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Show (Copyrirlit, W. N. U.) 7 The first of April, some do say, Is set apart for All Fools' Day; Itut why the people call It so. Not I, nor they themselves do know. Hut on this day are people sent On purpose for pure merriment. Hut 'tis a thing to bo disputed, Which is the greatest fool reputed; The man that innocently went Or he that him designedly Bent. Poor Robin's Almanac, 1760. By ELMO SCOTT WATSON v NE of the most famons f warnings of all history was that uttered to Julius ! I Caesar "ISewnre the Ides of March !" But the Ides . 'j of March, however fatal rt' they may have been to the great Roman, are of f W little concern to us of modern times. Another y day which will soon be ' here Is the one when we do most of our "bewaring." That's the first of April and unless we're very alert some one is sure to make an April Fool of us. The practical Joker is with us always, al-ways, but April 1 Is the day when he Is at his best. We may Ignore the hat lying on the sidewalk (with the brick concealed under it) or the pocketbook (either nailed down or attached to a hidden string which whisks it from under our hands as we stoop down to pick It up) and then unsuspectingly accept an explosive cigar which a friend hands us or bite into a tempting tempt-ing chocolate cream and find it filled with cayenne pepper. We may avoid all of these familiar pitfalls for the unwary and then be "taken in" by a fake telephone call. "Mr. Lyon wants you to call him," they tell us. (Or It may be Mr. Wolf or Miss Ella 1'hant.) But when we call the number num-ber and ask for that person, a disgusted dis-gusted voice at the other end of the wire tells us "This Is the zoo." Or it may be "Mr. Fish" whose telephone number turns out to be the aquarium or "Mr. Snow" at the weather bureau or "Mr. Coilln" at some undertaking establishment. Some of the foolery, however, Is on the decline. Large candy factories report re-port that they no longer make April Fools' candy. Not that one cannot buy cotton balls disguised as sweetmeats; the obscure shops still supply them. The larger dealers, however, say that not only are calls growing fewer for such trick bonbons, but that they themselves run into the foreign substance sub-stance law. Today, as every one knows, candy must pass a certain test. The pure food law has sounded the death-knell of the china baby doll dipped in bitter-sweet chocolate. Where did this April Foolishness originate, anyway? The answer to that question is necessarily a difficult one, for this custom, like so many others, goes back so far and has developed in so many different forms In so many different countries that it is impossible to ascribe it to any one period or any one nation. There is evidence that the custom was prevalent lu Asia in ancient an-cient times, tracing back to the celebration cele-bration with festal rites of the period of the vernal equinox in Persia. It was the day when the Persian New lear began and was very close to the old English New Year's day. of March 25. The sun was then entering into the sign of frisky Aries and on that day "the season of rural sports and vernal delights" began.- In India the Hull festival on March 81 for centuries has been a general holiday and time for Jest. One of the favorite diversions consisted of sending send-ing people on long errands of fictitious import. Colonel Fearce, a British army officer and writer of a century ago, says: "High and low Join in it The late Suraja Dowlah, I am told, was very fond of making Hull fools, though he was a Mussulman of the highest rank. They carry the Joke s fur as to send lotters making appointments appoint-ments la the name of persons who mnst be absent from their house at the time fixed upon ; and the laugh is always in proportion to the trouble eiven." From the Orient the custom came into western Europe many centuries ago. The ancient Romans took delight in many sorts of practical Jokes in connection with their Feast of the Saturnalia and there are those who declare that the first April Fool Joke was that one which Romulus and his "early settlers" in Rome played upon the Sablnes by Inviting them to the regular April First celebration In . honor of Neptune and then carrying off by force the Sabine women. For centuries the French have held a Festival of Fools on April 1, in which "every kind of absurdity and Indecency In-decency was committed." Their term for April Fool is "poisson d'Avril," a term which means, according to one explanation, a young fish and therefore there-fore a fish easily caught. When Napoleon Na-poleon married Maria Louisa, Archduchess Arch-duchess of Austria, on April 1, 1810, it gave the waggish Parisians an excellent excel-lent chance to whisper among themselves them-selves that he was "un poisson d'Avril." d'-Avril." But the classic French April Fool story is that of a young woman who stole a gold watch from the house of one friend and hid it In the house of another friend. She then turned the case over to the police. But they were sadly lacking In the imagination necessary to appreciate this Joke. She was arrested for the theft and the Judge, entering into the spirit of the occasion, sentenced her to Jail for a year with the remark that she be discharged dis-charged on April 1 the next year as "un poisson d'Avril I" Another French classic is the escape on April 1, 1700, from prison by the duke of Lorraine and his wife, who shouted back to their guards the French equivalent of "April Fool!" i April Fooling has been prevalent in Great Britain for centuries. There it mostly took the form of sending Innocents Inno-cents upon "sleeveless errands." A boy might be sent to the cobbler's for "a pennyworth of his best stirrup oil" and then be mighty amazed when the angry shoemaker applied this "oil" to his back. Or he might be dispatched to the milk-vendor for "half a pint of pigeon's milk," to the bookseller s for "The Life and Adventures of Eve's Mother," to the butcher shop for a "meat auger" or to the bakery for "a pie-stretcher." In northern England and Scotland this practice was called "Hunting the Gowk." An old couplet says; "On the first day of Aprile Hunt the Gowk another mile." The word "gowk" in reality means a cuckoo and was used metaphorically for fool, which undoubtedly is the origin of the modern slang phrase: "To knock a man cuckoo." There are plenty of connecting threads among all these words, "Gauch" In Teutonic is a fool, whence we get our word gawky, and "geac" in old Saxon was a cuckoo, whence is derived "geek," meaning one easily imposed upon. Remember Re-member the words of Malvollo to Olivia : Why have you suffered me to be Imprlson'd And made the most notorious "Keck" and gull That e'er Invention played on? Although April Fool's day appears to have ceased to challenge literary wits, there was a time in England when it brought forth observations from such scholars as Joseph Addison Addi-son and that prolific and satiric writer Jonathan Swift. Swift seems to have entered into the spirit of the day and to have enjoyed the liberties granted to the practical Joker on April first. He writes to Stella under date of March 31, 1713, about a Jolly evening spent with two good friends "in contriving" con-triving" a lie for the morrow." One of the commonest forms of April Fool Jokes during past years in this country was the practice by newspapers newspa-pers of printing on April 1 some exciting excit-ing story of an event which never happened hap-pened and not revealing the fact until the reader came to the end of the yarn. There have been innumerable variations of this stunt, ranging from i "scare" stories about the blowing up of the city hall and the assassination of city officials or the escape of all the animals in the zoo to more innocent inno-cent stories about the discovery of buried treasure or the exhibition of some marvelous and seemingly impossible impos-sible feat of skill or strength. Some 40 years ago a Cincinnati newspaper printed a big story regarding regard-ing a monster of fiendish aspect and unknown species which had been found inhabiting a cave in the hills east of the city, which had already carried off several children in its slavering Jaws and had spread terror In the neighborhood. There was even a picture pic-ture of the Thing, drawn from the descriptions de-scriptions of the two or three persons who had seen it clearly, and for malignant malig-nant hldeousness of aspect, that monster mon-ster made all Calibans, dragons, Hur-lothrumbos, Hur-lothrumbos, demons and octopl look tame. Finally, down at the latter end of the story In very small type, so small that many readers overlooked It, was set the legend, "April 1, 18SS." Even some who noticed that date didn't grasp its significance, but continued to shudder with fear at the thought of meeting the monster. Some Philadelphians still remember the story about the big iceberg thai was "being towed up the river." Thousands went to the river front to see the spectacle and then denied that they had been taken In. A quite modern hoax is told au follows fol-lows by one who was in Ireland when it "happened": Peace, of a kind, reigned in Dublin on March 31, 1922. There was tension ten-sion in the air for the Irreconcilables, who refused to recognize the truce with England, had taken over the Four Courts and were known to be preparing prepar-ing resistance to the terms which Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith had signed. Anything was likely to happen. About 1 o'clock on the morning of April 1 the Morning Post of London, the paper which reflected the views of those who thought that any truce with the Irish was a betrayal of Great Britain, Brit-ain, received a telegram from Dublin stating that the Kildare Street club had been seized by the Irreconcilables, that the members residing there had been driven into the streets in their pajamas and that this social stronghold strong-hold of British aristocracy in the Irisl capital had been transformed Into a stronghold of the enemy. With due solmenity and with headlines head-lines that had not been surpassed since the declaration of the Armistice with Germany the telegram was published. And that night Dublin was flooded with correspondents American, Kng-Iish Kng-Iish and French all prepared to cover the new "war." The British cabinet was called to Downing street for breakfast, and the world sighed in dismay dis-may and mourned that the Irish, when peace seemed in sight, "were at It again." Only a few know the true story behind be-hind the April fool telegram that started start-ed this furore. There was in Dublin at the time a Major Clarke who had served with distinction during the World war, but who had never been the same since his experiences In Flanders. They had developed in him a "sense of humor" that was peculiar. On one occasion he collected all the boots left to be cleaned outside the bedroom doors of the largest hotel iti Dublin and dropped them down the elevator shaft He was barred from the same hotel fir throwing cream-filled eclairs at the guests during dinner. And It was he who sent the telegram. He was tired of peace and he thought it would be a good joke to start the Anglo-Irish straggle again. And, strange to soy, he nearly accomplished his object, for the suspicious Irreconcilables thought the wire had been sent by the Fre State government as a bait But ther were not yet prepared. The brenk did not come for almost three months. ( by Western Newspaper Union.) |
