Former Nashville Banner columnist Fred Russell is respected as one of the nation’s most legendary sportswriters. x xxPractical joker Fred Russell is envied, from Maine to California, as one America’s most outrageous pranksters. He started at an early age; he is now in his 80s, but his eyes still twinkle when he recalls his exploits.
The dapper Russell’s voice fairly crackles when he describes the start of his notorious career as a practical joker. It was June of 1929, and Russell was a mere cub reporter at the Nashville Banner. Freshly out of Vanderbilt Law School, Russell had been assigned a desk in the Banner’s smoky, cramped headquarters. As fate would have it, he was seated next to a veteran writer named John Leiper.
Russell remembers that Leiper, a quiet, serious man from the old school, always wore a starched white shirt and a black tie. When he wrote headlines, he used an old-fashioned pen and bottled ink. Leiper’s ink bottle was a permanent fixture on his desk, and the longer Russell sat next to Leiper, the more the bottle began to tempt the young reporter.
Each day, Russell recalls, a teenage boy, nicknamed “Blondie,” would pass through the newsroom selling Eskimo Pie ice cream bars. To keep the ice cream cold, Blondie packed his Eskimo pies bars in dry ice. Russell had never seen dry ice before, and he was fascinated by its smoke. He also began to wonder what would happen if a chunk of dry ice landed in old man Leiper's ink bottle. About once every two weeks (“I didn't want to overdo it,” explains Russell), while Leiper was away from his desk, Russell would beg a small piece of dry ice from Blondie and drop it into Leiper’s ink bottle. When Leiper would return, his ink bottle would be bubbling and fizzing like a small volcano. “I guess I must have pulled that trick on him a couple of dozen times,” says Russell, “and his reaction was always the same. He would just sit there and stare at all the frothing and commotion that was going on in his little ink bottle, and he wouldn’t say a single word. He would just keep on staring in utter amazement until it quit fizzing and hissing, and then he would go back to work without mentioning it to anybody. We used to get a big kick out of watching him glare at that ink bottle.”
The dry-ice stunt was only the beginning of a long and distinguished practical-joking career. According to Russell, the joking craze probably peaked sometime in the 1940s and ’50s. In today’s hectic business world, he suggests, hardly anyone has time for the humorous gag. “Everybody had so much more time then,” he says. “It was a part of the newspaper business, and it was a part of sports. Practical jokes were expected and appreciated. They provided us with a lot of entertainment.”
Joys of joking
Like Grassmere season pass holders and Nashville Knights hockey fans, practical jokers may well go the way of the tyrannosaurus—unless the few remaining masters of the craft pass their skills along to the next generation. The loss of good-natured laughter—even, or especially, at another person’s expense—would leave a gaping, grumpy void.
To those unschooled in prankstering, the art of the practical joke—which involves finding pleasure in another person’s folly—seems to be an exercise in cruelty. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The nimble gracefulness of a practical joker lies in his ability to take a victim to the absolute edge and then, masterfully and gently, bring him back to the safe, familiar confines of predictable existence. Far from being the heartless bullies that they are often depicted to be, practical jokers are usually sensitive souls, mild-mannered mixtures of Mother Teresa and Newt Gingrich.
Take Alan Alda (please). No other man has so deftly epitomized the sensitive male of the latter 20th century than Alda as Hawkeye Pierce. For that matter, Trapper and B.J. were pretty damn sensitive too. Yet look what they did to poor Frank Burns. Never was a man so tormented. They dipped Burns’ hand in a bowl of warm water while he slept; they had Radar read Burns’ letters to Hot Lips over the loudspeaker. Nobody could have been more cruelly abused.
Still, Burns deserved what he got. It was not just his tormenters’ privilege to beleaguer him; it was their duty. In some strange, beatific way, Hawkeye, Trapper and B.J. made Frank a better person by making him the butt of their practical jokes. The flaws in Frank’s personality—his arrogance, his selfishness, his lack of camaraderie with his fellow man—were neatly held in check by simple, well-aimed practical jokes.
And therein lies the intrinsic worth of this dying crossbreed of fun and mischief. The victimizer helps correct a flaw, cover a glitch or restrain an obsession that might otherwise go unchecked. Sometimes these weaknesses are unique to the particular victim, but other times they are universal. The true art of the practical joke lies in finding the victim’s Achilles’ heel and then attacking it, setting him up by tossing out bait that he cannot refuse and then letting him run with it for awhile. For the joke player, pure gratification only comes with reeling the victim in. Practical jokes are a tricky business, but for those skilled in their ways, the rewards are priceless.
Who is my neighbor?
Physicians Elmore Hill and John Tudor lived next door to each other on Woodlawn Drive for almost 17 years. When the Tudor family finally moved away, many of their friends were astonished that both of their houses were still standing. The children in both families had been rambunctious. Their fathers, however, had acted like eternal 8-year-olds.
It is hard to pinpoint the onset of their particularly uncivil war, but the extent of their practical joking was brutal, long-lasting and wild. Hill describes his pal Tudor as “a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—he was Dr. Jekyll from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m., and then he turned into Mr. Hyde from 6 p.m. until 8 a.m.” Says Tudor, “I have established the P.T. Barnum Award, and Dr. Hill has been the sole recipient of it during the tenure of its existence, because he can be had easier than anyone else I know. In the days of the sting, he would have been described as ‘a mark.’ ”
Hill, a retired oral surgeon, admits that his relationship with Tudor was “most unusual.” Some days Hill would leave his house, only to discover that his car had been hidden in a thicket. For 10 years Hill, an amateur gardener, never had much success with his tomato plants. The problem, he finally learned, was that, for 10 years, Tudor had painstakingly been plucking off Hill’s tomato blooms one by one.
Hill’s own joke-playing prowess should not be underestimated. One evening when Tudor was hosting a dinner party, he slipped into Tudor’s kitchen and released a 4-foot iguana that Hill had purchased especially for the occasion. Although the iguana caused quite a stir at the dinner party, Tudor got the last laugh by placing the iguana in the back seat of Hill’s car, where it left a few practical jokes of its own.
Still, Hill sometimes found it hard to get back at Tudor. There was, for example, the time Tudor plastered the town with fliers advertising “Fresh-Killed Goat, 29 cents a pound, Cleaned and Dressed. Will Deliver.” Hill’s telephone number was affixed to the fliers, which were then distributed to various eateries that specialized in oddities such as, well, goat. Before the day was over, Hill’s phone was ringing off the hook. Less-than-reputable chefs from all over town were pleading with him to share his stash of freshly slaughtered goat. Tudor’s friends even got in on the action, calling Hill just to listen to him curse and fume. “He’s so wonderful to play jokes on,” Tudor chuckles.
Inevitably, some of the pair’s practical jokes backfired. After the iguana incident, Tudor decided to continue the wildlife motif. He purchased a bantam rooster, known for its loud and extended early-morning screeches, and stationed it next to the master bedroom of the Hill home. The bird, however, didn’t stay there long. Instead, it set up shop outside the Tudors’ bedroom window.
Green of judgment
One of Nashville’s most elaborate, and successful, practical jokes was born in a building near the intersection of I-440 and West End Avenue. The victim was local insurance agent and all-around nice guy Mickey Martin, a principal in the firm of Martin & Zerfoss. The perpetrators were Martin’s then-partners, John Lord and Sam Cook. Martin, big-smiling and fun-loving, was known for his occasional obsessions. For a while, those obsessions included his new house and, especially, his new yard. According to Martin, who was doing the yard work himself, his lawn was approaching golf-course perfection. Day after day, week after week, Martin droned on and on about his exploits in aerating, seeding, planting, mowing and trimming.
His co-workers had reached the outer limits of human tolerance. When Martin brought pictures of his lawn to the office one morning, they were driven over the edge. At lunchtime, Cook and Lord left the office and headed for the hardware store, where they purchased three spray cans of fluorescent orange paint. Setting out to Martin’s new house, they stopped about a quarter of a mile from his driveway and spray-painted a pair of fluorescent orange arrows in the street. Each 100 yards or so, they painted another set of arrows, all leading toward Martin’s home turf.
In front of Martin’s mailbox, they painted a pair of arrows that pointed directly toward the middle of the front yard. To add a final touch of authenticity, they hammered four orange-painted stakes, at 75-foot intervals, leading to the rear of Martin’s yard.
The next morning at the office, Cook and Lord’s revenge was sweet. They listened as Martin frantically called the Metro Water and Sewer Department, the city manager’s office and the mayor’s office, trying to short-circuit the city’s plans to bulldoze his front yard.
House boys
Almost any college fraternity can boast an impressive history of practical joking, but on the Vanderbilt campus no fraternity outdoes Sigma Alpha Epsilon. The SAEs were once headquartered at the turreted stone structure at 2500 Kensington Place, but a bit too much frivolity has forced them to relinquish their chapter house for a while.
The SAEs’ pranks, known to the fraternity’s members as “stooges,” have been passed down from generation to generation. Simple but effective was the “water stooge,” which required the participation of two SAE’s working in unison. One SAE would fill a bucket with water and climb onto the front porch overhang. Meanwhile, another SAE would station himself, and the selected victim (usually an outsider who had helped himself to more than his allotted share of the front-porch keg), directly beneath the bucket. The true beauty of the water stooge lay in its timing and positioning. Like a bullfighter manipulating his cape, the jokester on the porch would try to get as close as possible to the unsuspecting victim without getting a drop of water on himself. The SAE on the roof was required to extend himself deftly across the overhang and then direct a concentrated stream of water on a moving, if not staggering, target.
The SAE “fire stooge” required similar skill and dexterity. The fire stooger’s goal was to make his way through a crowded dining room, usually crawling, commando-style, on his elbows and stomach, until he reached the chair of the fire stoogee. Once he had positioned himself beneath the stoogee’s chair, the stooger would light a tightly twisted wad of newspaper and then crawl away. As the flames rose, so did the temperature of the stoogee’s chair. Inevitably, the victim would end up jumping from his chair and stomping out the flaming wad of paper. Inevitably, the SAEs thought this was a lot of fun.
Journalistic integrity
Some of our city’s best practical jokes were pulled in the old newsrooms of our city’s local dailies. Just ask Fred Russell and his fellow veteran sportswriter Edgar Allen.
Russell always looked forward to April Fool’s Day in the newsroom. “We would try to come up with something that would get a reaction out of our readers,” explains Russell, “something that was outrageous, yet just believable enough to keep from being discounted too quickly. On more than a few occasions, we came up with a winner.” One of those winners, as Russell recalls it, occurred in the 1950s when the front page of the Banner sports section featured a story on proposed legislation that would reroute Harding Place and extend it directly through the Belle Meade Country Club golf course. A phony map accompanied the article, showing the path of the new road, which passed dead-center through the golf course. “I spent the better part of the next day fielding irate phone calls from some of Belle Meade’s most prominent citizens,” laughs Russell.
Russell recalls a number of other April Fool’s Day lead stories, including the ersatz report that a zeppelin had landed inside the old Sulphur Dell baseball stadium and was scheduled to remain tethered there an entire week. A superimposed photograph of a zeppelin nestled inside the stadium was used to add authenticity to the story. “For the next week, people kept making special trips out to old Sulphur Dell to see the non-existent zeppelin,” says Russell. “Of course, it was a lot bigger deal to have a chance at seeing something like that back in 1949 than it would be today.”
Another Fred Russell special was his April Fool’s headline proclaiming that the University of Tennessee had sold the rights to the words “Big Orange” to the University of Florida for $20,000,000. “That was the last [April Fool’s story] we ever did, and it got quite a reaction from the UT contingency,” Russell says. “Tandy Wilson was a councilman at the time, and he fell for it hook, line and sinker. He asked me if I was sure about the story, and I told him we had picked it up off the AP line. Then he asked me whether I had heard what colors were being considered to replace orange as UT’s team color. I told him that a rumor was circulating that the school officials were leaning toward ‘Coon Dog Grey.’ He got so upset about the news that he called Doug Dickey, who was the athletic director at the time. Of course, Dickey knew nothing about the whole thing, and the councilman finally realized that he had been had. He was a great sport about it, though. We still laugh about that one.”
Edgar Allen, the sports editor for the Banner in the 1960s and 1970s, also recalls a few April Fool’s stories that made the news. “We ran a story that Loveman’s Department Store had installed a swimming pool on the store’s fifth floor, and we showed a doctored-up picture of someone jumping off a diving board that appeared to be inside the store. That raised quite a stir. We also did a piece on Vanderbilt’s decision to enclose the south end of Dudley Field and build a 30-story, $120,000,000 co-ed athletic dormitory. That one got the Vanderbilt fans pretty excited. It was all a hoax, of course.”
Allen also recalls an April Fool’s photograph that showed former Vanderbilt head football coach Bill Pace with what were supposed to be his triplet brothers assisting him at spring practice. The triplet brothers were actually just more pictures of Pace. The caption under the picture made sure to point out that the date on the coach’s calendar was April 1.
The 1971 April Fool’s issue depicted former Vanderbilt athletes Steve Burger and Watson Brown along with a man identified as Ap Rilf Ool Onyou (that’s “April Fool On You” if you say it aloud). The accompanying story explained that the two Vandy stars were considering signing professional baseball contracts with the Hirosaki Huskies of the Japanese National League. Yet another fake photo showed former Vanderbilt head basketball coach Roy Skinner with his new 7-foot 11-and-three-quarter-inch signee from Australia.
Naturally, the signing took place on April 1. Eventually, according to Russell, the newspaper got “a little too sophisticated” to continue with the April Fool’s stories, and the tradition “quietly faded away.”
Not in my front yard
Nashville photographer Slick Lawson has lived on historic Whitland Avenue for years. He and his neighbors take great pride in the lovely, tree-shaded homes that fill the neighborhood; their annual July 4 celebration, which attracts 2,000-or-so invited guests, is a highlight of every summer.
One summer day, in the late ’80s, one of Lawson’s acquaintances—the photographer says he knows who it was, but he would not identify the culprit—sneaked into Lawson’s front yard and put up a large, completely respectable-looking sign. The sign, mounted in concrete, was about 8 feet tall and announced that Lawson’s front yard was the “Future Home of Whitland Condominiums. 10 Story Ultra-Modern Highrise. Construction Financing by First Nashville Mortgage Investors.”
When the sign went up, Lawson was vacationing in Alaska. Meanwhile, the neighbors went into a tizzy. Known for their historic preservationist leanings, and their neighborhood pride, they were stunned by the thought of a condo high rise next door.
Soon, TV news crews had descended on Lawson’s front yard to shoot footage of the sign and to interview local residents about their objections to it. Four days after the sign appeared, someone twisted the screw even tighter by adding a sticker to the sign. It read, “Only 4 Left.”
In short order, the make-believe developer started putting orange construction tape on Lawson’s trees, indicating which trees were to be cut down. The prankster also drove stakes into the ground and spray-painted arrows to indicate where the utility work was to begin. As the ruse proceeded, amused neighbor Pat Burton quietly watched the goings on. Knowing that a trick was under way, she let things ride for a while. Eventually she strolled down to Lawson’s front yard, where she informed her neighbors and a crowd of reporters that, in her professional opinion, the whole affair had to be a practical joke.
Thus, the affair ended. “Payback is hell,” says Lawson, as he recalls the incident. The fact is, Lawson has played his own share of practical jokes. The bottom line, he says, is, “If you can’t stand the heat, you better get out of the neighborhood.”
