Those Times I Failed Horribly

A couple months ago I took one of journalism’s greatest risks: I wrote a column listing a number of people I’d met who had since passed away, and of course, one of them had not.

- David Freiburger

Charlie Henry remains alive and well, though Larry Henry, who was Charlie’s nearly 20-year coworker at Mopar Performance, has passed away. The worst thing you can do is kill someone off erroneously.

Former HOT ROD editor Jeff Smith, who hired me in 1991, often said, “Doctors bury their mistakes. We publish ours.” Another former boss, Angus MacKenzie, was fond of pointing out that if you don’t have a few failures, then you’re not trying hard enough. I’m pretty sure Angus wasn’t championing hideous breaches of accuracy, but I take his statement as a bit of comfort for other things I’ve done in my career in magazine editorship, apart from the following.