As a Lauderdale, I so rarely make mistakes that it's hard for me to relate to the incompetent boobs who do.
But on those occasions — oh, maybe every 12 years or so — when I somehow publish the wrong information in one of my columns, it's really not that hard to fix the error. Just delete, retype the correct information, and then blame the mistake on somebody else.
Repairing a mistake once it's been carved into stone is a different matter, as you might imagine. And during my many trips to various cemeteries around the city and county, I have sometimes stumbled on tombstones with misspelled words, obviously wrong dates, and other issues. Often these are just left alone, because how would you "erase" the mistake and start over?
Well, sometimes you do this — as found on an old tombstone in Elmwood Cemetery, part of the Nickey family plot there. I'm not sure how the family name "McMahan" was originally spelled here (maybe with an "o"?), but at some point somebody noticed it was wrong, so they painstakingly chiseled out the offending letter and neatly inserted the correct one. Not just once, but twice!
The correction isn't exactly invisible now, after all these years of weather and time, but you have to admire the effort to get it right.
