But when it comes to goofs in Cleveland journalism lore, one towers above all others. It is the great white whale of bloopers, a screwup so mammoth that it feels like a myth, a blunder so stupefying that people don’t believe it happened. You won’t find it in our archives. It’s not recorded in the microfilm. It appears to have been the early run of the special edition published the day after the human species marked its most audacious scientific achievement. When man walked on the moon. We all know what Neil Armstrong said in that magical moment when his foot touched the lunar surface:. “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” (Some believe he actually said “One small step for a man,” but history says otherwise.) Legend had it that we got it wrong at The Plain Dealer, that we reported, “One small step for me, one giant leap for man.” Yeah, hard to believe. One of the most famous quotes in all of history. How could you get it wrong? And where was the proof? If you check the microfilm on the day after the moon landing - the five-star late edition, presumably corrected -- the quote is correct. One former editor had a copy. It was grainy and fading, as I recall, but it showed a Plain Dealer page that had the quote wrong. We all marveled when we saw it, asking how that could happen, but could it be real, we wondered. Again, the official record that is the microfilm had it right. The explanation was that medical reporter Fraser Kent and science writer William D. McCann, who were reporting from Mission Control Center in Houston, received an advance copy from NASA of what the astronauts planned to say and built a story around that. Then, no one corrected it based on the actual quote before the special edition went to press. That explanation holds no water, though. Armstrong’s later accounts of how and when he thought of the quote prove there was no advance copy from NASA. If the mistake was made, it was pure blunder. Who was to blame? Who knows. Proof of the error remained elusive. Until now. I am here to report that we at last have found our white whale. The late Roy Hewitt was the longtime sports editor at The Plain Dealer, and a few years before he died, he was at home clearing out the flotsam of what one accumulates during a lifetime. He had a lot of old newspapers, including a bunch from Philadelphia, which he knew is near where I grew up. He also remembered I once had a bunch of old front pages with major headlines hanging in my office, including some from Philly. So, he dropped by the office with a big box of his old newspapers and gave them to me. I think I was in one of those periods where I was too busy to think, so I put the box in a filing cabinet drawer for a later look, and there they sat until a week ago. You might have heard we are departing our longtime home on Superior Avenue, so I’ve been clearing out filing cabinets. I finally took the time to go through the old newspapers. When I saw one of the old editions was the full Plain Dealer reporting the moonwalk, I had an adrenaline rush. Could it be the elusive proof, I wondered? Or was it the version in the microfilm? It is a three-star edition, meaning an early run. Like the five-star edition, the section had a big photo on the first page and then a second front page with the story. I turned to it, and there it was. The oopsie of all oopsies. You can see the evidence in the photo. |