Forty years ago, when my brother and I were young and foolish as opposed to the old fools that we have become, we conjured up, with several folks’ help, an April Fool’s prank for the newspaper.
Back then, when a weekly newspaper’s day of publication fell on April 1, it was traditional to plant a fake story as an April Fool’s prank. Perhaps some still do. It happened infrequently enough that readers once fooled could be fooled again by the time the calendar allowed April Fool’s Day and publication day once more to coincide.
Our story involved the “lirpa loof,” a “large hairy thing” that walked upright and that had been spotted in various locations around the county the night before the April 1 publication.
An unwitting accomplice abetted our scheme. Mary Lou Evans was then director at the chamber of commerce office next door and every Wednesday she would pay us a casual visit and saunter back to where the front page was under construction on a graphics table. She would scan the headlines to see what she learn.
That Wednesday several of us watched Mary Lou’s eyes get real big as words “large, fur-covered creature” jumped out at her from the headline. She left the building rather hurriedly and got on the telephone as soon as she returned to her office.
“Y’all, there’s something strange going on,” she later told us she had repeated to several friends whom she had called.
In the story we gave the fictitious witnesses plausible, Panola-sounding names, quoting them as having seen the creature in locations from Highway 51 between Batesville and Pope to Yocona Bottom.
We had recruited an out-of-town salesman who made a call at our office to pose for a photo next to a large “footprint.” We identified him as “N.S. Sherlock, a strange animal expert from the Mississippi Game and Fish Commission.”
And so on. Our fear was that it was so preposterous story readers would see right through it. We even listed the creature’s name — April Fool spelled backwards — deep into the front page story for fear of giving away the ruse too soon.
We need not have worried.
When the paper arrived in homes on that Thursday — April 1, 1976 (Thursday was our publication day then) — phones began to ring, both in our office and at the sheriff’s department where the lone dispatcher on duty had not been forewarned. Game wardens fielded a share of those phone calls as well.
Reports began to filter back to the newspaper office about people who had cancelled fishing trips, pulpwood cutters who had refused to go into the woods and a lady who had called the sheriff’s department alarmed that the creature was in her back yard because “my dogs barks different when it’s people.”
One game warden threatened to throw Rupert from the Tallahatchie River bridge. Then Sheriff David Bryan put him in a strangle hold.
Most people laughed with us, and when it was over, Rupert and I breathed a quiet sigh of relief, realizing that we had wholly underestimated the impact.
We have reproduced the story in its entirety on page 6A today for Blast from the Past. Read, enjoy and remember — it’s April Fool’s.