As I hope people know, the infamous Dan Quayle incident consisted of the school handing Quayle a card upon which "potato" had been mispelled. The student in the bee spelled it correctly, Quayle looked at the official card and said, "I'm sorry, that's wrong."
And the media decided that Quayle was an idiot.
It actually wasn’t spelled wrong. You can spell the plural two ways, one is more commonly used today than the other; but in the past, the version he used was the more common way.