APRIL FOOLS: With April Fools’ Day falling on Easter this year — and since we don’t publish a Sunday paper — we cut our readers a break from our annual prank column.
A prank column published on any day but April 1 seemed wrong. But we didn’t want the occasion to go completely unrecognized, so we collected some of our leg-pulling tales from years past:
• 2013: We told you that Bradford City officials planned to close Main Street and surrounding streets to traffic in the name of improving its appearance and becoming more environmentally friendly. The “plan” also included a gondola service on the Tunungwant Creek. Plans for a “Sasquatch World” park and camping resort in the Allegheny National Forest were sadly imaginary, too.
• 2008: A proposal to build a heated dome over the artificial turf in Bradford Area School District’s Parkway Field was just hot air. This meant that hopes to bring in Olympic trials, rock concerts and professional football players looking for off-season training was also hokum.
• 2003: Readers learned that someone could face a $1,000 fine or 30 days in jail if a person “knowingly and purposefully provides feed, seed or weed to any flying creature (including but not limited to flying squirrels); that Bradford was in the running as a place to relocate the Sundance Film Festival; and that the McKean County landfill might start accepting nuclear waste as a way to get more money into the county.
• 1998: A Cezanne painting from Tullah Hanley that was discovered in old City Hall could be sold to raise money to fix up the building; officials might wait as late as the Fourth of July to open up Kinzua Reservoir to boats due to a buildup of ice at the bottom of the dam; Zippo is working on a prototype for “The Millennium” — a lighter that would work under water and in outer space; state officials are considering renaming Benezette to Elktown to bolster tourism in the elk-herd home; and Straub prepares to market a non-alcoholic beer in a bottle with a nipple on it for Mother’s Day.
Now that you’ve heard some of our past pranks, did our readers pull any good April Fools’ Day pranks this year?
