It’s amazing how one tiny typographical error can send a mind with a proclivity for fantasy into flight. Just such an error of this sort appears on page 16, lower left corner, of this week’s paper (Nov. 30-Dec. 6), and it truly reduces F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Benjamin Button” to the mundane. In the picture on page 16 is little Robert O’Leary of Potsdam, born in 1924 to John and Gertrude, and who died in 1924 while fighting in WWII. One wonders if uniforms were made that small back in 1924. One wonders if there really was a WWII in 1924 that the world had not heard about; and if so, why not? If such a war had occurred and no one knew, should we call in the physicists for some sort of rationale? I mean, did Robert O’Leary perhaps have a relative whose last name was Schrodinger (a fellow who today would be taken to task by the SPCA for sure!)?
Editor’s note: Mr. O’Leary died in 1940. We regret the error.