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.

Among the first of my gratuitous flops was when I was the editor of Car Craft magazine and got a call from a TV producer whose name meant nothing to me then and which I don’t recall now. The gist of the call was that he was executing a new show and wanted to know if Car Craft could be involved in participating in the buildups—one example I recall was turning a Chevelle SS396 into the world’s fastest lawn mower. I assuredly told the guy that no one on Earth wanted to see such a stupid premise, and there was no chance that Car Craft wanted to be involved in ruining cars that way. Of course, the show was