It wasn’t so long ago, for some of us, anyway, that prank calls to businesses and various authority figures were a staple of teenage life.
Thanks to caller ID, cell phones, and other technologies, over-the-phone anonymity is a relic of the past, along with goofy phone calls inquiring about the present state of a refrigerator or asking to speak with “Mr. Al Coholic.”
But in the 1980s, prank calls were commonplace and on April Fool’s Day, they were problematic – enough to merit coverage in The Blade.
Headlined “Zoos Taking Mr. Lyon off the Hook,” the April 1, 1987 story, noted that the sheer volume of mischievous phone calls to zoos, including Toledo’s, asking for a “Mr. Lyon,” or a “Mr. Wolf,” or a “Mrs. Fox” necessitated a dramatic response: zoos temporarily disconnected their phone lines.
The story, by The Blade’s George Joseph Tanber, reported these prank call statistics from The Bronx Zoo from April 1, 1955: On that day, the zoo received 1,427 calls for Mr. Lyon, 630 calls for Mr. Wolf, 613 calls for Mrs. Fox, and 499 calls for Miss Bear.
Prank calls were only one popular method of celebrating April Fool’s Day tradition, which dates to 1564 in France, The Blade reported, “when Charles IX adopted a reformed calendar that changed New Year’s Day from April 1 to January 1.” That some people refused to get with the times and continued to celebrate the New Year on April 1 is what came to be known as April fools.
This led to a popular French custom “of tricking friends and relatives,” which ultimately spread to other countries and some big pranks.
Among them: The 1985 Sports Illustrated story by George Plimpton (Paper Lion author and Intellivision spokesman) about a New York Mets pitching prospect named Sidd Finch, “who had never played organized baseball, learned in Tibet to throw a ball 168 miles an hour.”
And, locally, the 1984 prank pulled by Bowling Green State University, which reported that “a university pool would be used for a Marine World show of sharks, eels, barracudas, and a petting shark,” which resulted in phone calls inquiring about tickets and a local woman’s complaint that “the pool wouldn’t be cleaned in time for her daughter’s swimming classes.”
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First Published March 30, 2020, 10:00 a.m.
