The news of his death has been greatly exaggerated

Depending on your literary source and the variances of the actual quote, Mark Twain once said: "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

Imagine my surprise when Mr. Galen "Shorty" Landess walked in to my office this morning and informed me that the news of his "death" also was greatly exaggerated. (His sister, Laverne, thank God, is still with us, too.)

I recognized Mr. Landess as soon as he walked through the front door at 128 South High Street. In fact, not 15 minutes before his arrival, I mentioned to my co-workers in the office that Mr. Landess might call.

Thanks to a correspondence from Mr. Nick Fauber, I was alerted to the unintentional error in this week's "Mowrystown Recollections" column by longtime HCP columnist Jerry Pruitt.

Jerry had written that Mr. Landess left us in 1974. In re-checking his research, Jerry realized that he had confused the Hollowtown Road Galen Landess with another family of the same surname. (Jerry will address this in his next column, with even more interesting family history.)

However, thanks to Mr. Fauber, I was not totally surprised to see Mr. Landess. In fact, I was pleased to see him. We've met before, after all.

Many, many years ago, I used to ride my bike past his farm on Hollowtown Road in the summertime. In my late teens, I helped survey much of the land purchased by Galen.

Today, he shared several stories of his land acquisitions and his outstanding credit with former local bankers such as Mr. Winkle and Mr. Hodson.

Fortunately, Galen shared his wonderful sense of humor, too.

"In my family, there was Galen and Galo Landess and we both had addresses of Route 7. We'd get each other's mail all the time. Until they switched to exact numbers, that happened a lot. Same thing with the banks."

Galen shared one story from many years ago when one of his bank deposits ended up in another person's account. "Bob Hodson called me and said he knew I'd made a deposit that week. As it turned out, it was written up in another "Galen's" account."

The bank quickly remedied the situation.

To credit Galen's good nature, he said the "fellas at McDonald's had a lot of fun with this."

Galen took another copy of the paper and reminded me that his sister, Laverne, is still with us, too. If she has half of her brother's sense of humor and understanding, she already is one of my favorite people in this world.

Thank you, Galen, for your understanding. I can assure you that Jerry and I are equally embarrassed by our error in publishing.

And since we began this column with a Mark Twain quote, it's only appropriate to end in the same fashion.

Mark Twain's advice to writers was this: "First get your facts, then you can distort them at your leisure."

Mark Twain said a lot of things. Many of them in jest. But all of them with a grain of truth.

It was good to see you, today, Galen. Stop by any time.

Rory Ryan is publisher of The Highland County Press.