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Show em Riding club will be held on onujuj vwuu cuapei ior can lr-' res- I (TmM0?! 1 What has become of the hoax of old those tricks that shocked thousands? By FRED J. OSTLER 1 HERE ARE newspapermen, today j showing slight wisps of gray at 'a their temples, who will tell you it much of the heart and gusto of news-U news-U rdcm has gone fleeting. They recall good-natured jests and hoaxes which ap-lard ap-lard much more frequently, in their , V als in years past . . ; and which jokes, j-ltIJ admit, were sometimes on the news-irrl news-irrl themselves. : In the past, hi-jinks of this calibre gave (utine journalism a hilarious shot in the tm. But since the press became respect- V ), the gay old art of hoaxing has fallen '(to discard, thereby robbing the world of ,f )dly share of amusement. In the news, jia.est hoax medium yet invented, there it not appeared a first-rate, rootin'-tootin' im flam in years. The best the Fourth u s can muster these days, they say, is Jc d April Fool gag. 1 Is is weak tea indeed compared to it strong grog served up, say, by .Robert ' . Quillen when he was editing the South aiclina Tribune. In January, 1930, this oryjof a local wedding appeared, with imoi and date in the lead, on the Trib-le's Trib-le's society page: I 77e groom is a popular young ; b n who hasn't done a lick ol work f t ee he got shipped in the middle o 1 i f junior year at college. He man- i Is to dress well and keep a supply t, spending money because his dad is a spit-hearted old loot who takes up 1 f. i bad checks instead of letting him i to jail where he belongs. The bride is a skinny, last little JC.ot, who has been kissed and hand- led by every boy in town since she '' 12 years old. She paints like a S.oux Indian, sucks cigarets in secret 'ant, drinks corn liquor when she is out .,; yj riding in her dad's car at night. ' dovn't know how to cook or keep . touse. The house was newly plastered r-iori the wedding and the e iter ior painted, thus appropriately carrying I jptifj the decorative scheme ior the froom was newly plastered and the bride newly painted . . . the young fryle will make their home with the t ."Je's parent which means they jp ' sponge on the old man until he and then she will take in wash- t der's eyes popoed when thev read '? nerve of that Quillen! Then they hood-winked i . on. They had been t, " 1 IS f -"Gat a Bsatcs,?" by Quillen's long pent-up urge to just for once tell the truth. This Wedding Story has since become enshrined as a newspaper classic, and was a great favorite of the late Alexander Woolcot. X EA, THE old-timers gave us soma amazing but highly amusing stories. Would your morning be brightened today, by reading read-ing in any newspaper in the land of a tree that gave baked apples? A cow that ate horse-radish and gave burning milk? An animal called a whirling whimpus that spins like a top A man who painted a spider on his bald head to keep flies away? Answer: NO. Yet these brilliant tid-bits of fiction posed as fact in small papers, were picked up by the wire services, and subsequently were swallowed by thousands. But that was in the dear, dead past. Today, To-day, alas, hoaxing in journalism is as dead as a pared thumbnail. For a truly fantastic fable, you must hark back more than 100 years, to the colossal Moon Hoax, most celebrated hoax in press history. It began on Tuesday, August 25, 1835, in the New York Sun. Calmly,, without screaming headlines or ballyhoo, this Buck ' Rogers tale began by revealing how Sir John Herschel, (an eminent astronomer) had brought the moon within forty miles of the earth by means of an enormous super-telescope. super-telescope. . The story picked up speed next day with the scientists gaping at such marvels on the moon as huge rocks of green marble; a beach of brilliant white sand; a chain of pyramids of lilac hue; and a monster of bluish lead color with one horn a lunar unicorn! When Thursday's paper came out, all New York clamored for it. People stormed the Son's offices for back copies. Newsboys sold out in a flash. The Sun's sales sky-rocketed. On Friday, avid readers discovered new enchantments: lunar reindeer, hills of snow-white snow-white marble, biped beavers that walked erect, lovely golden pheasants, and a temple of polished sapphire. Then the sensational news: there was human life on the moon! The- inhabitants were the size of midgets, and covered with glossy, copper-colored hair. These astounding revelations became the talk of New York, traveled to London, Paris, Edinburg and Glasgow. A delegation of Yale professors hurried to New York to investigate promised additional scientific data. They were treated to a royal run-around, and sent scurrying from one printer to another until they returned to the campus cam-pus in frustration. Clergymen in Massachusetts Massa-chusetts were reported eager to send missionaries mis-sionaries to convert the bat-men. Even Edgar Allan Poe was so impressed he admitted ad-mitted himself outdone, and never completed com-pleted his current story; "The Adventures of One Hans Pfaal." Then, when the Sun was enjoying the largest circulation of any daily in the world, the bubble burst The New York Journal ol Commerce' decided to run the story, and sent a reporter to the Sun. There he met Richard A. Locke, the Sun's star reporter. Locke admitted the story was his brain child, and that he had written k M boost circulation. . And there was time ... . - .About twenty years, ago, Paul J. Smith, literary critic of the Loi Angeles Timet, had a large gripe against modern art. Fed up with surrealism, be took a canvas, smeared it, daubed it, and flung colors at it until the result faintly resembled dusky woman waving bunch of bananas. He labeled this "Exaltation," by Pavel J. Jerdonowitch. With a half-dozen similarly daubed monstrosities, "Exaltation" was exhibited ex-hibited in salons about the country under the name of "Disumbrationist Art." Instead of being howled from the galleries, it drew critical huzzahs from Havelock Ellis. The Chicago Art World fell madly in love with it. Parisian art magazines hummed with . its praise. For three years the paintings were exhibited, ex-hibited, and discussed in solemn tones as a new and significant art form. Finally Smith could stand the farce no longer. He confessed con-fessed to authorship, thereby setting modern mod-ern art back twenty years. But what's happened to good, clean, old-fashioned old-fashioned skull-duggery? Journalism 'fears to rise above her comic strips, Art is so deadly decorous it hurts. The world of letters let-ters has become a vast mimeopgraph machine, ma-chine, spewing out commercial best sellers. If anyone could jolt us out of this lethargy, leth-argy, you might imagine those nimble wits, the press agents, would be the boys. But not one has whipped up anything recently to compare with one sample of the hocus-pocus hocus-pocus conjured up by the master mountebank, mounte-bank, the late Norman Jefferies. Whil publicity manager for a Philadelphia museum mu-seum and side show in 1906, Jefferies produced pro-duced and directed the wierd Jersey Devil Hoax which beguiled the Associated Press, thrilled countless readers, and incidentally stampeded paying customers into his museum. mu-seum. It was a fable remembered in Jersey Twilight nl the Max to this day. It began when Jefferies broke this story in a small paper in Jersey: "The Jersey Devil, which has not been seen in these parts for 100 years, has again put in ite appearance. Mrs. J. N. Hopkins, wife of a worthy farmer of our county, distinctly saw the creature near the barn on Saturday, and afterwards examined its tracks in tha snow." That started it. In jig time, women were reported having hysterics from encounter! with the Thing. The Associated Press sped reporters to the scene. They kept the wirea humming with stories of mills shut down because women refused to walk home after dark, of men seeing an eerie shape along dark roads, of the expert from the Smithsonian Smith-sonian Institution who inspected the tracks, but could give no help. And behind tha scenes and pulling the strings sat Nornua Jefferies. When press and public excitement waa at its peak, the Devil was dramatically captured. cap-tured. Photographers were conveniently present. To the trumpeting of the press, which reported in all seriousness the capture cap-ture and subsequent appearance at Jefferies' Jef-feries' museum the Devil was exhibited to record crowds. It was, of course, ne monster, but a kangaroo splashed with green paint, and wearing green whiskers and cunningly contrived bronze wings. But, as the old song goes, all this waa long ago. Today the hoax sleeps with pennies on its eyes. Perhaps ws caa only hope that the grand old art will rise again, bring with it the mystery, good humor and artfulness of one of man's oldest and most universal pastimes. The Hoax is dead! Long live the Hoasd IT lv accepted, and both are beiner used every day in police |