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Edward KocheEdward Koche
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Session:         Page of 617

sign 200 letters a day, and while I'm very careful in looking at the letters that other people do for me -- that is to say my staff prepares 150 or more, maybe 175 of the 200 letters -- and am very careful to read each word, I'm not so careful when I have dictated the letter myself because I have very good, competent people and I don't worry about stenographic errors. And I just signed it and it went out.

Well, I didn't know what the hell to do, so I called Wolf's home and he wasn't home; I called Fancher and his wife was there, Vivien Fancher, and I said, “Vivien, have you seen the letter in the Voice?” and very frostily: “Yes.” And I said, “I didn't write it. I didn't send it to the Voice; I sent it to the Villager.” And then it was: “Oh, Ed, we knew you couldn't have written that.” It was clear they were very upset, and I don't blame them. She said, “I will call Ed right away. He was devastated, and we didn't think you could do something like that, and we couldn't understand it.”

So I wrote a second letter to the Voice in which I said I was very sorry, I was mortified. That was my opening line -- mortified -- and explained what had happened and said I would never put down Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher and the others and “what bothers me is that many of the people, particularly Voice writers of the old Voice, would never see this new letter and they would think I had betrayed them and “I'm just so sorry at the embarrassment to the new Voice and the embarrassment to me, but that's it, and it's the gaffe of the year so far as I am concerned as to what





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