EDITOR’S COLUMN: Oh, not that Tom Anderson

It’s not the worst mistake I’ve made in nearly 20 years of journalism, but it very well could be among the stupidest.

The letter to the editor you see in our Friday online edition is penned by a Tom Anderson, resident of Anchorage, who is not to be confused with Tom Anderson, the former state legislator and current talk radio host of the Tom Anderson Show each weekday from 6 to 9 a.m. on KVNT, 92.5 FM.

That Tom Anderson lives in Meadow Lakes and records his show in the studio inside the Frontiersman office in Wasilla. I’ve been on his show several times and we joke and banter back and forth quite a bit. He often writes columns to run in the Frontiersman, and often times we’ll repurpose them in our sister publications — The Eagle, serving Eagle River and Chugiak, and the Anchorage Press, the alt-weekly of Alaska’s largest city.

So when I got an e-mail on Friday from Tom Anderson looking to have an opinion piece about Gov. Walker’s proposed payroll tax published, I just assumed it was that Tom and without thinking, wrote back something like, ‘Hey, how you doin’ Tom? Want it to run in the Press and Eagle, too?’

To which Tom Anderson, resident of Anchorage replied something like, ‘I’m doing well. Yeah, that would be fantastic.’ I don’t know whether that Tom Anderson has ever submitted a letter to the editor before, but he’d surely never been greeted with such personal enthusiasm as he got from me.

In any event, I threw it in the copy bin as a column submission by radio Tom Anderson, to be accompanied with column photo. It ran in Wednesday’s print and online editions.

Early Wednesday morning I was completely taken by surprise to hear from my boss, publisher Dennis Anderson (no relation, so far as I know), that our Tom hadn’t written that opinion piece, peppered with all-caps interludes of invective intended for state legislators.

I apologized to radio Tom and we laughed it off, but I owe readers and the Tom Anderson of Anchorage who was just trying to get his letter to the editor an apology, too.

I guess the moral of the story is never assume there’s only one Tom Anderson, especially when the person’s name is as common as Tom Anderson, a list, which according to Google is topped by Tom Anderson, the founder of Myspace, followed by Tom Anderson, founder and CEO of Supernova Companies LLC, followed by Tom Anderson, intellectual property lawyer, Tom Anderson, Notre Dame swimmer, Tom Anderson, Sheffield University chemistry professor, and in fiction, Tom Anderson, the neighbor of Beavis and Butthead, and Tom Anderson, aka ‘Neo’, the protagonist of The Matrix Film series portrayed by Keanu Reeves, with whom radio Tom probably shares the most in common.