Can Human Error Be Cured?
M y wife and I have a routine to the television channels we watch, depending if we’re relax- ing outdoors on the patio, working in either her office or mine, eating, lying in bed at night, cleaning cars in the front garage, or working in the shop out back. (That’s right, seven TVs!) Luckily, we both understand and respect each other’s per- sonal choices, and with another stroke of luck, we both love “American Pickers” on the History channel. “Pawn Stars” is anoth- er favorite along with “Storage Wars,” some of the home restoration shows (“Restoring Galveston,” “Maine Cabin Masters,” etc.) and because he brings so much reality to working on old cars to light, “Roadworthy Rescue” with Derek Bieri’s unique ‘get er done’ approach. If nothing else, his banter is funny and a lot of his fixes give homebuilders the confidence and knowledge they need to begin fixing up an old car. Across the board all these shows are interesting, considering the wide variety of items we get to learn about, and sometimes their ballpark value, and examples of restoring cool old houses and preserving archi- tectural history. What my wife and I also have in common is 80 years combined experience preparing copy for hot rod and custom car magazines. Preparing copy means either writing it yourself or editing other writers’ copy. Once all copy has been paired with the photographs it gets designed by our artists and we finally get to see and read all that raw material turned into a typical article. After all these years we understand occasional typos and mistakes making their way to the printed page and have come to realize as much as we try, they do happen. The reason I mentioned our television favorites is because when they are wheeling and dealing any- thing automotive the mistakes pop out of the screen at us. Calling an early ‘30s coupe a roadster, or a clip from 1934 featuring Bonnie and Clyde’s bullet-ridden bodies in the ’34 Ford Tudor they met their demise in, being towed to the police station with the background crowded with large sedans from the late ‘30s and early ‘40s are mistakes that are easy to spot. We find ourselves copy editing everything, including the film editor! The reason we spend so much time copy editing
is the feeling a reader gets when they are deep into a story, intent on what they are reading, and then a mistake pops up. You can’t help but ask yourself how much other misinformation is there, and you find your confidence in the writer or magazine waning, becoming less authoritative, less reliable, and of less value. As this relates to television shows, my wife and I point out misinformation about the automobile environment many times, making us wonder how much is true about all the items we don’t have knowledge on. Taking information sim- ply for what it is will probably become even more prevalent in the future with the advent of AI, so the need to do your own research and not rely solely on one source of information, especially if research- ing from Internet sites, will still be required. Unfortunately all the proper research in the world can’t make up for human error. Try as we may, after all these years, we’ve learned no matter the amount of proofreading and corrections we catch, those nasty mistakes are lurking in the back- ground. In last month’s Curbside we identified the 2026 Ridler Award winner at the 73rd Detroit Autorama as a ’57 Chevy convertible instead of the ’56 Chevy convertible it is. We hope the owner Rex Satterfield, from Russellville, Tennessee, builder Kevin Riffey’s Hot Rods & Restorations, and the thousands of other rodders reading StreetScene understand this mistake was simply a human error and when we find a cure for that, we’ll be sure to pass it on to the world!
Tom Vogele tomvogele@verizon.net
8 MAY 2026
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