the scene. A.T. Vestal was working for the Premier Oil Company in Longview, which is about 25 miles northeast of New London. Like others, he drove to the school as soon as he heard about the blast and spent hours trying to pull children from the rubble
My grandfather, who was a Navy Seabee during World War II, was not the talkative type. But my mom said he would occasionally reference the disaster at New London.
“He said it was worse than being in Okinawa,” my mom told me.
Careless error #1: This was a detail I should have known, except that I was so busy writing and editing that I didn’t call my mom for a week.
Careless error #2: I’m proud of my accuracy. I double check quotes. I look and look again at statistics and numbers and names. This time, unfortunately, I didn’t check closely enough.
Ellie Goldberg, who wants the New London disaster to be designated as a national day to raise awareness about chemical hazards in schools, runs a great program called “Healthy Kids: The Key to Basics.” Her website is www.healthy-kids.info.
I talked to Ellie early in the story, and she provided some great tips and contacts in New London. Unfortunately, I incorrectly wrote down her organization’s name and forgot to insert the hyphen between “healthy” and “kids” on her website address. It was, quite simply, a mistake that I failed to check.
We have corrected the error online, and we’ll tell our print readers about it in the June edition. But I hope it does not detract from Ellie’s cause, because this careless error does not need to be a costly one.
Glenn Cook, Editor-in-Chief