Clothes Pin Prank

John (we're waiting for Pat to write about her grandfather joining Buffalo Bill's circus):

My sister, Gay, and I would excitedly wait for my father (John Hewlett Fawcett, born in New Jersey in 1898) to come home from work and chant, "Did you get fired? Did you get fired?" Dad worked at the Moore (Drydocks) Shipyard in Richmond,\California building Liberty Ships, I believe, and the war was ending in 1944. Little Johnny (Johnny Skeekie) was 4 then, and little Gay (Gaygee Google) was 7. The nicknames in parentheses were my father's favorite names for us. My father wanted to leave the war effort and get back to teaching since the war was ending. Our chants, not withstanding, ultimately came true and he got a job at City College of San Francisco. We lived in Berkeley, across the Bay.

One of his frequent sayings was to threaten me with, "I'm going to put you in my pocket and take you to San Francisco." It wasn't much of a threat, I would have loved to have gone. I didn't like the pocket part, though. A few years later I went several times with him to San Francisco and he would pay me a penny for every word I could read off of billboards as we rode the old Key Train across the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge. That stopped when I could read better. I remember how disgusted he would get when he would see someone spitting in the San Francisco terminal. There were "NO SPITTING" signs to stop that practice. Another thing I remember at that terminal was the big screen movie machine. You would put in a quarter (worth a few dollars in today's money) and the movie of big band music would play, A crowd would always stop and watch, so the clever thing was to just hang around until someone used their own quarter.

An incident last night while I was babysitting Bridget's kids reminded me of a trick I would do during this period. The grandkids stuck a sticker on another's back and then on mine. They would get wise when I would nonchalently press a sticker on their back. My trick was to take a clothes pin (thi kind with two wood pieces with a coiled spring in the middle) and put it on the back of my father's suit. His student's would say, "Mr. Fawcett, there's a clothes pin on your back." He tried to do the same to me without such fun results. I would usually catch on. But even if I went to kindergarten with a clothespin, no one would care as much as my father's students did. After a while he usually caught on. I had to devise a place to put the pin where he wouldn't see it or feel it when he sat down. The best place seemed to be on the back of his suit jacket but on the left side where he wouldn't feel it by reaching for his wallet or by sitting on it.

My Favorite Prank

John:

My dear friend Amy Sue Loveless loves cruises and traveling. She referred us to the WorldMark vacation company to get a free trip to Reno just for listening to their come-on. They got some fancy gift for referring their friends. Well, we bit. We actually joined the program and got the coupon for the free 3-day trip to Reno after spending about $7,000 with cash and card. A year later we decided to go on the Reno trip before the deadline. Well Amy had lost her coupon. We got our coupon extended and a new coupon for Amy and Jack. We tried and tried to find a time we both could go and were getting close to the next deadline.

The deal was pretty phony. You could only leave on a Tuesday and return on a Thursday. This meant, basically, a one day trip and two days of travelling because our plane might leave late Tuesday and early Thursday. For a few hundred extra we stayed 5 or 6 days and could choose when we travelled. Our fun trip with the Lovelesses cost us thousands of dollars and never happened. We had a good time, though. We would walk through our hotel lobby which was a full blown casino and ride the elevator up and enjoyed telling other riders that we had not lost a penny and have had no hangovers (we don't drink or gamble). They would look at us incredulously.

A year or so later I called Amy and informed her that I had won a free cruise - I think to Hawaii. The best thing was that we could take another couple and we had chosen the Lovelesses. She was so excited. Furthermore, "we get $500 spending money." She was ecstatic. I said that the trouble was that it was $500 per couple not $500 each. "Oh, that's OK," she said, a little disappointed, but keeping her spirits up to comfort me after I delivered the sad news. Her husband came in the room at that moment and she relayed everything about the contest and the cruise and added the part about only one $500 per couple. He also said that that was all right, the cruise itself was plenty. I then wished them a happy April First. After a long pause she asked me if this was an April Fools joke. I said yes and that she had reacted better than I could have possibly asked for.

I tried once or twice to get her again on April 1, but they don't usually answer their v0ice mails or their phone. You can't leave a message because when they would call back days or weeks later the surprise was over. You can't say, "April Fools" on July 17th! I will get Amy again, but I'll have to wait a long time because she is very suspicious on April 1st if I call.

College Pranks

John:

I went to college (class of 62) at the University of California, Riverside. I have enjoyed doing pranks over the years and college was probably the height of such activities.

The University of California, when possible, has a giant "C" on a nearby hillside to advertise the campus. When I was a freshman in 1958 the tradition for this new campus (they had graduated their first 4 years of students the previous Spring) the big task was for freshmen to repaint the "C" in yellow paint to make it sharp and yellow. The next year, as a wise old Sophomore, I would drive some of the new Freshmen up to the "C" in my 1929 Packard I would buy my Freshman year.

As a really wise upper classman I supported or instigated several alterations to the Letter, just because it was there. We found that end-rolls of newsprint from the local Press-Enterprise newspaper was the material of choice to make the changes. It was cheap (free), and it instantly covered the rocks and boulders which surrounded the "C." The first time we changed the letter was to make it a backwards "C." Another time was in honor of the President of the University, Clark Kerr, when he came to the campus for a Reagents meeting that was held at one of the campuses each month. With the news print we made a "CK" to acknowledge his visit.

The meanist thing we did was on a day when high school seniors visited the campus to see if they wanted to attend four years there. In a deep fog that morning we changed the letter to become a Hammer and Sickle, the symbol of the dreaded Soviet Union. As the fog lifted at about noon, I imagine there was a collective gasp from the attendees and the college administration. I don't know if some potential enrollees chose another college to go to.

On the evening of the day-long Scotts on Rocks Day one year four or five of us drove up to the "C" with large tin cans and containers of kerosene. I drove them in my 1934 Ford four door sedan which I had brought down from my home in Berkeley up to the "C" on the rutty road up the back side of the mountain. We placed the cans along the outside of the letter and filled them with kerosene. The others gave me a head start so as to give me cover by being at the carnival when the light-up occurred. They were premature and as I neared the campus I looked up and saw the firey letter. It was beautiful. My partners in crime ran down the steep hill in the dark and arrived at the campus not long after I did.

My favorite book as a youth was "The Compleat Practical Joker" (British spelling) by H. Allen Smith. A slow reader, it took me way too long to read because I would laugh out loud and long several times every page. It would be fun to find that book again.