Meet the other Mark Hofmanns
One of the two pet peeves that has plagued me all my life is the misspelling of my last name. The other is trying to figure out how no-flush urinals work, but that’s another story for another time.
As you probably can tell by looking at the top of this column, my last name is spelled H-O-F-M-A-N-N.
Not Hofman, not Hoffman, not Hoffmann and certainly not Hauffmann — all of which I have seen instead of the way it’s actually spelled.
My family calls that The Hofmann Curse. The curse has caused countless corrections, an unknown number of emails floating around in the void of cyber space and two mistaken challenges to a duel.
Hofmann is a German spelling, and it was confirmed to me how popular my last name is in Germany when my brother traveled there for work (a.k.a. Drinking at Oktoberfest) and looked into a phone book and found many Hofmanns spelled the right way or as I say, “curse-ive”.
Here, however, finding a Hofmann with one F and two N’s isn’t so easy. I kind of felt alone until I found myself in name only.
I was 19, working at my uncle’s gas station and pondering over the mystery of no-flush urinals when a coworker came up to me and said, “Quit day dreaming, Mark! The gas pumps are on fire!”
After the fire departments cleared the scene, he said, “I was going to tell you that you’re a serial killer.”
At first I thought he was referring to my ability to devour boxes of cereal, but then I found out he was talking about the other Mark Hofmann.
Mark William Hofmann is regarded as one of history’s most accomplish counterfeiters, and no, he wasn’t a “counter fitter” for Home Depot like I first thought.
What the other Mark Hofmann did was create false historic documents, selling them as “found” documents to the Church of Latter Day Saints, raking in dough and popularity.
However, like the flavor of chewing gum and characters on “Game of Thrones,” it didn’t last long.
When people started getting wise about his shenanigans, Hofmann planted bombs to murder two people, killing one of them and injuring himself before he was able to carry out his second assassination.
He’s been serving life in a Utah prison since the 1980s.
So, yeah, learning about that Mark Hofmann was a bit of a letdown, but I found other Mark Hofmanns in the country through online searches — there’s a doctor, a real estate developer and a general manager for a wood-fire pizza restaurant. No counter fitters, though. I wonder if that’s a real title or something just reserved for criminals.
It was then I thought about starting a club, “The Mark Hofmanns Who Are Not Bomber/Murderers Club.”
It looked promising on paper, but I quickly abandoned the idea when I imagined the first meeting.
“Let’s start with the roll call,” I would say. “Is Mark Hofmann here? Oh wait. I didn’t think this through. Everyone quit daydreaming and let’s figure out who we are.”
Maybe I’ll be better off starting a counter-fitter club.