There is nothing quite so refreshing to the human soul as news of another person`s blunder, unless it is news of a sworn enemy`s blunder or, especially, a major corporation`s blunder.
What could be more entertaining than, for instance, watching a manufacturer of orange dairy products attempt to give away one van-a prize you just know would have gone to a cheese-hating misanthrope with no teeth, no kids and no driver`s license-and then learning that the company has actually managed, according to its own rules, to create hundreds of van winners?
Anybody who has ever played 3-card monte and lost-or the lottery, or bingo, or a McDonald`s scratch-off game-couldn`t help but feel that a little bit of equilibrium had been restored to life: The rent may be past due and the kids may be into pentagrams, but, hey, at least I`m not a spokesman for Kraft right now.
Although Kraft`s goof was the latest to surface, the company is hardly alone in its status as a bungler of comic proportions. Indeed, it seems as though, with modern communications being so gosh-darn quick, you can`t get away with mucking up anything these days. Even before the paint is dry, the errormaker is pictured sitting in it on newspaper pages and television broadcasts nationwide.
A blunder, it should be said right up front, is in an error category all its own. Though difficult to define, exactly, it is grander than a miscue, more widely publicized than a slip up, less somber than a tragedy. It is the adult equivalent of a classmate tipping over in his lunchroom chair.
A chemical plant leaking PCBs into the ol` swimmin` hole, for instance, is not a blunder-no humor there. Nor is addressing an intimate friend by the wrong name at the wrong time-not public enough, although the aftermath could be very public, indeed. Chernobyl, the Hindenburg and the 1989 Chicago White Sox don`t qualify, either.
But actress/admitted-Elvis-lover Cybill Shepherd shilling for beef
(Remember? ”Real food for real people”?) and then telling Family Circle magazine that her latest beauty secret is ”to stay away from red meat”-this is a splendid blunder.
So, too, was the case of the Delta Airlines pilot who got clearance to land his Boeing 737 in Lexington, Ky., but actually brought it down on a runway 19 miles away in Frankfort. The passengers, that day in July, 1987, were bused to their destination, presumably with more precision.
Neither of these qualifies as a legendary blunder. Legendary blunders are on the order of the people of ancient Troy deciding that an oversized hobby horse is a thoughtful gift from a retreating army.
Dead-end zone
Other fine blunders of yore include 1940s Americans determining that now is the time to unload IBM stock and the navigational faux pas of the two Wrong-Ways, Riegels and Corrigan.
Roy Riegels, a University of California football lineman, loped into the annals of sport by scooping up a fumble in the 1929 Rose Bowl-at the time, football`s grandest spectacle-and taking it 63 glorious yards to the end zone. Unfortunately, it was the wrong end zone. A teammate finally caught up with Riegels at the goal line and turned him around, but as he tried to head back upfield, he was tackled at his own 2-yard line. Georgia Tech nailed California for a safety shortly after, and the two points eventually gave Tech the win.
In 1969, the Atlanta school honored Riegels` blunder by making him an honorary alumnus. Ten years later, newspapers ran stories commemorating a major anniversary of the error. The Tribune`s was headlined ”After 50 Years, Riegels Still Called `Wrong Way.` ”
Douglas Corrigan made his mark by taking off from New York in July, 1938, after telling airport officials he was heading back to California. When he landed his single-engine plane in Dublin 23 hours later, he said simply, ”I flew the wrong way. My compass got stuck.”
Corrigan had actually been planning to fly to Europe but was denied permission to cross the Atlantic by authorities in New York: The fuel required would make his plane too heavy to be cleared for takeoff. So his remarks upon arrival were almost surely tongue-in-cheek and raise questions about the true magnitude of his blunder. But throughout his life Corrigan has continued to insist that the foul-up that made him famous was on the level.
A litmus test
A sure way to know if something is truly a blunder is to test your response. The normal person`s reaction should be as follows: 1) Hearty chuckle 2) Day-long grin, slightly twisted 3) Murmured thanks to lucky stars 4)
Eagerness to repeat tale to everyone you see. Indeed, a defining characteristic of a blunder is that it is something you can talk to a stranger about.
Unless, that is, the stranger you choose to converse with happens to be the person directly responsible. That person probably won`t even hear you because he will still be very intently calculating the number of shovelsful it will take to dig his sorry carcass out of the immense pile of public and personal embarassment.
His reaction goes more like this: 1) Deny everything, until it becomes obvious that nobody believes you 2) Tell superiors it was fault of underlings 3) Tell underlings management botched things again. 4) Tell public nothing 5) Leave town.
If the blunderer, however, is very courageous, he can simply march to the nearest county fair, remove his shirt and shoes, and begin his vigil at the wrong end of the dunk tank. ”Step right up!” the barker might shout.
”Drench the movie star who allegedly videotaped sex with a teenage girl, and then lost the tape!” Towels may be sent to Rob Lowe, in care of his agent.
Cybill Shepherd`s approach, upon being discovered, was oh-so-Hollywood:
She blamed her publicist, claiming the quotes had been sent without her approval. Then she wrote a letter to the magazine assuring people that although she does ”avoid fatty foods,” she has ”retained red meat” in her diet. Basketball stars Michael Cooper and Larry Bird are the latest beef spokesmen.
To celebrate its flub, Kraft also put on a weasel mask. As soon as winners started calling in by the scores, the company announced that it was just kidding: The game was invalid. Instead, the company offered to send $250 to everyone who mailed in van-winning game tickets. Plus, these lucky folks`
names would be thrown into a hat and four of them would win vans.
”We want to show the customers that Kraft appreciates their patience and good humor in this situation,” said a spokeswoman.
Ha ha. ”When I thought I won,” said Peggy Grace, a freelance writer from Rolling Meadows who is participating in a class-action suit to make the company pay, ”I was, like, `I`m gonna buy Kraft cheese for the rest of my life!` Afterward, I`m, like, `Forget it. None of that Kraft macaroni and cheese. I`m gonna go generic.` ”
Chicago`s most recent municipal blunder came this month when it was discovered that two ends of a tunnel built to link City Hall and the State of Illinois Center didn`t quite match up-by 9 inches up-and-down and 8 left-to-right. ”We opened up the wall and found they weren`t at it,” John C. Hill, the city`s coordinating architect on the project, told members of the press, referring to the state team that was building the other half. ”It`s very embarrassing. It`s like the railroad to nowhere not meeting.”
Chicagoans may also remember the sorry foul-up in 1980 in which a developer`s wrecking firm bulldozed the 1851 Rincker House on the Northwest Side, the city`s second oldest residential structure. City officials had apparently granted a demolition permit by mistake. Afterward, in what frequently marks the aftermath of a blunder, everybody sued everybody, but the house remained razed.
Crying over spilled wine
Over in New York, meanwhile, wine merchant William Sokolin recently brought to a public wine-worshipers dinner a 1787 bottle of Chateaux Margaux believed to have been owned by Thomas Jefferson. Sokolin, who bought it for $212,000, was trying to sell it for $519,750. What happened next was probably inevitable, especially in a gathering of drinkers: Sokolin, apparently brandishing the bottle somewhat carelessly, banged it against a metal-topped table, the bottle broke, and old red wine poured onto the rug at the Four Seasons Restaurant.
Off Miami this month, the Ostwind, a yacht built for Adolf Hitler, was to have been taken offshore and sunk to mark the 50th anniversary of the ”Voyage of the Damned,” a boat carrying 900 Jews seeking refuge from the Holocaust that was turned away by the U.S. Coast Guard and ended up returning to Europe. Most of the passengers died in concentration camps.
The commemorative deep-sixing was a noble idea, but it ran aground when the yacht was mistakenly pushed off its barge a full mile off-target. It landed on a delicate coral reef in a shallow shipping lane, from which it must be moved. ”It was truly an incredible, incredible historic event, and suddenly-boom!-somebody made a mistake,” said Abe Resnick, a Holocaust survivor and Miami Beach official.
Finally, no newspaper story about blunders would be complete, or honest, if it didn`t offer a mea culpa for the industry. Because newspapers act so stuffily authoritative, people seem to take special delight in their errors.
In 1980, for example, the Boston Globe botched, rather spectacularly, an editorial about an anti-inflation speech by President Jimmy Carter. An editorial writer, apparently just making a joke for the benefit of his colleagues, stuck a headline on it that said ”Mush from the Wimp.” It made it into the paper.
And, of course, every loyal Tribune reader has fond memories of the paper`s careful scrutiny of the presidency of Thomas E. Dewey.
